by Roy Williams
I pledge to my teammates and my coaches, that I will give 100% mentally and physically on every defensive possession these next 7 days. I cannot imagine letting my teammates down on this nor can I imagine the hurt I will cause myself
Underneath I drew 17 lines, and then I went out to the court.
When practice was over, I peeked into the players’ locker room and all 17 guys had signed it.
I thought that was pretty neat.
AT HALFTIME OF the NCAA semifinal against Michigan State we were down by five points and I got after our guys. I said, “Why would you not box out? Why would you not take a charge? Fellas, this is the Final Four. Sean, I’ll take a charge on you with Damion riding on your back. Let’s wake up. How dare you do this to yourselves?”
We scored the first six points of the second half and then we picked up our defense. Michigan State made only 10 of 34 shots in the second half. We did box out. We did not back off and let somebody drive in and lay it up. We got turnovers that led to fast breaks that led to dunks. We got the lead and we’d get a stop and then another fast break and another and another. If that game had lasted long enough, we’d have won by a million.
Before the championship game, all I was reading about was how we were talented but we were not a team. That was an insult to me and to my staff and my players; it was like a slap in the face to what we’d worked on for 100 practices. And so I told the kids that. I said, “It should make you mad. I want it to make you mad. I want to shut them up.”
Then I started telling them what some guy on TV said, what some other guy wrote in the paper, and then I saw that it was making them angry and I liked that. Finally, I told them, “Let’s show them we’re a frickin’ team.”
In the locker room before the final against Illinois, a team that had been ranked No. 1 for most of the season, I felt very confident. In each of the previous rounds, I’d written a number on the dry-erase board for the round we were trying to get to: 32, 16, 8, 4, 2. I’d drawn boxes around the number and with each game the box got bigger. So that night I turned the board around and said, “This whole board is a box and if we win tonight, there’s going to be a 1 in there. Phil Ford and Michael Jordan and Dean Smith are North Carolina basketball, but if we play our butts off tonight, you’ll be North Carolina basketball forever. Tonight somebody is going to win the national championship. Why not let it be us?”
We came out attacking offensively and we got after them defensively and we surged ahead by 15 points. During timeouts, I kept telling them we were going to win it on the defensive end, and I thought we were playing one of our best defensive games of the year. On offense, Sean was kicking everybody’s rear end, and at one timeout Jackie even said, “Guys, keep feeding the big dog. Let the big dog eat!”
Illinois made a run in the second half when Luther Head and Deron Williams made a bunch of threes, and they cut our lead to two with just under 13 minutes to go. Then Sean scored 10 of our next 13 points and we built our lead back up to 10 with nine minutes to go. We were up by six when there was a timeout with about seven minutes left. I was a little concerned about the look on our guys’ faces. That moment reminded me of Coach Smith in the 1982 NCAA final against Georgetown and what I still think is the best huddle speech I have ever heard.
So I told the team, “We’re okay. Why should anybody be worried? Guys, did you expect this to be easy? That is a really good team down there. They’ve won 37 games and they’re not going to roll over and play dead, but this national championship is ours. We’re exactly where we want to be. We’re still in control. We’re going to determine the outcome of this game.”
I did see a little relief on their faces. Illinois fought back to tie the game 65–65, but then Raymond made a contested three-point shot and I thought back to the Duke game, when he didn’t make a play at the end and got criticized so much for it. Now, he was not afraid to make a big play for us.
We took a 30-second timeout with a little more than two minutes remaining and the game tied 70–70. “Guys,” I said. “I really don’t have anything to say to you. We just have two more minutes to push and we’re going to win the whole blessed thing. I wanted to give you a chance to catch your breath and just realize that every possession is crucial. We’re fresh and we’re into their bench already because Sean has kicked their tail. Think how fantastic this is going to feel. We’re two minutes away from winning the national championship.”
Then Rashad threw up a prayer, but sometimes prayers are answered because Marvin Williams tipped it in to give us the lead with just over a minute left. Then Raymond made three free throws and a huge steal, and Sean got the rebound of their last shot. I looked up at the scoreboard. We were ahead 75–70 and I saw the clock tick from two seconds down to one and then I looked back down and saw Sean still had the ball, and I looked at the clock and saw it tick from one to zero. The next thing I saw was Sean sprinting right at me. I’ll never forget that big smelly, sweaty rascal hugging my neck, and seeing how excited he was. I told him, “Son, you have no idea what this means to me.”
Sean said, “Coach, you believed in me. This is the happiest moment of my life.”
I always told myself that if I ever won a national championship, I’d walk around the court with my fists up in the air like Rocky. But when it actually happened, I was in a fog. I had no idea what to do. I didn’t know how to feel. I kept thinking, “Is this really happening?”
I hugged Marvin and I said, “Thank you so much for trusting in me and believing in me.”
I saw Jackie and he said, “Coach, I love you.”
I told him, “Young man, I will never forget this feeling for the rest of my life. Thank you for allowing me to coach you.”
I wanted to say something to the three seniors, who were standing together with their arms around each other. I walked over to them and Melvin was saying a little prayer, and when he finished, I asked if I could join them. They put their arms around me in their huddle. I talked to them about how proud I was and said, “Treasure this moment. This has to be sweeter for you guys than anybody else.”
Then I went to see my family in the stands. Wanda was crying and Scott was crying and Kimmie was crying and I was crying, and I hugged all of them. It was almost surreal. At that time a lot of it was relief, because my family had had to defend me for so long when people said I couldn’t win the big one. I think it bothered them even more than it did me. They had been there for the lowest moments of my coaching career. I was glad to get that monkey off my back and I remember answering a question about it at the press conference by saying the same thing Coach Smith said in 1982, that I’m no better as a coach than I was three hours ago.
In the locker room I hugged Coach Smith and all I could think to say was, “Thank you.”
Michael Jordan picked me up off the floor in a big bear hug and I said, “Thank you so much for being here.”
“There is no way that I was missing watching you win your national championship,” Michael said. “There may be more to come, but there was no way I was going to miss this one.”
I turned to the team, and everybody got together and jumped around for a while. When we were done, I pointed at Michael and at Coach Smith and said, “They are what made North Carolina basketball great, but now you all are a part of that forever.”
When I got back to the team hotel, I was still in a daze. I went up to my room and there were 40 people up there. I thanked Bob Frederick for giving me my start as a head coach. I thanked Buddy Baldwin for instilling in me the dream to be a coach in the first place. There were a lot of tears shed, and it was just an incredible feeling of exhilaration and satisfaction that I’d been able to bring those kids, who had been through so much the last few years, to a national championship.
I told everybody in the room that I would’ve loved to be able to walk to the top of the escalator and be invisible and watch the reaction that our players were getting from the fans. I wished there was some way I could do that without people coming
up to me. If only I could just watch my players, because that would tell me how nice it felt.
I didn’t go to sleep at all that night. We flew back the next day and the reception in Chapel Hill was mind-boggling. We got back to our house and there were signs in our front yard, one of which read, “Roy and Wanda, thanks for ‘heeling’ our team.”
That night I invited all of my coaches and their wives out to dinner to celebrate. I was physically and emotionally spent. I had nothing left. Neither did anybody else. About halfway through the meal, I saw Wanda yawning and Coach Robinson propping up his head in his hand and I said, “Let’s get out of here and go on home to bed.”
At 6 o’clock the next morning I met Coach Holladay in the parking lot at the Smith Center to go recruiting.
CHAPTER 10
Philosophy
WHEN I WAS TWO years old I went with my dad and some of my uncles to go fishing at a pond near where my aunt Doris lived. I was pestering them so much to let me fish that my dad found a little stick and tied a fishing line to one end of it with a hook and a bobber on it. I don’t know if he even baited the hook, but he threw it out in the water for me. I was standing there holding the stick when all of a sudden the bobber sank, and I felt something tugging on the line. I had no idea what to do. I didn’t have a reel. So I just turned around and took off running away from the pond as fast as I could with that stick, and I dragged the fish right out of the water up onto the bank. That fish was almost as big as me.
I’m still trying to land the big ones any way I can. Recruiting means everything. I know that Roy Williams is only as good as the players I can put out on the court. In the summer of 2000 I went to visit the legendary UCLA coach John Wooden and he said something that has always stuck with me: “Roy, you can coach talent. Some guys can’t. Nobody can coach no talent, but you can coach talent.” That has driven me ever since to make sure that I have talent to coach.
I recruit through a process of elimination. If I see a big guy who can’t run, I don’t recruit him, because I want our team to run. If I see a point guard who can shoot, but has no savvy, I won’t recruit him, because I need a point guard who makes great decisions. Whenever I go out and recruit, I’m thinking, “This is the way I want to play. Can that kid do what I want him to do?”
I need guys that can pass, I need guys that can shoot, I need guys that play at a high speed and I need guys that are self-motivated, but I have to allow for some give and take, because not everybody is going to be perfect.
When I go into a gym to recruit, I climb up to the top of the bleachers, put my back against the wall, and I’m there to work. If I’m there to watch one individual, I’ll watch every move he makes. If I’m watching a group of players at an All-Star camp, I wait for somebody to jump out at me and I’ll write his number down on my pad every time he does something I like. In the summer of 1989, I was at a tournament in Louisville and they had four games going at the same time. My assistants had me watching a player on Court 2. Every time the play would stop on my court, I would glance over to Court 3, and No. 34 was just killing people. I kept writing down the number 34 over and over and over. He was so outrageous with his effort and rebounding and how he could run. At some point in the second half, I just turned away from my court and started watching No. 34. That player’s name was Richard Scott and he ended up being a three-year starter for me at Kansas.
When I decide that a kid has the talent I’m looking for, then I try to find out about his character. I once had an elementary school principal in Wichita, Kansas, tell me, “Coach, I wish you’d say academics is the second priority.”
“No ma’am,” I said, “because if he’s a great player and a 4.0 student but he’s going to be a pain in the rear end, I want it to be somebody else’s rear end.”
I remember going to recruit Marvin Williams, and in one game he had 36 points. But that wasn’t what sold me on him. Marvin fouled out of that game, and while the crowd was giving him a standing ovation, he walked over to the end of the bench and grabbed five cups of water and handed them to the five guys who were going back into the game. I said to myself, “I really want that kid.”
If you’re among the best in my talent and character tests, I’m going to show you how important you are to me. I pick one or two prospects every year to handle by myself. In the summer of 1992, I went to an AAU tournament and Eddie Fogler told me, “I just saw a guy that has Kansas written all over him.” It was Raef LaFrentz. Raef was rated among the top 10 prospects in the country. I made nine or 10 trips to see Raef in Monona, Iowa. I would fly into a tiny airport in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, that had no rental cars. There was a car dealership about a mile and a half from the airport that would rent me a car. Sometimes I had to walk to get there. Then I would get a sandwich right across the street and I would drive about 20 miles across the Iowa border to Monona. I made that trip so many times that after a year or so when my plane landed, a guy at the car dealership brought my car to the airport and left it all warmed up and running for me on the tarmac with my club sandwich and a Coca-Cola sitting in the passenger seat. The people there were rooting for me to get Raef to come to Kansas.
I would call Raef every Sunday night at 9 o’clock. No other coach on my staff ever called him. He visited Kansas and then a few weeks later he visited Iowa, which was hard because I knew the home state pull was going to be a factor. The Sunday night after Raef’s visit to Iowa, I called the LaFrentz house and Raef’s mother told me, “Coach, Raef doesn’t want to speak to you tonight. He wants to get his thoughts cleared.” I thought it was all over with. I didn’t sleep all night. I just sat in a chair and stared out into space. I called back a couple of days later, and that’s when Raef’s mother told me he had done the same thing with the Iowa coach after he visited Kansas. It was during one of our Sunday-night calls a few months later that Raef told me he’d decided to come to Kansas. I was ecstatic. He was the most highly rated recruit I had ever signed.
I tell every prospect I recruit that I’m going to try to outwork every other coach. Our players get one day off each week during the season, and on most of those off days I go recruiting. Once I was watching a recruit play and I had a stitch come loose in some dental work, but I stayed and watched the rest of that game while I spit blood into a cup. Another time I was at a prospect’s game that didn’t start until 12:15 a.m. I was the only college coach left in the gym and I was propping myself up against a railing to stay awake when the recruit’s mother turned to me and said, “Coach, please go home.” But I watched that whole game. I like to ask prospects, “Who is recruiting you the hardest?” If they don’t say me, I’m mad and I’ll go back to my staff and tell them we’ve got to do more.
I probably don’t call recruits as often as other coaches because I hate the telephone. I can talk the paint off the wall face-to-face, but I don’t really like talking on the phone. I tell prospects right up front that when I phone them, I won’t talk their ear off for an hour like some other coaches. I want them to know that I care, but I believe everything is better in moderation. I don’t send a bunch of e-mails to recruits. I send handwritten notes.
I don’t recruit with a shotgun approach. I narrow down my focus as much as I can. If I want to sign two or three players, I will focus my attention on four or five candidates and they have to be kids that I’m going to enjoy being around every day. Since I became a head coach, I’ve had three recruits visit campus that my players thought wouldn’t fit in, so I stopped recruiting all three.
Recruiting is like putting together a puzzle, and I mean that literally. When we recruited Paul Pierce at Kansas, we had four starters coming back, but we had no small forward. I asked my assistant Steve Robinson to make a little puzzle. He cut pieces out of a cardboard box; there were four corner pieces that represented our four starters and he left the centerpiece missing. We sent Paul the four corner pieces and then two days later, we sent the centerpiece in the shape of a star with Paul’s picture on it and a message that read,
You are the missing piece to the puzzle. That’s what Paul turned out to be when we got him. Recruiting is about convincing kids that they are the missing piece that we need to be complete.
I’m a plodder. I’m methodical. I never stop recruiting. My life revolves around recruiting periods, recruiting trips, recruiting calls. The closest I ever came to a divorce was in my third year at Kansas when I took Wanda to Hawaii for the first vacation we’d had since going to Lawrence. Every afternoon of the trip I told her I was going jogging, but instead I put on my jogging shoes and went to a pay phone in the hotel lobby to make recruiting calls. When she found out what I’d been doing, she was not a happy camper. During warm-ups before we played the 1991 national championship game against Duke, I went around the corner from our locker room to a pay phone and made a recruiting call to Jason Kidd. All these reporters rushed up to me and I said, “Guys, can’t somebody talk to his father without you all hovering around like that?” I didn’t say that that was who I was talking to, but it got them to leave me alone.
You have to call most prospects 10 times for every time they answer the phone. But Shane Battier had the most organized recruitment I’ve ever been involved in. He selected six schools and said he was going to have phone calls every Monday night. Each coach had 15 minutes. I made the phone call every Monday at 9:30.
One Monday night I was at Yankee Stadium watching the Yankees play the Texas Rangers. I was invited by my former chancellor at Kansas, Gene Budig, who was the president of the American League, and we were sitting in the first row beside the Yankee dugout with Marty Springstead, the league’s supervisor of umpires. At 9:30 I told Chancellor Budig that I had to make a phone call.
He said, “A recruiting call?”
“Yes, how’d you know?”
“Because I know you.”