Hard Work

by Roy Williams

  Speaking of life off the court, most years I have an FBI agent come talk to my team about the dangers of gambling. I have a female faculty member talk to them about the meaning of the word no. Bill Chamberlain, my former teammate on the UNC freshman team, talks to them about making good decisions.

  I try to constantly remind our players that at some point the ball is going to stop bouncing and they’ve got to have something to fall back on. Early each season I’ll huddle the team and let the upperclassmen mentor the freshmen. I’ll ask a senior, “Tell the freshmen what is the easiest way to get me upset. Is it a failure to do something on the court or is it a failure to do something academically?” That player will say that the worst days of running in practice are the days that I get a bad report on grades.

  I also want my players to realize how fortunate we all are. Every year at Christmastime we go shopping for gifts for underprivileged kids. It’s always an emotional day for me, and when our guys realize they’re shopping for a child’s only Christmas present, it gives them a different outlook. There’s no question that it has a special significance to me because of how I grew up, but mostly it’s about reminding our players that there are things more important than whether their jump shot is falling. Coach Smith once said that our program is the front porch of the university because we’re the part that’s most visible. I want our guys to have people see them in a very positive light.

  I try to never blow smoke with my players. I tell them what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. I tell them the truth. When I was in high school, Buddy Baldwin told me, “If you tell the truth, you won’t have to remember what you said.”

  Early in his Kansas career, Drew Gooden was convinced he should play on the perimeter and be allowed to shoot more three-point shots. One day I said, “Drew, I know you can shoot the three, I just don’t think you can make the three.” He was hurt that I didn’t think he could play away from the basket, but two years into his NBA career Drew called me and thanked me for setting him on the right path to the pros.

  I would not be good as a psychiatrist, because if anybody were to tell me that a man killed 12 people with a chainsaw because his dad knocked him around as a kid, I think that’s a bunch of B.S. I believe that you get to make the decisions in your own life. It’s not your dad. It’s not your mom. You are responsible so you’d better make the right decisions. I try to coach my players like that.

  That applies even to being on time. Everybody who knows me knows that I work on a strict schedule. I remember when Adonis Jordan was late for the bus on a road trip to Oklahoma State. Our bus was pulling out of the arena driveway when Adonis drove up. He grabbed his gear out of his car, but I met him at the bus door and said, “You’re not going with us.” I left him behind. He had to catch a ride with the radio crew. Four hours in a car with two old fogeys was a pretty severe punishment. Then I made him do the same thing on the way home. Adonis was never late again.

  I remember when Rex Walters transferred to Kansas and I was very hard on him in practice. The simplest way to get me mad is with selfishness, lack of concentration, or lack of hustle. Rex showed up with all three. Rex may have been the only player I ever threw out of practice twice. One of those times I told him, “Get out of here before you contaminate me and everybody else.”

  One day Rex called his father and said, “Dad, I want to come home. I don’t think I can handle this man.” His dad talked him out of it. The next season Rex was the best player in the conference, and as a senior, he led us to the Final Four and then got drafted by the New Jersey Nets in the first round. Rex grew more as a competitor than any other player I’ve coached.

  I will never forget the words of Jack Johnson, one of my summer league baseball coaches: “You coach a guy and 30 years later you can still see in him something you gave him. You better be darn sure it’s something positive.”

  One of my high school players, Stan Turner, once came to see me in his senior year. “Coach,” he said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life.”

  Stan was really personable, the most well-liked student in his class, so I asked him, “Have you ever thought about going to Asheville-Buncombe Technical Institute in their hotel management program? I think you’d be good at that.”

  Stan came by the next day and said, “I think I would like to do that.” Sure enough, he went there, and later on he became the general manager of a beautiful hotel in West Palm Beach.

  One of my favorite stories is about Eric Davis, a player on the last North Carolina junior varsity team I coached. I had lost touch with Eric until he came to see me during my first season back at North Carolina in 2003. He told me, “Coach, you are the reason I am where I am today. After I played JV basketball I quit studying and I flunked out. I moved back home and one night my mom was watching Kansas play on television and she said, ‘That man had faith in you that you could be somebody and here you are back at home on the street corners. That man had faith in you. Why don’t you have some faith in yourself?’ I called the university and begged them to let me back in school. Two years later, I begged the dental school to let me in. The reason I did that is because my mother said you had faith in me.”

  Today Eric Davis is a dentist. He gave me a picture of the two of us with this inscription: The true measure of a man’s greatness is not in the number of his accomplishments, but in the number of people’s lives he inspired while achieving those accomplishments.

  I do have one huge regret about how I handled one of my players. Sean Tunstall was in four team pictures at Kansas, but he only played one season. During my first season as the Kansas coach, Sean was ruled ineligible as a freshman because the NCAA wouldn’t verify a college board score. His sophomore year he could practice, but he couldn’t play. But he played a significant role on our team during his junior year. In the NCAA Tournament semifinal against North Carolina, Sean made the basket that clinched the game for us.

  The next year he was eligible, but I suspended him for the first semester because I didn’t like what he’d done academically. I was just so frustrated with him. I did something I have always fought against as a coach, which is disciplining someone by taking away the one thing that he is successful at. But I took basketball away from Sean. His grades got worse. He left school, got involved with drugs, and landed in jail. Shortly after Sean got out of jail, he was shot and killed in a drug deal gone bad.

  Sean’s story is the reason that if I think there’s any hope, I’ll stick with a kid a lot longer than most coaches might, because I’m mad about the way I handled that. Sean was a good kid. At the time I thought I was doing the right thing for him, but now I think, “What if I’d let Sean play and just run him after every practice? Would that have saved his life?”

  I’ll never stop wishing I could do that one over again.

  IN MY THIRD YEAR as an assistant coach at North Carolina, we were playing in the Great Alaska Shootout in Anchorage over Thanksgiving break. I got on the bus for the ride to the airport, and one of the hardest things I have ever had to do was to not get right back off. It killed me that my wife and my two little kids were going to be having Thanksgiving dinner together and I was not going to be there.

  That feeling is the reason that every single year since I’ve been a head coach, Wanda has cooked a Thanksgiving dinner for me and my team. It usually doesn’t happen on Thanksgiving Day because most years we are on the road. We do it whenever we can squeeze it into the schedule. One year we had Thanksgiving dinner on New Year’s Day.

  We like to describe the North Carolina program as a “family,” and Wanda and I like to treat it that way. When recruits come on their visits, Wanda will fix breakfast at our house. I remember one Kansas recruit, Greg Ostertag, ate eight waffles with whipped cream and strawberries on top, after feeding on bacon and eggs first.

  On the first day of classes each year, our players do a 12-minute run just to see what kind of shape they’re in, and we follow that up with dessert at our house. If we
’re not playing in the final of our conference tournament, Wanda makes brownies and banana pudding and the players come over to watch the NCAA selection show.

  My Kansas team celebrated my 200th career win at a Baskin-Robbins. At the Smith Center after my 500th win, we had a huge cake that barely fit onto the top of a pool table. I shared that with my assistants, my players, the arena maintenance crew, and anybody else I could find.

  It is all about enjoying the ride, a change in attitude that I adopted after the devastating loss in the 1997 NCAA Tournament. The legendary Marquette coach Al McGuire once said, “You’ve got to smell the roses along the way.” I have tried to coach myself to do that more. I think I do a much better job of it than I used to.

  Sometimes I’ll lighten up a hard practice by letting my players run relay races where two guys put their arms around each other’s waists and dribble a basketball from one guy’s right hand to the other’s left hand up and down the court, and they laugh through it like second-graders. Sometimes I’ll take the team bowling. One time, after we’d done a clinic for kids, I let my team sing their way out of a practice we’d scheduled afterward. We’ll make blooper reels that we run the day after games that show guys falling on their faces or walking off the court toward the wrong locker room. At Kansas in 1998 we began a tradition of bumping around in a mosh pit after big wins, and we still do that today. In 2009 I even agreed to do a television ad for Guitar Hero. First, I had to ask my players what Guitar Hero was. I had never seen the movie Risky Business, but when the ad’s director pulled out a pair of briefs for me to wear, I told him that was not happening. We compromised on boxers and the other coaches in the ad — Bobby Knight, Mike Krzyzewski, and Rick Pitino — thanked me for that later. It was a hilarious experience.

  During my final years at Kansas I’d fly home late at night from a recruiting trip, and on the drive home from the airport, it would often be 15 degrees outside. I would pull the sunroof back, roll down all the windows, crank up the heater, and turn on some soul music as loud as I could. I’d be singing and shimmying around in my seat to the Temptations as I rolled on down the highway.

  I had learned to enjoy the ride.

  CHAPTER 11

  Stealing Brownies

  THE NIGHT BEFORE I was going to meet Tyler Hansbrough and his parents for the first time, I left St. Louis around 11 p.m. to drive down to Tyler’s hometown. On that trip, I got pulled over for speeding. I had no argument. The policeman took my driver’s license back to his car and then walked back to my car, handed me the ticket, and said, “You should not have beaten my Missouri Tigers as many times as you did.”

  What he said hit me the wrong way. “I’m at North Carolina now,” I said, “and if we get this kid I’m going to see down in Poplar Bluff, we’re going to beat your butt again.”

  He was not amused. I started the car, pulled out, and drove no more than 500 yards when I saw the blue flashing lights in my rearview mirror again. I was thinking to myself, “That shows how dumb you are to say something smart-alecky to a cop. Aren’t you always telling people, ‘Do not pull the tail of the tiger when your head is in his mouth’?”

  I knew I wasn’t speeding this time, but I pulled over again, and now I was scared to death about what was going to happen. The policeman walked up to my window and said, “I forgot to give you back your rental car agreement.”

  At that moment, I knew recruiting Tyler Hansbrough was not going to be easy.

  The first time I’d ever seen Tyler play was at the Nike All-America camp in Indianapolis the summer before his junior year. I was watching everybody that day, but I kept noticing this 6'9" kid who was running the floor and banging into everybody. I was thinking, “He’s not that skilled and he doesn’t look pretty, but he plays the way I want a big man to play.”

  I watched him the rest of that camp. Then I watched him in Orlando at an AAU tournament. I went to see him play three or four times during his high school season and then I made the decision that he was a guy I just had to have.

  Once during his junior year, I flew out to watch him during a typical day. He and his teammates lifted weights at 7 a.m., they had a shootaround at 7:30, and then school started at 8. Then they played pickup games at 8 p.m. So I got there early and I watched Tyler lift weights and I watched Tyler at the shootaround, and then his high school’s athletic director said, “Coach, what do you want to do the rest of the day?”

  I said, “I’m just going to hang around and watch Tyler play pickup tonight.”

  “You want to go play golf?”

  “Sure, I’m in.”

  So five of the coaches from Tyler’s school and I left in the middle of that day to go to the golf course. We played 18 and afterward I said, “Am I going to get all you guys fired?”

  One of them said, “No, we talked to the school superintendent and he’s mad because he couldn’t play with us.”

  Then we all went and got something to eat, and I went back to watch Tyler play pickup games that night. After the games, I walked up to Tyler’s coach, John David Pattillo, and I said, “I can only say hello to Tyler, but can you remind him that when Coach Krzyzewski came here he just watched the pickup games, but I’ve watched him lift weights, watched him shoot, and then stayed all day and watched the pickup. That’s the way I’m going to do it. I’m going to try to outwork everybody.”

  I thought that was something that might appeal to Tyler because he tries to outwork everybody, too.

  In January of his junior year, Tyler came to Chapel Hill for what turned out to be the worst recruiting visit I have ever hosted. I think it was only the second time Tyler had ever been on a plane in his life. He was scared to death of airplanes, and we had a snow and ice storm. He was as shy as he could possibly be and all he was thinking about during his whole visit was how afraid he was on that plane and how he had to get on another plane to go back, and he didn’t know when the ice storm would be over. It was very hard to break through his shell. He barely spoke for two days.

  At the end of his visit, I drove him to the airport but his flight was canceled. And then the next flight was canceled. Then the airport closed. Tyler was beside himself. He was going to have to stay another night. I took him back to our house and he called his mom and his dad. Wanda fixed him dinner and we ate together in front of a ballgame on television, and I was trying to get him to relax. He said, “Coach, you’re treating me like a king.”

  I said, “I’m just so sorry the travel is bad. At least I want you to feel like we’re going to take care of you.”

  We had to scrape ice off of my car windshield just to get him back to his hotel room so he could sleep. The next morning I took him back to the airport and put him on the plane, and he was really freaked out. I drove back to my office and I told my assistants, “Guys, we tried, but it’s not going to happen. There’s no way we’re getting that kid.”

  I spoke with Tyler’s dad, Gene, the next week and I apologized for the way Tyler’s visit had gone. Gene said, “Don’t feel badly about it. Maybe we will come back another time and I can see the school with him because I like the way you’ve recruited him. I love your program. Maybe we need to take another look when you have better weather.”

  Then one night my friend Mickey Bell called me from St. Louis. “I don’t know if you’re going to get this Hansbrough kid,” he said, “but he had some great things to say about you in the newspaper.”

  Tyler had said how he loved the personal notes I wrote to him that included some of our Thoughts for the Day. I had been sending him three handwritten notes a week, but after that I started writing even more often.

  After Mickey called me, I called the Hansbroughs, and Gene told me, “Coach, I love your notes. We put them up on the refrigerator. It’s the only mail that Tyler opens.”

  Tyler and Gene paid their own way to come for another visit to Chapel Hill during the first week of June. It was great weather. Tyler was a little more comfortable. He played pickup with our guys. Gene told me, “I
’ve really studied the way you play and the way you coach, and I just want you to be his coach. I think this is the best fit for him.”

  Tyler’s recruitment was as intense as any I have ever been involved in. During July I went to see every game he played during the recruiting period. Tyler had visited North Carolina, Kansas, Missouri, and Kentucky. He had some Missouri boosters sponsoring his AAU team, and I knew he didn’t want to hurt their feelings. His dad had gone to Missouri where he was the Big 8 high jump champion. His mother had been Miss Missouri. His dad had told me that he wished I was still the coach at Kansas because the distance was the biggest issue working against us.

  In August I went to the 2004 Olympic Games in Greece as an assistant coach for the U.S. basketball team. The day Tyler made his college announcement, I called in from Athens at 5 o’clock in the morning. Coach Holladay told me that Tyler had said he was coming to UNC.

  I knew Tyler’s decision to come to North Carolina was important to us, but at the time I had no idea just how important it was going to end up being.

  WHEN TYLER HANSBROUGH committed to North Carolina, he thought he would be backing up Sean May and Marvin Williams. Then we won the national championship in 2005 and I figured that Marvin would leave for the NBA after his freshman season. Two days after the national championship, I had just returned from a recruiting trip to see Ty Lawson when I got home and Wanda said that Sean May had called. I called Sean right back. “Coach,” he said, “I know I told you I was coming back, but my dad and I have talked, and how can my stock get any higher than it is right now?”

  I said, “Son, I understand.”

  I hung up the phone and I felt like somebody had just ripped out my stomach. I knew we were going to lose Marvin and Rashad McCants and Raymond Felton, but I really thought we’d have Sean back. Suddenly we had lost everybody. It put such a damper on things that we couldn’t really enjoy the national championship.