by Roy Williams
“Then just give it to Ty and he’ll make a play.”
Tyler gave my original play about one-tenth of a second to materialize and then he threw it to Ty, and Ty dribbled down the court and floated one up and won the game at the buzzer. It had been a miserable night for Tyler, but he showed what a great teammate he was by being the first guy to bear-hug Ty after he won that game for us. Tyler couldn’t care less that his streak had ended as long as we won.
In early February we took our annual bus ride to Cameron Indoor Stadium to play Duke. The talk in the media was all about how Tyler and our other seniors couldn’t possibly win all four of their games at Cameron, but I’ve always thought that being the underdog is a great position to be in if you’re really good. In the postgame locker room after our previous game, I had told the team, “You know, guys, we probably can’t beat Duke four years in a row over there. All those experts, they must be right. It’d be really hard to do that. But you know what? There’s only one team in America that could do that and that’s the guys sitting right here in this room. Nobody else in America could go there and win this game, but we can. So from tonight until we play them, let’s think about how good this is going to feel when we beat Duke for the fourth straight time in their own gym.”
We helped Duke defend us in the first half by clogging up the lane. But at halftime I went to the dry-erase board and drew our five positions, showing everybody where to go to open up some lanes for Ty to drive his man. I knew they couldn’t guard Ty if we didn’t help them. Ty drove to the basket over and over and scored 21 points in the second half, and sure enough, we beat Duke again.
We had won 10 games in a row since the loss at Wake Forest when we played at Maryland. It should have been 11 straight. We led by nine points with less than two minutes left when we went totally brain dead. We turned the ball over. We took stupid shots. We had to make five dumb plays in a row to give them any chance to win, and we made all five. We lost by three.
In the locker room I waited for a couple of minutes to let them think about it and then I went in there and ripped them pretty hard because we’d screwed up. I said, “I am really pissed. You know, part of this is my fault. If we had practiced late-game situations more, perhaps we wouldn’t take stupid shots. Perhaps we wouldn’t have panicked. Perhaps we wouldn’t have turned the ball over stupidly in the backcourt. I’ll take responsibility for that. Guys, if we had taken four shot-clock violations on our last four possessions we would’ve won the frickin’ game.”
At practice the next day I made them watch the whole Maryland game tape. That was really hard for them to sit there with me winding the tape back and forth, telling them how stupid this play was, how stupid that play was, how little effort we put in on another play. They had ticked me off, and I wanted them to know it. We sat there for nearly three hours watching tape and then we practiced for an hour and it was vicious. I think they got the message.
Before our Senior Day game against Duke, I put a lot of pressure on our underclassmen. I told freshman Ed Davis, “Tyler Hansbrough is going to go out the right way as a senior. It is your responsibility.” I told freshman Larry Drew, “Bobby Frasor’s going to go out the right way and if he doesn’t, I’m going to be mad at you.” I went on down the line. I was scared stiff that we would be so tight that we couldn’t play. Then two days before the game, Ty jammed his toe in practice. It was swollen, so our doctors gave him a cortisone shot to relieve the pain.
We didn’t know whether Ty was going to play until right before the game, and then he really struggled in the first half. At the end of halftime, as we were walking back out to the court, I grabbed Ty and I said, “Hey, put that half behind you and play your tail off in this half.” Ty finished the game with 13 points, eight rebounds, and nine assists, and he made a key three-point play down the stretch, and we won the game and the ACC regular season championship. Ty would be voted the conference Player of the Year.
After the game the cortisone shot began to wear off and Ty told me he was really hurting. He left the gym with his dad and his dad suggested he try some Epsom salt and hot water. That was about the worst idea you could have. Ty’s toe swelled up the size of a lemon.
I wanted to win a national championship more than I wanted to breathe, but I was not going to let Ty Lawson have another cortisone shot. Managing his injury reminded me of the way I felt at the beginning of the season with Tyler’s shin. I worried about Ty every day at practice and I decided to sit him out of the ACC Tournament. We played Florida State in the semifinals and we got beat. I tried to reassure everybody in the locker room after that loss by telling them I’d been to the Final Four six times in my career and five of those six times my team had lost in the conference tournament.
President Obama picked us to win the NCAA Tournament again and it was broadcast everywhere. That was fine with me, because I couldn’t possibly have felt more pressure than I already did going into the tournament.
I decided we could afford to sit Ty in our NCAA opener against Radford, but we played him in the next game against LSU. At one point in the first half, though, Ty’s foot got bumped and he felt something pop in his toe. He limped to our bench and said, “Coach, you’ve got to get me out.”
I thought he was done for the game, but he went back in a few minutes later. I could tell he was struggling to trust what he could do on the court. It was the same scenario as on Senior Day, because as we were walking back out after halftime, I grabbed Ty and said, “Remember, against Duke you didn’t do too much in the first half, but you were great in the second half. Put that first half behind you. Son, we need you to be great this half.”
We quickly fell behind by four points early in the second half, and at a timeout I walked into our huddle and barked at our seniors, “Is this how you want your careers to end? Then keep playing like this.”
From that moment on, Ty had one of the best performances of any point guard I have ever coached. The very next possession, Ty made an unbelievable layup and there was a lot of chest bumping going on, and all of a sudden our team was feeling confident again. Ty attacked the rim every possession, and we were running and pushing the ball and LSU was having trouble getting back in time to keep Ty in front of them. Ty loaded everybody up on his back and won the game for us.
We normally don’t like to make major changes in the middle of the NCAA Tournament, because in the past if we changed anything it really screwed things up. But against Gonzaga in the round of 16 game I thought we needed to make a change from how we had played ball screens all season. Their attack was to set a screen with one of their big guys, who would look for a pass cutting to the basket. We normally have our big guy step out and hedge, but that game, we decided to squeeze and go under, and our guys adapted to that idea very well. We shut down their favorite option and Ty scored 17 points in the first half. We won easily, 98–77.
Then we were playing Oklahoma and Blake Griffin, the guy who had the best season of anybody in the country. Again we made a major defensive adjustment. I decided to double-down on Griffin as soon as it was passed to him in the post. We had about 15 minutes during our one day of practice before the Oklahoma game to teach our guys when to double-team Griffin and then how to rotate to the open man. Our players did a great job of it. For much of the game, Griffin passed the ball out of the double-team and Oklahoma missed its first 15 shots from three-point range. We won 72–60. After the game I told our guys that I’d never seen a bad defensive team win a national title, and I thought we’d won our last two games with our defense. In the locker room that day the guys were so excited, but right before I walked out, I said, “Remember, we were here last year.”
I said it again right before the NCAA semifinal against Villanova. I never mentioned the word Kansas because I thought that could bring back bad memories, but I repeated, “Remember, we were here last year.” I also told them we should win the game because we were bigger and better than them. Reversing what had happened a year earlier, we jumped out
to a 40–23 lead with Tyler outmuscling their smaller post players inside and then passing the ball out to open shooters when he got double-teamed. Tyler finished with 18 points and 11 rebounds, while Ty scored 22 points and Wayne had 20, and we won the game pretty easily.
After our game, I watched a tape of the other semifinal three different times, and I was surprised by how easily Michigan State beat Connecticut. I was happy, because I thought playing Michigan State would be great for us psychologically. I was thinking, “Hey, we beat the crap out of them earlier in the season, we can beat the crap out of them again.”
In 2005 designer Alexander Julian had sent me a lucky suit to wear in the NCAA Tournament. I had worn it in the second game, the fourth game, and in the NCAA final, and we won the championship. He sent me another suit before the 2009 tournament, and I’d worn it in the second game and the fourth game. You bet I was wearing that suit for the championship game.
In our locker room before the game I said, “We’re going to attack. We’re not going to back down. We’re going to attack and attack and attack. They’re saying we can’t beat them again because we beat them by 35. Hey, we can beat them worse. We can beat them by 45. We’re better than they are. They say that Michigan State winning is going to fix the nation’s economy — well then, I say, hell, let’s stay poor a while longer. All of that stuff is B.S. This is a basketball game. That’s all it is. We are better than they are. Now let’s go play. Tonight somebody is going to win the national championship. Why not let it be us?”
The Temptations sang the national anthem. They are my favorite singing group, so I figured that was a good omen. Then Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were at center court for a ceremony. Magic, of course, played on a national championship team at Michigan State, and when he came off the floor he shook my hand and I said, “I know where your allegiance lies, but I appreciate you being here.” Then I saw Larry and he whispered to me, “I really want you to kick their ass because I want to be able to talk junk to Magic.”
In the first half of that game, I have never seen a team so driven by attitude. We played with such confidence. We played as aggressively as we could early and hit our shots and took their huge home crowd right out of the game. Wayne hit three three-point shots early and scored 17 points in the first half and we built the lead to 40–20 late in the half, but during timeouts I kept asking them not to focus on the score. The key factor in the game was Michigan State’s turnovers and how we converted them quickly into points. Ty had seven steals at the half and our defense caused 14 turnovers. When I walked off the floor at halftime, I looked at the scoreboard and saw we were up by 21 points and I was mad because we’d played so great that I thought it should have been more. It wasn’t a perfect half, but for a national championship game, it was pretty doggone close.
At halftime I said, “Guys, last year we were down 28 and did we not get it down to five and Danny had a shot go in and out that could have cut it to two? These guys could do the same thing. They can come back. Unless we don’t let them.”
I told our guys to keep attacking, but it did no good because in the second half our players couldn’t stop watching the scoreboard. The whole half we were tentative, but we were playing so hard defensively that Michigan State could never cut our lead down to less than 13 points. We still had a comfortable margin with a minute to go, so I motioned to put in our last five guys on the bench.
All of a sudden Tyler was standing in front of me with the most amazing look on his face. It was pure, pure joy. At that moment, I realized how much winning that game meant to me. Tyler bear-hugged me and almost knocked me over and it was like Sean May in 2005 hugging me all over again. When he hugged me, it was the first time I actually realized we were going to win the national championship. Up until that moment, I hadn’t had that thought. I was just coaching.
After the game I was in a daze. Again it reminded me of 2005. After we cut down the first net, I walked over to Tyler and we stood in front of the family section and I presented it to him. From the very beginning of the season, I had thought Tyler winning a national championship was the right thing to happen. I told him, “To me this is fitting, son. I want you to know that I will never, ever forget for the rest of my life being able to coach you.”
The team then gathered for “One Shining Moment,” the annual montage of highlights from the tournament that is shown up on the video board inside the arena. Watching that as the NCAA champion is the greatest time a coach can have. That’s what you dream about. That’s what every one of the recruiting trips, every one of the practices, every night you stay up late watching film, is all about. I remember watching the highlights and peeking over at Wayne, and he was crying, and I broke down and put my face in my hand. That’s what I coach for.
Back in the locker room I stood at the dry-erase board and I said, “We started with 64 teams and you divide by two how many are left?
They all shouted, “Thirty-two!”
“You divide that by two how many are left?”
“Sixteen!”
“Divide by two?”
“Eight!”
“Divide by two?”
“Four!”
“Divide by two?”
“Two!”
“Divide by two?”
“One!”
And I wrote a big 1 on the board. The players were all screaming. They really got into it. When the room fell quiet, I told them, “Fifty years from now, when they have another reunion in 2059, that night when you go out on the court, at 72 years old, you go out there and remember one thing, that no coach has ever felt more privileged, no coach has ever felt more proud of a team that handled things like you did. The adversity, the injuries, other people’s expectations. I honestly feel like I’m the luckiest coach that has ever lived . . . I love you.”
At the press conference after the game I said, “You can choose to believe it or not. I wanted this championship for Roy Williams, yes, and I’m extremely satisfied, but I so badly wanted this championship for Tyler Hansbrough. I know that’s corny, but hello Pete, that’s who I am. If you put $10 million in a pile right there and say, ‘Roy, you can have that $10 million, but if you take it you’ll forget that feeling you had when that big rascal came over and hugged you.’ Well, you can have that $10 million. I wouldn’t give $10 million for the feeling that I had at that moment.”
I also shared what I’d said to our team after the Wake Forest game when we were 0–2 in the ACC. I truly believe that as a coach, that was the wisest thing I have ever done. That was a critical moment for getting our kids to believe that if they would just do what I asked them to do, we would be there at the end. I believed it. I think the kids believed it. In my view, that moment is the reason we were able to win the national championship. Who knows? My players may not even remember it.
TWO MONTHS AFTER the championship game, Coach Robinson and I were on a recruiting trip driving from Cincinnati to Cleveland and he asked me, “Do you think there’s been the same excitement after the national title this year as there was in ’05?”
I said, “Wanda and I have been talking about that very thing. We don’t think so.”
“Coach, I don’t feel like it’s been anything like it was in ’05 and I talked to Coach Holladay and he feels the same way.”
I said, “You know, back then the program was three years away from 8–20 and we were a little bit of the underdog because Illinois was the perfect team, and everybody thought we had all the talent but not the team. We surprised people a little bit. Maybe that was it. This year the expectations—”
Coach Robinson interrupted me and said, “Yeah, so just because we were expected to win it, people don’t get excited by it? Everybody just says, ‘Well, ho hum, they were the best team and they just did what they were supposed to do?’”
I started thinking about it more, and I realized that the level of euphoria from our alumni and fans just wasn’t the same after the 2009 championship as it had been in 2005. I never want us to
be spoiled. I don’t want our fans to ever think we’re supposed to win a national championship. That’s a terrible feeling to have. In the 1980s I can remember Coach Smith saying, “What we need to do around here is go 8–20 one year to get people to appreciate what we do accomplish.” It was extremely coincidental that he picked that record.
When we got back to our hotel after the 2009 championship, it wasn’t the mob scene it had been in St. Louis in 2005. When I got home in ’05, there were signs in my yard. That didn’t happen in ’09. When we got back to Chapel Hill the day after the ’05 championship, everybody was so excited that people were still hugging each other. When we got back in ’09, people weren’t hugging each other anymore.
The best part for me is that to our 17 players it was the biggest thing that’s ever been, and for our students it’s a memory they’ll treasure forever. That’s who we should be coaching for anyway. To me, the 2009 title may be even sweeter than the one in ’05 because of all the pressure I felt over the expectations before the season. Winning it all in ’09 was a more satisfying accomplishment because of all the adversity we had. It was the hardest year I have ever had in coaching. Bobby Knight sent me a letter after the ’09 season that said, “I want you to know what a great accomplishment that is to win the national championship when everybody says that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re the biggest target. You’re the biggest game on everybody’s schedule and if you think about it, the only way you can be successful is to win the national title.”
I think we as coaches savored the 2009 championship more. Before the ’09 national title game, Coach Robinson put a Ziploc sandwich bag in his pocket. When we won, he scooped some confetti off the floor to keep as a souvenir. I know I worked harder to enjoy it in ’09. In ’05 I started back recruiting on Wednesday after the championship. In ’09 I gave myself until Thursday. We didn’t go to the White House in ’05, but we did in ’09 and I loved it when President Obama said, “Thanks for salvaging my bracket and vindicating me before the entire nation.” I remember one morning I just sat back for a few minutes and looked over some of the stats from the championship game just to relive it a little bit.