by Roy Williams
The trips revolve not around basketball but around golf. Golf is my escape.
The first time I was ever on a golf course I was caddying for Buddy Baldwin, and he explained how hard golf was. When I first played the game as a senior in high school, I found out he was right. One of my uncles gave me a set of irons: a 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-iron and a putter from a flea market, and I bought a used driver at a discount store. So I learned to play without a fairway wood or the other irons.
When I stopped playing competitive basketball after my freshman year in college, I knew I’d need something to replace it or I was going to go crazy. I played a round of golf at the UNC course and then I went back the next day, and again the next weekend. The golf course was a place where I could still compete. That summer I started playing a lot, and on into my sophomore year I played quite a bit. By the summer after my junior year, I’d decided I was going to try to be really good at it. My friend Gene Allen and I both bought a membership at Asheville Municipal Golf Course, or “Muni,” as we called it. We played 26 days that June.
I continued to play during the summers through my five years coaching at Owen. But I have never played golf during the basketball season. I have always put the clubs away in October and I don’t take them back out again until April, so it’s a challenge to find my swing again each year.
One day on Muni I parred the first hole, eagled the second hole, birdied the third hole, eagled the fourth hole; I was five under after four holes. That was the first time I shot 69. The last summer before I came back to North Carolina as an assistant I got my handicap down to a 3. But in 10 years as Coach Smith’s assistant my handicap never got back down to a 3, and then I became a head coach, and it’s been going the wrong way ever since.
I had my first hole in one while I was at Kansas. I was thrilled. It was the 2nd hole at Alvamar, a 118-yard shot. I remember driving Wanda out there to see the hole and she said, “Gosh, that’s so close it shouldn’t even count.”
Golf is even more fun for me now than when I was younger. Back then it was strictly the competition. Now it’s the competition, but it’s also the one place I can truly get away. When I’m playing, I don’t think about who I need to call. I don’t even take my phone to the golf course.
A golf trip is the one thing that really does relax me. Even when my game fails me, I still have a good time. I remember in the fall of 2008 I was playing with my buddies one afternoon and I walked to the 18th tee with a chance to make a birdie and shoot 80. I hit a great drive, but it flew a lot farther than I thought it would, and it wound up in a creek. Then I had a 40-yard pitch shot to a tucked pin over a bank with grass about a foot thick. My shot landed in that thick grass, and I hit it and I hit it and I hit it and I hit it and I hit it, and I could not get it out of the grass. I was laughing, but I was not going to quit. I walked back and dropped another ball, and I hit it in the creek again. Then I hit another shot into the bank of thick grass and took a few more swings. I finally got the ball up on the green and two-putted. My score on that hole was a 22. I said, “Guys, I’m not quitting on a 22.” So we played a 19th hole and I parred it.
Nothing better illustrates my love of golf than when Wanda and I were planning our wedding. I remember Wanda asked me, “What date do you want to get married?”
I said, “Whenever you want to.”
“Where do you want to get married?” she said.
“Wherever you want to,” I said.
“Who do you want to marry us?”
“Whoever you want to,” I said.
My only request was that we get married at night because so many people get married in the middle of the day, and that just screws up a bunch of golf games. The day that I got married I played 36 holes.
I BELIEVE I AM a fine physical specimen, but there are times when my body fails me. I was on the 15th hole at Alvamar Country Club in 1995 when I hit a shot that I thought was perfect, and it landed in the lip of a bunker. I jumped up in the air and yelled, “Aaaaahhh!” And then the whole world started spinning every which way. I fell to the ground. I said to my partners, “Guys, I don’t know what’s going on. I’m really dizzy.”
The second time it happened, I was on a trip with a bunch of other college coaches, and I was participating in a balloon toss, one of the activities they had planned for the event. My partner threw our balloon a little short and I stupidly dove for it and my chin hit the ground and all of a sudden, I couldn’t tell which way was up. I felt like death warmed over.
The third time, I was playing golf again, and I hit a shot out of a bunker on the 6th hole and the wind blew sand in my face. I jerked my head around and I got so dizzy I threw up right in the bunker. I threw up on the 7th tee. I threw up on 8th tee. I threw up on the 9th tee. I decided not to play the back nine.
When I had another episode one day at a Kansas practice, school administrators became afraid that I was going to die on their watch, so they sent me to the Mayo Clinic where a doctor ran a series of tests on me. They made me sick as a dog. Finally, the doctor concluded that I had benign positional vertigo.
At the Mayo Clinic they also did full blood work and they checked my triglycerides, which are supposed to be 150 or below. My count was 455. They asked me to complete a questionnaire with a dietitian. The doctor came in to review it and he came to the question about soft drinks. I had written, Coca-Cola Classic, 7–10 a day for 40 years.
When the doctor saw that, he said, “Oooohhh.”
I said, “‘Oooohhh’ is not good if I’m the patient.”
The doctor asked me if I could stop drinking Coca-Cola. So the next day I cut it out. Now I drink two or three Sprite Zeros a day and save my Cokes for when I eat a steak.
If it was up to Wanda, I would have quit coaching a long time ago. In her mind it’s been very difficult for me mentally and physically. She would like for us to live some healthy time outside of the fishbowl. She’s never actually asked me to quit, but after we won the national championship in 2005 she said, “We could quit right now. It would be a great time.” If I had come back to Chapel Hill in 2009 and let everybody enjoy the national championship for a couple of weeks and then announced that I was retiring, that would have been a dream for her. Whenever I come home complaining about something at work, she says, “Well, I’ve got a cure. You could quit.” She’s been doing that for 10 years.
What Wanda sees is that when you’re a college basketball coach people always want more. The administration always wants me to do more and the fans always want more. I could never do enough. In the first three months after the 2009 national championship, I had probably 100 people come up to me and say, “Great job, Coach, let’s win it again next year.”
I thought, “Can’t we all enjoy this one for a little bit?”
Wanda and I both got a big kick out of a local newspaper poll that came out after the 2009 championship, which determined that 76 percent of North Carolina Tar Heels fans have a favorable opinion of me. When I read that I was thinking, “Gosh, in the previous five years we’ve won more games than anybody else in the country, we’ve been to three Final Fours and won two national championships. If it’s 76 percent now, it isn’t going to go anywhere but down. What the heck do I need to do to please those other 24 percent?”
Some of my friends still think I should try coaching in the NBA, but I’ve seen so many good people disappointed because of what happens to them coaching in that league. As an assistant coach at the 2004 Olympics I saw how some of the players’ egos and immaturity destroyed that team, and I came back saying there was no way I could ever coach in the pros.
It would be easy to slow down, but I don’t think I’m good enough to do that. I couldn’t do it halfway. The fear of losing would not allow me to do that. Bob Frederick always used to say that he was surprised that after 10 years I still worked just as hard as I did the first day I got to Kansas. If you asked Coach Robinson right now, he would tell you that I’m a lot more mellow, particularly on the court, but that I work
just as hard as the day he came to work with me 21 years ago. I’m never going to sit back and say, “Whew, I’ve made it.” When it’s time to work it would bother me like crazy if someone was out there recruiting and I wasn’t. It would bother me a great deal if someone was out there watching tape and I wasn’t. I’m probably a little wacko.
Hard work doesn’t guarantee success, but without it you have no chance. I always want people to know that nobody’s going to outwork me. I may screw it up. I may make a bad substitution. I may call a bad play. But there’s no way that any other coach can outwork me. And that’s what motivates me every single day.
Winning still drives me. When we won the national championship in 2005, I thought, “My gosh, how good would it feel to win a second one?” And after the 2009 championship, I was thinking, “Gosh, how great would it feel to win a third?” Maybe that’s greedy. There’s no question that I love the competition part. I want to beat your rear end. But I also enjoy putting a team together. Every year presents a different challenge for me.
If I live long enough to quit, what I will miss the most is building relationships with players. Those bonds are always going to be there and they are personal. They are not based on wins and losses but on something you gave them, something you tried to do for them, something you tried to establish in those kids that would affect their lives.
In the summer of 2009, I ran into Rex Walters, who is now the coach at San Francisco, and he said, “Coach, I just want you to know that every success I’ve had is directly related to my time spent with you.” That is one of the greatest feelings you can have as a coach. My former players know that I care, that no matter how long they’ve been out of school, I’m always going to be there for them. I don’t believe I’m going to get any little gold stars on my college diploma for every time I help one of my players, but it makes me feel great. As long as there are kids out there saying that I will always be their coach, I will be happy.
Coach Smith once told me, “Don’t quit as early as I did.” He retired at 66. I think he later wished he hadn’t quit so soon, because he still loved the coaching part of it, but it was the press conferences, the booster club meetings, and the other stuff that wore him out. I’m 59 years old and I’d like to coach another eight to 10 years.
Wanda really roots for me to be good at golf because she thinks that if I were to give it up, I would never quit coaching. My buddies don’t think I’ll ever be able to retire, but I will. I’d always said that when the right head coaching job opened for me it would be staring me right in the face, and it was. And when the day comes that it’s time for me to quit, it’ll be staring me right in the face, too, and I’ll say, “Well, that’s it.” I’m not worried about what will happen after that.
When I was a kid growing up with all the problems in our house, I always knew I was going to be all right. When I was 11 years old getting on the bus alone to go to the YMCA, I knew I was going to be all right. When I came to North Carolina as a part-time assistant for $2,700, I knew I was going to be all right. When I lost eight straight games in my first season at Kansas, I knew I was going to be all right. When I retire, I know I am going to be all right.
What would be ideal is to quit and then someday have a computer tell me what day I’m going to die. Then I’d see if I can play 18 holes for my last 365 days in a row. If I’ve got enough money to pay off my bets walking off the 18th green on my last day on earth, that’d be really a good deal for me. I’m one of those guys who was born with no money, and when I die, I hope the last check we write is to the guy that sells us the casket. And I hope the check bounces.
CHAPTER 14
Look Homeward, Angel
THERE IS ONE other reason I came back to North Carolina in 2003 that hardly anybody knows. The failing health of my dad and my sister helped bring me back. They were part of why I needed to be home.
I LOST MY MOM in 1992, and I have always regretted not being there for her when she died. My mom quit working at age 65. I had started a little fund for her to put some money aside. She quit because she wanted to spend some more time with her grandchildren. Nine months later she was diagnosed with cancer, and seven months after that, she was dead.
She had handled the first round of chemo pretty well. I was making the trip back from Kansas to North Carolina about once a week to see her, and one day the doctor had called me and said, “We can’t get enough chemo to her the regular way. We want to put a catheter in her chest.”
I called my mom about the surgery and she said, “Let’s go ahead and do it.”
The recruiting period had started and I flew to Los Angeles. I had this peculiar feeling, so I called Mom that evening and I said, “How are you doing?”
She said, “I’m doing fine.”
“I’m thinking about getting a flight home tonight to see you through the operation.”
“Oh, Roy, they’re not even calling it an operation. They’re just calling it a procedure to put the catheter in. It just takes 20 minutes and they’re going to videotape it to use in some of the medical schools to show them how they’re supposed to do it. So I’ll try to look my best.”
“Mom, are you sure you don’t want me to come back?”
“No, you stay there and do your job and come back when you can.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Well, no. Actually, I’m really mad. They wanted me here at the hospital at 2 o’clock this afternoon and they’re not doing the procedure until 5 o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Why didn’t they just let me come in tomorrow so I wouldn’t miss bingo tonight?”
So we laughed and I thought she was all right and I hung up the phone.
I went to the games to recruit that night and then I caught a redeye to Indianapolis and went to a basketball camp there the next day. Phil Ford, who was an assistant coach at North Carolina at that point, was with us, and Phil, Jerry Green, Steve Robinson, and I went back to the hotel so I could call and make sure my mother was all right. We got back around 9 p.m. and Jerry went into his room and I went into my room with Phil and we were in there talking for a minute before I called my mom. There was a knock on the door and Jerry came in and he said, “Have you called yet?”
I said, “No.”
“There was a message in my room,” Jerry said. “Wanda called and she said your mother had cardiac arrest on the operating table. She passed away.”
I had two thoughts. One, I felt my world had ended. The angel of the world had died. The person that I tried to make proud every single day of my life was gone. But I had this other feeling. I’m not the most religious person in the world, but I do believe in the Lord. I do believe in a higher being. When I first heard my mother had cancer I said, “Lord, I only have one request. Please don’t allow my mom to suffer.”
So the second thought that I had when she died, and the one I was able to live on, was that my mom hadn’t suffered. That was the only way I could handle it. I didn’t want to remember my mom in pain. I wanted to remember her being mad about not playing bingo.
The only way I got through it was because of Wanda and Scott and Kimmie. If I didn’t have those three people to look forward to, I would not have cared about living. If it hadn’t been for them, I would have had no more reason to keep going. I thought about how my mom worshipped them. She liked Wanda better than she liked me, and my son and my daughter were her dreams for the future. When I was a child, my mother was my hero and now my children are my heroes. And Wanda has been the strength behind everything that I’ve ever done. So even though I’d lost my mom, in that moment, I could think of my family and feel like the luckiest man there ever was.
I flew to Asheville and went to my mom’s house. I got out of the car and just sort of stood there. I didn’t know if I wanted to walk in the house. My mom had never remarried, but she had a friend named Leonard King who would take her to play bingo or out to eat. The first person to come out of the house was Leonard. He said, “I wanted to give you something. Your mom gave
me this and told me to hold it until she got back out of the hospital.”
He handed me two hundred-dollar bills, money my mom had won at bingo. I remember thinking that for my mom to have a hundred-dollar bill was like the craziest thing in the world.
Then Leonard said, “She would want you to have it.”
I took one of the bills and folded it up in my wallet and I gave the other one to my sister.
The next night we had the visitation at the funeral home and my dad walked in. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. “I’m not coming to the funeral tomorrow,” he said, “but I wanted to see you and Frances. I wanted to tell you something. I have never regretted one damn thing I’ve ever done in my whole life except one. And that’s the way I treated your mom. I loved her and I still do. All the rest of what those people say about me, I couldn’t care less. They can all kiss my ass. There’s nothing I can do to change what I did, but I’m sorry about everything that happened.”
I hugged him and told him I appreciated that.
MY SISTER, FRANCES, was a lot like my dad in that she didn’t always make the greatest decisions. She was married and divorced three times. She was a dreamer. She lived her whole life believing that one day she was going to hit the jackpot. She sold vitamin pills in a pyramid scheme, she started a housecleaning service, she sold time-shares in Myrtle Beach. She always believed that she was going to come up with an idea that was going to make a gazillion dollars, but that never panned out. She knew that I had found what I loved to do, and she was sad that she hadn’t found something she loved like that, but she was very proud of me.
She came out to Lawrence almost every year to see a Kansas game and spend a few days with us. Once we went to one of Scott’s high school basketball games and after the game I told her to follow me out. But when I got outside my sister wasn’t there. I walked back in and Frances was standing in the bleachers looking totally lost and it dawned on me that something was wrong. The next morning at the breakfast table she told me, “Roy, I’m afraid one of these days I’m going to forget my children’s names.” How can anything be worse than that? Frances had been diagnosed with dementia in her early fifties.