by Roy Williams
I knew it would only get worse for her and part of why I came back to North Carolina is because I didn’t want to be the rich little brother in Kansas just sending money. I visited Frances regularly when I moved back, but her health continued to decline. I really believe that the last basketball game my sister saw that she knew what was going on was the 2005 NCAA championship game. She would fade in and out watching it on television with her son and daughter, but I like to believe she knew that we won that game.
The last nine months of her life, my sister didn’t know who I was. At that time, I wanted to go see Frances and I didn’t want to go see Frances. I felt so guilty that I didn’t want to see her, but I hated seeing my sister like that. I saw her at Christmas in 2006 for the last time and she died three months later. If only she had been healthier, I think Frances and I would have grown closer than we ever had a chance to as kids. She would have really enjoyed being the big sister of the basketball coach at North Carolina.
THE LAST TIME I ever saw my dad was on a Wednesday in May 2004. I was going to St. Louis for a meeting, and I got a charter plane to fly me from Chapel Hill and stop over in Asheville so I could visit with him. Over the years, we’d seen each other on Christmas a few times. He came to watch me coach two games. He had never come to my house. By the time I came back to North Carolina, my dad had late-stage cancer. We saw each other about a dozen times during that first year I was back.
When I arrived at his house on that May afternoon, he said, “Well, good God, look what the dogs drug in.”
Later, he said to me, “You know, I really didn’t do a good job with you as a father.”
I said, “I was all right.”
“No, I could’ve taught you so many things.”
“You did.”
“What the hell did I ever teach you?”
“Daddy, I just looked at what you did and I tried to do the opposite.”
“That’s the only goddamn way I could ever have taught you anything.”
Then I said, “Daddy, you did something else, too. When you came to Mom’s visitation I appreciate you saying what you did.”
He looked at me and said, “It’s still the only goddamn thing I’ve ever regretted in my entire life.”
As I was leaving, I said, “I’ll be back on Sunday.”
I will never forget that he said, “Well, maybe I’ll be here, maybe I won’t.”
That next Sunday, as I drove to Asheville, I was heading toward my dad’s house when I decided I needed to stop at a golf course right near the airport because I wanted to work on my putting. So I putted for about 30 minutes. Then I thought to myself, “It’s time to go now.”
I got back in the car and drove over to my dad’s house, and my half brother, Danny, came out of the house. “He’s passed,” he said. “He’s been gone for about 30 minutes.”
I said, “I know.” I knew because I didn’t want to see my dad like that anymore. The last thing he had said to me was, “Well, maybe I’ll be here, maybe I won’t.” That was right somehow. It was like my mom saying, “Why didn’t they just let me come in tomorrow so I wouldn’t miss bingo tonight?”
At my mom’s funeral when I delivered the eulogy, I said, “Life was never easy for my mother, but she never belabored that point. She never made me feel like she was feeling sorry for herself, and that made me feel how strong she was. Very seldom did we ever tell each other, ‘I love you.’ But there was never a moment in my life that she didn’t make me feel like I was the most important person in her world. I thought she was an angel, but she treated me like one.”
My dad had heard about the eulogy. He asked one of my cousins, “Do you think Roy will talk at my funeral like he did at his mom’s?”
That was my dad’s way of asking me. Because he wouldn’t actually ask me. He had too much pride. But he knew my cousin would tell me.
So I spoke at my dad’s funeral, too. I said, “The song that came to my mind when my mom died was “Wind Beneath My Wings,” because that’s what she was. The song that reminds me of my dad every time I hear it is “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” because he was married five times and the only thing he ever left us was alone, where he laid his hat was his home, and he spent all his time chasing women and drinking. That was my dad.
“He didn’t always do a great job living, but my dad was really good at dying. He had three grandsons and he had three shotguns and before he died, he gave each grandson a shotgun. He had two sons, my half brother Danny and me, and he tried to mend fences with both of us. Before my dad died, he cleared everything off his chest and all of us in this room should hope to be able to do that. I know Daddy would want everybody to say I love you more than he and I ever did, and so I would hope that all of you would take the time to tell people that you love them. My dad would like that. My dad made some mistakes while he was alive, but he tried to make amends before he died, so I believe he died a contented man.
“Some of you may be upset about the bad things I’m saying about my dad at his funeral. You know what? It doesn’t bother me, because my dad told me one time that he didn’t give a damn what other people thought. Well, I’m Babe’s son.”
MY MOM DIED on July 7, 1992, and in my wallet to this day I’ve still got that folded-up hundred-dollar bill. Whenever I see it there it reminds me that if there’s ever a really, really, really rainy day, I’ll be all right, because my mom will still be leaving me that dime.
AFTERWORD
I REALLY DON’T SPEND much time thinking about where I’ve been in my life or how much different that is from where I am now. But I will say that as a person and as a coach, I have never experienced anything like the changes in the two years since this book was first published. Most people would probably think my perspective began to shift on January 4, 2010, when our loss to the College of Charleston began the downward spiral of the most exasperating and humbling season of my college coaching career. But it really began three days earlier.
I HAD FIRST HEARD the news in June of 2009. On Father’s Day. Wanda and I were driving back home from the beach one night when we got a call from our son, Scott. We talked for a while on the speakerphone, and Scott wished me a happy Father’s Day. At the end of the call he said, “Oh, by the way, Katie’s expecting.”
“Expecting?” Wanda said. “Expecting what?” We were stunned.
Then I said, “Are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?”
“Yeah,” Scott said.
“When?”
“January 1.”
After we hung up, the thing I remember most is that Wanda and I didn’t say anything to each other for several miles. My mind was racing.
Many years ago I read an article about Jimmy Valvano. One of his dreams in life was to do things with his grandchildren that he neglected to do with his own children, because he felt guilty about how much time he’d spent away from his kids while coaching. Jimmy passed away before he ever got that chance. For years, I’ve been thinking about that. During a lot of my children’s lifetime, there were so many things I missed. So the moment I heard that I was going to have a grandchild, other than almost wrecking my car, it was a pretty neat deal.
It was something that I had been pestering Scott and Katie about, at first sort of casually, then more straightforwardly, and then more bluntly, until the day I finally said, “When are you guys going to get started so we can have some grandchildren?”
The anticipation was phenomenal. Every time I saw a little baby or passed a store selling baby clothes or toys, I thought about it. But what it all meant didn’t really strike me until the day the baby arrived. I had just come home from our January 1 basketball practice when the phone rang, and within a half hour, Wanda and I were driving to the hospital in Charlotte. We took two cars because I had to be back in Chapel Hill for practice the next day. We got there two hours later, and probably 30 minutes after that, the baby was born. We were sitting in the waiting room with Katie’s parents when Scott walked up with a big smile on h
is face. He didn’t tell us boy or girl. I had told him early on that I didn’t want to know, and they felt the same way. I wanted to be surprised. We followed him down to the delivery room. I was the last one in, holding the door for the other grandparents, and my heart was pounding. “Well,” Katie said, “why don’t you guys come over here and say hello to your grandson, Aiden Allen Williams.”
That was the moment when time stood still. Allen is my middle name and Katie’s father’s first name, and when Katie said that, I had to turn around and walk back toward the door. I wanted to get away to someplace where people couldn’t see me, but there was no place to hide. I had to compose myself for a couple of seconds before I could even go over there and take a look at the little rascal. I thought of my mother and I wished she could have been there to see him.
People have asked me what I would have done if the birth had happened on a game night. The answer is easy. I would have missed the game. I hadn’t told anybody, but I’d already made up my mind that if it happened, Coach Robinson and the rest of the staff would coach the game and I would come back when I could. I knew there would be other basketball games, but there would never be another first grandchild. Luckily, it didn’t come to that. That’s how I know Aiden is my kind of kid. He was punctual.
I went over to the hospital the next morning to see my grandson again, and then I left to come back for practice. While I was driving back to Chapel Hill, the phone in the car kept ringing over and over with people calling to find out the baby’s name and statistics. That ride was a blur. I was so far past elated that I don’t know if there’s a word in the dictionary to describe how I was feeling. During that whole trip I completely forgot about basketball.
THE 2010 BASKETBALL SEASON changed my perspective as well. It is mind-boggling to think that in the span of one year I went from the greatest season I’ve ever been involved with, as far as margin of victory all the way through the NCAA tournament, to the worst season I’ve ever been involved with.
I remember years ago, after I’d just taken my first head coaching job at Kansas, I attended a farewell party at Coach Smith’s house on the night before we left for Lawrence. Coach Smith walked me out to his driveway. “The biggest worry I have about you is how hard you take the losses,” he said, “because I assure you they are going to be much more difficult for you as a head coach.”
Our next game after Aiden’s birth was at the College of Charleston, and we had an 11-point lead with four minutes to play. Charleston scored the next eight points of the game and had the ball with time running out. I was on the sideline with my arm in a sling from the shoulder surgery I’d had in November, and I was jumping up and down but couldn’t get anybody’s attention. Instead of doing my usual jumping jacks, I could only wave one arm. We had a player who was supposed to foul and he didn’t foul, so instead of sending their guy to the free-throw line for a one-and-one, the guy shoots a three and ties it up, and then we lose in overtime. We almost never lose a game like that. We win games like that.
Three games later, we played Georgia Tech at home, and I remember five things happened at the end of that game that could have gone either way, and if any one of the five had gone our way, we would have won. But we were 0-for-5. We had to make a great comeback just to have a chance to win that game, but that’s what North Carolina does. And to lose it at the end, that is not what North Carolina does.
Now there was some doubt. We’d lost a home game. That was the game that got our guys thinking, “Oh my gosh, what is happening?” The difference between winning and losing is often so small, but the impact can be so huge. I really believe that if we had won that game, it would have changed our whole season.
As a coach you’re always considering worst-case scenarios. After losing to Georgia Tech, Coach Robinson and I were sitting in the coaches’ locker room one night after practice. “Steve,” I said, “we’ve got to get this turned around because—”
“One loss leads to another one,” he said, finishing my sentence. We lost eight of our next 10 games.
I’ve been asked a million times what went wrong that season, and that’s easy to answer. You don’t have to be a nuclear physicist to figure it out. I had said in the preseason that we were thin in backcourt experience. I was worried about our perimeter shooting because we had nobody that had ever done it in crunch time. And we had nobody on our team who’d ever been asked to be “the man.” Nobody like a Sean May, Tyler Hansbrough, Raymond Felton, or Ty Lawson who I could point to and say, “All right, this is the play we’re going to run, and they know we’re going to run it, but you’re going to score anyway.”
Still, I thought our depth up front might be such a strength that it might overcome some of those weaknesses. In golf you can hit it a little sideways, but you can overcome that if you make all the putts. But then our big guys all of a sudden started getting hurt. There was no strength for us to build on. We had too many holes. The guys we were depending on to cover up those holes became holes. And then, when you lose a couple of games, the fans tend to panic and the players start saying, “Oh my gosh, what are we doing?” That lack of confidence grows like a snowball rolling downhill until the players begin to think, “How are we going to screw this one up?”
We were in a team meeting one night, and I asked Coach Holladay if he had anything to say.
“I’m just so confused about why this team won’t do what you’ve asked them to do, when every other team that you’ve coached has tried to do that to the best of their ability and they’ve been successful,” he said. “I’m dumbfounded about why these guys aren’t giving you that kind of effort mentally and physically.”
He was right. I could never get that team to do the simple things that I’d gotten every other team to do for the previous 21 years. I was saying the same things during our 90th practice that I was saying the first week, and I could not get them to do them. They kept making the same mistakes over and over.
I went back and looked at old practice plans to see if I’d left something out. I asked myself, “Am I running them too much? Am I not running them enough?” I even had the players write down things that they wanted everybody on the team to focus on, and I asked them to include me. A few players wanted me to shorten practices, and I threw those out because that was a cop out. Some of them wanted me to be more demanding. I was trying to be, but you can’t ask guys to do multiplication tables when they haven’t learned how to add yet.
Another day I had the team and the staff vote for which five guys were playing the hardest, and we posted it up on the board in the locker room. It was brutal. My thought process was, “What would I think if I was a player and Coach put those names up on the board and I wasn’t one of them? That would kill me.” That meeting was hard for me because I was astounded that guys weren’t hurt as much as I wanted them to be, that it didn’t bother them as much as it would me. And it hurt me because I hadn’t been able to get them to feel as invested as I thought they should be. I even asked one of those guys, “Did that embarrass you?”
“A little,” he said.
“Did you expect it?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why not change?”
THE LOSS AT DUKE to end the regular season was a low point. I have never had to sit through anything like that. Duke had everything going in their favor. It was Senior Night, and none of their players had ever beaten us in Cameron. I was dumb enough to think that was great, because nobody thought we had a chance. I felt like we could really stick it to them. We could do something to hurt their psyche for a long time. And we were awful. They totally dominated us from the first whistle to the last. It was embarrassing. The level of the beating was something that I’d never experienced before as a college coach. We looked like we didn’t have any idea how to play. It was the last regular season game, and I remember we had a shot clock violation right after a timeout. “Guys,” I said, “how can that happen?”
I left Cameron and drove straight down to the beach and got
there at 2 o’clock in the morning. The team had the day off, and I wanted to collect my thoughts before the ACC Tournament started. I couldn’t sleep that night. The next morning I planned to sit on the porch to try to relax a little bit, but I couldn’t. I went for a walk four times that day. I could not sit still. I wanted to do anything to avoid sitting there, because all I could think about was how badly I got my butt beat the night before. So I was walking down the street and a guy passed me on a bike, and he said, “You guys got killed last night!”
I said, “You think I don’t know that?” For a moment, the “mountain” came out in me, and I wanted to go over there and see how tough he was.
There were also a few college kids standing there. “Hey, Coach,” one of them said, “don’t worry about that guy. Can we have a picture made with you?”
I laughed. “You sure you want your picture made with me?”
I was humbled, but I was not about to give up. I honest-to-goodness believed we would go to the ACC Tournament and win the thing. What a neat deal it would be, because everybody had counted us out and said we were not going to make the NCAA Tournament. After we lost to Georgia Tech in the first round, I was walking off the court in Greensboro, and I was bewildered. I can remember stopping for a second on the way back to the locker room and thinking, “Gosh, we’re not going to make the fricking tournament. How could this happen?”
One of the few things about the season I’m proud of is that after that loss, I asked every one of my assistant coaches, “Do you want to go to the NIT?” Every one of them said “No. No. No.” The seniors had told me they had taken an informal vote, and some of the players on our team didn’t want to go. I came home and asked Wanda about it, and she said, “No.” I woke up the next morning and told myself, “If we get an NIT bid, we’re going, because if somebody invites me to play, I’m going to go play. How could it get any worse than it is right now? Playing more can only help us, because we’re at rock bottom.”