by Roy Williams
So we made a nice little run to the finals of the NIT, and we built a little of our confidence back. In the locker room after the loss in the championship game, Coach Robinson pointed at me and said, “Coach Williams is really the only one who wanted to do this, because he thought we could still do something positive. We did.”
The other thing I’m proud of is what Deon Thompson talked about at our postseason banquet. “Coach never gave up,” he said. “He never let us give in. Every game he came to practice coaching us the same way he did last year when we won a national championship. He always believed we were going to get it turned around.”
I guess that’s what the captain of the Titanic thought: “We’re going to stop sinking any minute now.” But I did come to practice every day, and told the guys, “Hey, if we give in, we know what the result is going to be. If we don’t give in, we could get rewarded.” It wasn’t that I had to give myself a pep talk. I honestly thought that we were going to turn it around. I have always believed that you never lose a game; the clock just runs out on you. I thought our team was going to be a good team, but the season ended before we really had a chance to show it.
Two days after our last game, the Final Four began. I had been to every Final Four since I became a head coach, 21 years in a row. In 2010 I didn’t go. I was worn out and my team wasn’t there, so I didn’t give a darn. On the night of the championship game, I watched Dancing with the Stars. I wanted to watch Erin Andrews and to see if Pamela Anderson could dance. I clicked over to the NCAA final at one point, saw one play, and then turned it right back. Eventually, somebody told me that Duke won. Duke is a conference team and nobody can have more respect for what that program has accomplished than I do, but that doesn’t mean I have to sit there and pull for them. I don’t think Mike was pulling for us when we won it the year before. The bottom line is that I was like a spoiled little brat thinking that if you won’t let me play, then I’m going to take my ball and go home.
The season was hard. I didn’t handle the losses well. Losing feels like somebody reaches into your chest and jerks your heart out and shakes it right in front of you. That sounds very dramatic, but coaching is my livelihood. It’s not my life, but it is my livelihood and it is my passion. It was tough to get smacked right between the eyes again and again.
My worst record as a head coach had been 19–12. In 2010 we had 17 losses. There’s a long way between 12 and 17. And to not even qualify for the NCAA tournament? I felt worthless. I felt like a failure. I haven’t felt that way very often in my professional life. Winning a national championship the previous April wasn’t nearly as high as the lows were low after losing at home to Georgia Tech, Virginia, and Duke a few months later.
During the 2010 season, I’d go to sleep and wake up an hour later. Sometimes I’d go two nights in a row without sleeping at all. I’d be up watching tape, writing down notes. The doctor told me I needed to start taking some sleeping pills. When I’d stay up all night — night after night after night — Wanda would say, “Are you trying to kill yourself?”
It didn’t feel real. I remember lying in bed when I couldn’t sleep all those nights and thinking, “I wish I could go to sleep and wake up and realize that this has all been a nightmare.” But it lasted so long, I knew that I hadn’t slept long enough for all that bad stuff to happen.
I don’t think I’m important enough that some higher power sent Aiden here to make sure Ol’ Roy would be okay. I think his arrival was a coincidence. But it was a wonderful coincidence. I could have made it through that season without him, but it would have been so much harder. He was something else to live for. Something there to make sure I got my exercise, to make sure I took my heart medicine. He soothed my soul.
I remember how Aiden saved me after we got killed at Clemson. We couldn’t fly home, because there was too much ice on the plane, so I sent the players back on the bus. Wanda and her parents were at the game, and they were going to Charlotte afterward to see the grandbaby, so I joined them. The next morning the little boy fell asleep on my chest while we were lying on the couch. That’s the first time those two worlds met. I had been so distraught, just ruined. Seeing Aiden didn’t make me forget the loss, but it showed me something else beyond basketball. I thought, “That was ridiculous last night. I’m really ticked off, but gosh almighty, this is about as nice as it can be.” It didn’t erase the hurt, but it made me feel really good at a time when nothing else in the world could have.
ON AUGUST 1, 2010, I turned 60 years old. All I really wanted to do that day was to have dinner with my family. Scott, Katie, Aiden, my daughter Kimberly, and Wanda and her mom and dad were all there. Dinner was about as countrified as you can get: fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, corn, green beans, and potatoes. I really wanted some family pictures made, because I only have one picture of me with my sister and my mom and dad. So Scott set up his camera with a timer, and he took some pictures of the four generations. It was one of the great days of my 60 years.
I can remember when I thought 60 was ancient. Kimberly likes to say, “Daddy, one of these days you are going to mature, but I don’t know when.” She’s right. Earlier that summer, two people bet me $25 each that I wouldn’t cut all my hair off. So I did it. Cutting off all of my hair just to say I beat people is not terribly mature. That $50 was not going to change my life, but I wanted to beat them. That kind of thing makes me feel that while I may be getting older, I’m definitely not mature yet.
I will admit that the 2010 season aged me as much as any season I have ever coached. It was also a season when I spent more time thinking about aging because of what I saw happening to Coach Smith.
During my first five years back at UNC, Coach Smith came to practice four times a week. I’d walk over to him at water break, and during those two minutes we’d talk. I loved that part of it. I thought I was so lucky to have another set of eyes that I trusted so much, whose only goal was the same as mine: to make the team better.
The past three seasons Coach Smith has rarely come to practice. I have missed having him there, but I’ve missed it more for him, because I know he is not doing what he really loves to do. During my first few years back at UNC, there would be a phone message from Coach Smith after every game congratulating me on a great win or telling me to remind one of the players to sprint back harder on defense. The past couple of years he has never called me after a game. That’s sad.
Coach Smith has more pride than anybody I’ve ever known in my life. He was so proud of his basketball knowledge and his mind and his memory and his relationships with the players. The memory loss that he’s recently suffered is the worst thing that could possibly happen to him. It’s cruel. He shouldn’t have the last years of his life take him so far away from what he stood for. That’s the hardest part. It would have been great to have him around in 2010 to ask, “Coach, every time we play man-to-man defense out of bounds, I think they’re going to score a layup. What do you think about playing zone?” I didn’t have that. We did end up making that change, but it seemed strange not to have his approval.
Coach Smith still has good days. He sent me a handwritten note during the 2010 season that said exactly what he would have said to me 15 years ago. The writing was so clear; the punctuation and grammar were perfect. A couple of days later, I thanked him for the note, and it took a few seconds for him to remember that he’d sent it to me. During a team party at my house after the 2010 season, I introduced Coach Smith to Aiden, and a few minutes later I was holding Aiden and Coach Smith came over and said, “Oh, that’s the cutest baby . . . now whose baby is this?” I don’t think he has much memory about what happened to our team during the 2010 season and that’s okay with me. I don’t want him to remember that.
Every time I see Coach Smith, I have such mixed emotions. In the summer of 2010, I played nine holes of golf with him and Coach Guthridge. It was the hardest nine holes I’ve ever had to play, because the Coach Smith I’ve known was always playing mind games with you, know
ing how the bet stood and wanting to get 25 other bets down. He loved to compete, and that was the first time that Coach Smith and I ever played golf that there wasn’t something bet. We were just playing golf, and that felt so unusual. Still, I was really happy I’d had a chance to spend some time with him.
My favorite moment from the 2010 season came at our 100-year celebration of North Carolina basketball when I walked Coach Smith out to the center circle at the Smith Center along with Coach Guthridge and Eddie Fogler. It was the most emotional time I have ever had that did not involve my family. I started crying, Al Wood was crying, Walter Davis was crying. Lots of the players were emotional. After the ceremony, I walked Coach Smith back into the tunnel and at that moment his mind was as clear as it has ever been. “Coach,” I said, “you did great, and thank you very much.”
Coach Smith looked back at me with tears in his eyes and he said, “No, thank you.” And he hugged me. That is a moment I will never forget.
FLYING HOME FROM NEW YORK after the last game of the 2010 season, I was relieved. I am always relieved when the season is over. I was also still unbelievably mad, surprised, confused, and thinking, “How in the crap could this happen? This is not supposed to happen. Okay, what am I going to do to make sure this doesn’t ever happen again?”
That season, I doubted myself as a coach more than the first 21 years put together. Buddy Baldwin said to me three or four times that season, “Coach, you cannot get that dumb that quickly. Even you.” There’s some truth to that, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I was still the one going through it. I can’t just say that the kids didn’t do it, because it was us. That was the part that was killing me. It was not just the players’ fault. Sure, I can’t make the three-point shots, I can’t shoot the free throws, I can’t not turn the ball over, I can’t invest on the court. I can’t do any of that for them, but I had to find a way to get them to do it, and I couldn’t. I blamed myself. I failed. That is hard to take.
Part of doubting yourself as a coach is that it makes you wonder, “Am I ever going to have a chance to be the best again?” There are no guarantees. I went to the Final Four as an assistant at North Carolina in 1982 and then I didn’t get back until Kansas got there in 1991. I can still remember during a dinner at the 1991 Final Four when Coach Smith said to me, “Man, after ’82 neither one of us thought it would take us this long to get back, did we?”
During the 2010 season I was always coaching for the moment, coaching for a practice, coaching for a game. But after the season, I did sit back and wonder if I could get us back to where we’d have an opportunity to win it all. That’s the unknown. I wanted that the day after we won the championship in 2009, but following the 2010 season, that desire was so much deeper. I don’t ever want to embarrass the program, and I felt like I’d embarrassed the program that season. I just hoped to bring our team back to where all of the players who had ever played at North Carolina could be really proud of us again.
I met with our athletic director, Dick Baddour, shortly after the 2010 season, and he told me he thought I needed to let go of what happened. I told him I couldn’t. I know that he was right, but if you haven’t walked in my shoes, you don’t know the pain, you don’t know the regret, you don’t know the anguish. It eats at your soul.
THERE WERE PLENTY of times during the summer after the 2010 season that I felt like climbing up on top of the Smith Center and jumping off. The off-season was really difficult. It seemed like an eternity, the longest I have ever endured as a coach by far. I was ready to start practice the day we came back from the NIT in New York. I was dying for another chance to compete.
It helped that my friends in the coaching business, and even some of my enemies, really supported me. All of those guys have gone through seasons when it just didn’t work. It makes you realize that you’re not alone. Coaches understand.
Feeling like I had embarrassed the program was hard to deal with, but it drove me. I tried to look back at every single thing I did with the 2010 team to see if I could figure out what I did wrong. One of the things that went through my mind was how every year my assistant coaches tell me that I’ve mellowed compared to when I first became a head coach. So one Sunday night right after the season, I took the players over to the track and ran the crap out of them. In recent seasons we’d done all of our conditioning work in the gym, so going to the track added more of an element of stamina and mental toughness to it.
We did one of my conditioning drills from the fall of 1981 that I’d created for guys like Jordan, Perkins, and Worthy. I wanted to show the current guys what tough really means. They ran a timed half-mile, three 400-meter runs, and five 200-meter sprints. They were shocked. They didn’t think they could do it. One of the players was throwing up at the end of the track. I liked that. I told them I was done being Mr. Nice Guy and that something had to change, because I wasn’t going to go through another season like 2010, and if I couldn’t get them to play the way I wanted them to play by coaching them, teaching them, or pleading with them, this would be another option. Coaching by fear doesn’t bother me if it gets the results we’re all looking for.
Then during my postseason player meetings, I talked with David and Travis Wear about what I wanted them to work on over the summer. Their dad called me a couple of weeks later. I thought he wanted to talk about what I’d told his sons to practice so he could get them started on it at home. Instead he said, “Roy, I’ll just get right to the point. The boys are not coming back. I want their release immediately.” I was stunned. I didn’t know what to say. It was not a pleasant phone conversation. He said that his boys weren’t happy, and I just didn’t believe that. I asked if I could speak to the boys and he said it would serve no purpose. That was it.
The Wears were two kids that I really enjoyed coaching. I thought they were really going to be good players and that they could really help us get back to where we wanted to be. They were going to play at least 45 minutes a game for us combined in 2011. Then all of a sudden the rug was pulled out from underneath us. I was just dumbfounded. Reality set in pretty quickly, and I realized that it doesn’t make any difference how I feel. We’ve got to move forward.
The remaining players took that news and used it to help them bond. During the second session of summer school, we had everybody on campus except for Leslie McDonald and Larry Drew. It was fantastic for our guys. It was John Henson, Tyler Zeller, Kendall Marshall, Harrison Barnes, Reggie Bullock, Dexter Strickland, Justin Watts, and Will Graves, and every day they were playing pickup against all of our NBA alums who come back to play in Chapel Hill each summer. The two teams never mixed. Our players told me it was vicious. The alums said they’d never played in summer games more competitive. There were nine current or former NBA players out there including Marvin Williams, Raymond Felton, and Sean May, and our eight guys were trying to kick their tails.
On the first day of classes in August, we always do a 12-minute run, and then we come over to our house and I talk about the season and what I expect out of them. I gave my talk, and then at the end I asked if anybody else had anything to say. Will Graves said, “Coach, I need you to say something that you haven’t said yet tonight.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“About winning a national championship,” Will said.
Every other year that Will had been playing, I’d said, “I’m looking at a team that’s good enough to win the national championship.” I believed that for the 2011 team. I hadn’t said it to the team because we were so young. I was thinking short-term goals more than long-term goals. But I said it again that night.
One day during conditioning in September, I was standing at the finish line as my assistants were calling out times. John Henson had just finished running and two other guys had run similar times. John looked over to me in a panic, asking, “What was his time? What did he run?”
“John, relax,” I said. “Sam Perkins hated this program, but you know what he told me one time? Sam said, ‘Coac
h, sometimes you’ve got to shut the hell up and run.’ John, that’s what you’ve got to do. These are times you can make. These times are realistic for you. Are they easy? No, but life’s not easy, so just shut the hell up and run.”
John looked at me and he said, “Okay.” Then John took off running and he was fantastic.
No one liked the conditioning program at all, but I was determined to add some toughness to the team if they didn’t have enough by themselves. It was really hard, but I was really proud of how they handled it. It made them a lot tougher mentally. They knew there was no sympathy from me. “You can complain all you want,” I told them, “but keep it to yourselves, because it has no meaning to me. Guys, everybody wants to be like Mike. Well, then be like Mike. Shut up and do it.”
During that time period I was seeing Will Graves get into the best shape of his life. I began to think he was going to have a great year. Then all of a sudden, one week before the start of practice in October, I had to dismiss Will.
That was another big blow to us that I really had a difficult time handling. Losing Will is going to affect me for the rest of my life because I stuck by the kid when everybody else was telling me to forget him. I was shocked when I found out I was going to have to let him go. I couldn’t believe that he had made the same mistakes again. I had suspended him in 2009 for the whole second semester, and at that time I said, “Will, if there are any more problems, there is no decision to be made. You have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. So don’t screw it up.”