Ol’ Roy On His Famous National-TV Profanity, Driver/Salesman Jobs To Feed His Family, 18 First-Place Finishes, Coach K, Much More

By David Glenn

 

(Note: This is the third installment of David Glenn’s “Roy Williams Goes to College” series — you can find parts one and two here and here, respectively) 

Roy Williams recently served as a guest speaker for the sports media class I teach at UNC Wilmington. He seemed relaxed and happy, and he laughed and smiled (he joined via Zoom) a lot. He was serious at times, including when discussing his 2021 retirement, but mostly playful. He became emotional while talking about his mother, childhood and other things.

As usual, he gave great answers to thoughtful questions, and he somehow turned lesser questions into valuable opportunities for teaching/learning, too. He patiently revisited many old stories, while adding a few unexpected twists, and he told some new stories, too. All the while, he responded to each student by name, often answering as if his or her question (some of which he had answered for others many times) was his only concern in the world at the time.

This is Part Three of a four-part summary of Williams’ visit to UNCW’s COM 495 class.

Part One included an extended introduction in which Williams offered some opening comments, before turning the class over to an hour-long Q&A led by the students that included questions/answers about his retirement, parents and grandchildren, former players, technology challenges, 10-cent Coca-Colas, wild triglycerides and much more.

Part Two continued the in-depth Q&A and included questions/answers on his 2-19 season, NC State, Dean Smith, Hubert Davis, his wife Wanda, what he misses most about coaching and much more.

UNCW Student Question: What do you think is more important in a recruit, work ethic or talent?

Williams: Oh, it’s a little bit of both.

To me, Tyler Hansbrough’s work ethic was, by far, the number one thing for him. For Ty Lawson, it was talent. For Sean May, it was the work ethic to try to lose the weight, to change his body, to do the things he had to do from his sophomore year, when we win 19 games, to his junior year (2004-05), when we win the national championship.

Everybody wants talent. I’m gonna guess here, but in our last 10, 11 or 12 years, we beat Duke on two recruits. Everybody wants (elite) talent. People said, Duke and Kentucky, they just wanted those one-and-dones. Well, I wanted some of those guys, too! We just didn’t get ‘em. (Laughs.)

But you have to say talent first. I also wanted to look and see if I could find somebody that might perhaps be rated a little bit below some of those guys (holds his hand up, showing a small margin with his fingers) but had that something special inside. If I could get that, I thought, that’s the kind of guy I could really, really enjoy coaching.

UNCW Student Question: With Duke-Carolina being one of the most anticipated rivalries in sports, what was your relationship like with Coach K, on and off the court?

Williams: You know, on the court, you’re just competing. I’d say hello to him before the game, we’d smile at each other, and the whole time we’re both (thinking), I want to beat your rear end today! (Laughs.) That’s what’s inside, without saying anything.

During the game, I try to never even focus on the other coach. Most games, I’ll never look at the other coach during the entire game. So, during the game, I was trying to decide what was the best way for my North Carolina team to beat those Duke players out on the court.

Off the court, we have a very good relationship, built strictly on respect. I say strictly, not to say anything bad about any other (aspects), it’s just that’s what it was built on. Most situations in college basketball, what I believed in, Mike agreed; what he believed in, I agreed. We did really have very similar focuses about what we thought was good or bad for college basketball. We were on the NABC (National Association of Basketball Coaches) board for many years, on many committees together, so we had plenty of chances to decide what we each individually thought, and remarkably, most of the time, we had the same ideas. So it’s very easy to have a great relationship that way, because we believed in what was good for college basketball, and most of the time we agreed.

He’s just a great, great coach. Great program.

I never had to get myself fired up to play against Duke, as opposed to playing or coaching against Mike Krzyzewski, because both of us are old and couldn’t get out there and look very good anyway. (Laughs.) It’s just trying to decide which way was the best to try to beat his team.

UNCW Student Question: In 2005, you won your first national championship in just your second season as the head coach of the Tar Heels, and the next year you were named the National Coach of the Year after another impressive season. How were you able to inspire such a high level of success in such a short amount of time?

Williams: You know, that (2006) is one of the most fun years I ever had in coaching. (Smiles.) It really was.

David Noel, I think, had averaged three or four points per game (the previous season), and he was the leading returning scorer. In fact, that year we started David Noel, who came here as a football recruit; Reyshawn Terry, who was second-team all-STATE (emphasizes) in the state of North Carolina; and three freshmen.

Now, Tyler Hansbrough was one of those freshmen, and he was a little bit unusual the way he could play, but it was a fun, fun team to coach. I kept telling them, this is North Carolina; we don’t back up. We’re still gonna be really good. That year, we weren’t picked … Sports Illustrated picked the top 68 teams to make the (NCAA Tournament), and we weren’t one of their selections, but we ended up being a #3 seed.

It was strictly because those guys really bought in, from Day One, whatever I was selling. David Noel was one of the greatest leaders that I’ve ever been around; he’d put his arm around those guys, and he’d also kick ‘em in the rear end if he needed to. So I had maybe the greatest leader I’ve ever had on my squad, and the guys really had tremendous focus, (with the attitude) hey, yeah, North Carolina won the national championship LAST YEAR (emphasizes), but we’re still North Carolina.

UNCW Student Question: If you had not decided to become a basketball coach at such a young age, for the reasons you explained earlier, what do you think you would have done instead?

Williams: OK, you mean my whole career, and not just now. You know, that question has been asked a lot, and I jokingly say — with the joking part being only a little bit — I would be working at a golf course, mowing greens or something, because I’d figure out a way for them to let me play for free two or three times a week.

But I never wanted to do anything else, so I never even thought about doing anything else. When I was here as a full-time assistant, and that was a full-time job but with part-time pay, I had to do other things to feed my family. So I drove copies of (UNC basketball) TV shows and I sold (UNC basketball) calendars.

So what I tried to be was the best driver of TV shows, get ‘em there on time and at the same time every week, 504 miles every Sunday. I’d go to drive to Durham, I’d pick up the copies, in these big ‘ol cans (holds up hands to show size of film cannisters). It’s not like digitally, where you send it across the magic airwaves or anything now. I’d drive one copy to Greensboro, drive the other copy to Asheville, then turn around and drive back.

But I did those kind of things because I wanted to feed my family. For me, if I were doing anything else, I think I’d have the same kind of focus, to do the best job I could possibly do. In fact, they changed the rules about part-time assistants selling calendars, and that made me feel really good, because I sold more calendars than anybody. (Smiles.) I told ‘em they had to change the (rules) because they didn’t like what I had done. So I was, quote, ‘the best dadgum calendar salesman you’ve ever seen.’ (Laughs.)

UNCW Student Question: Some sports media students are most interested in media relations or the sports communications side of things. As a coach, what impressed you most about the people you thought did those jobs particularly well?

Williams: It’s funny, we used to call those folks SIDs (sports information directors), and I knew who Rick Brewer was — he was the SID here at North Carolina when Coach Smith was the head coach and I was an assistant (1978-1988) — but I had no idea what he did. (Smiles.) So, when I go to Kansas, my SID was fantastic, and I grew to appreciate everything that went on.

For me, they’re a barrier; they’re a hurdle for people to get over, instead of getting straight to you for stuff that may not be very important, or not important at all, to you doing your job. So I had to trust those guys.

For me, trust in those guys, like (UNC’s Steve Kirschner), for example … I was with Kirsch for 18 years, and I trusted Steve Kirschner immensely, that he would understand my time, my job, my family needs, and then, ‘Oh, yeah, Coach, can you do this? Can you do that? Can you do this? Can you do that?’ But I trusted him from the very first.

I’ve always been one of those guys that starts everybody off in a very good spot, and as long as they keep doing what I think they should do, they stay there. I was never going to start anybody in the middle, then say you could go this way or that way. One of my former coaches I worked with started everybody way down low, and you had to prove yourself. I just trust people and know they normally want to do the right thing.

Kirsch has been just off the charts, protecting of my time so I can coach my team, because it is so time-demanding. I can’t imagine another job that has more time demands than a coach has on him. I still trust Kirsch immensely; he’s still getting quite a few requests. I’ve asked him a lot of times: What do you think I should do? A couple times, I’ve disagreed with him, but so many times I’ve agreed with him, too.

UNCW Student Question: You seemed to have overwhelmingly positive relationships with broadcasters and writers, but there were at least a couple moments that became famous exceptions to that rule. What explains the difference between the good and the bad?

Williams: I’ve messed it up sometimes. I’ve made some statements that I wished I could have caught as they were going out of my mouth (reaches hand out in front of his face) and pulled ‘em back in, and I’ve said some things I was not proud of.

I always looked at a (media) guy and said … and, guys, I’m from the South, so that (‘guys’) means boys and girls both, OK? … you have a job, you’re a writer, what do you want to do? You would ask me a question, and I would give you the answer. I understood that part.

What I never understood easily is when someone would ask a question, and I would give them my answer, and they didn’t think that fit so they’d ask again. You know, you can go ahead and write your article any way you want to write it. That’s your privilege. But don’t get me to try to agree with you if I don’t agree with you.

I would say, the three or four situations I said some things I wish I hadn’t said, all of them … every one of them was just that, right there. If you’re gonna write the article, you don’t need me; go ahead and write the article. I don’t agree with you, and you’re not gonna talk me into agreeing with you.

One of them is very easy to explain. We’re playing North Carolina State. (Post-game question:) Why did you not press them? Well, we won the game. (Follow-up:) Well, why didn’t you press them, because they have trouble against the press? I said, well, we don’t press very well. We practice it, because I would like to be able to do it better. He said, well, they just have so many turnovers, I don’t see why you wouldn’t press them. I said, well, that’s not who we are. Then it went to another statement, and I said, I don’t really understand these questions. If I knew how to fix the blankety-blank thing, I would have already fixed it. You know, that kind of thing.

Or, the famous one, after the national championship game in 2003, where we (Kansas) had lost to North Caro, I mean Syracuse, and there were so many comments and questions. Was I going to leave Kansas and come to North Carolina? And I told the reporter, outside the locker room, I said, ‘Do not ask me about the North Carolina job. The only thing I’m concerned about is the kids in my locker room.’ And I said, ‘If there’s somebody in your ear, telling you to ask that question, tell them that I said they’re not a very nice human being, because I care about my kids in the locker room.’

So, she asked that question, and I said (on national TV): That’s not right, I don’t think you should ask that question, blah blah blah. Then she asked again, and that (became) the t-shirts that ended up being put up and made up in Durham, and I believe it’d be alright to say it like this (on Zoom to a group of college students), because my quote back to her was: I don’t give a sh*t about North Carolina right now, I care about those kids in my locker room.

If she (Bonnie Bernstein of CBS Sports) had been a male, it would have been worse than that. As soon as I said that, I turned around and walked off. If it had been a different scenario, if it had been a male, as soon as the interview was over with, I would have blasted them, challenged them. I would have done everything in the world.

But it made for a good t-shirt and went through the circles over in Durham. It was not my best moment, but my friends, some of my best buddies, they really thought it was great.

UNCW Student Question: In 33 years as a head coach, your Kansas and UNC teams were part of 18 first-place finishes (counting ties) in two of the best college basketball conferences. What goes into that sort of high-level consistency over such a long period?

Williams: It is a little bit about culture.

I think it was nine at Kansas and nine at North Carolina, and when I came to North Carolina as an assistant coach, there were only seven teams in the league. It’s easier to win a conference championship (or finish first in the league standings) if there’s only seven teams. We had 15 (in the modern ACC), so it is really difficult.

So that (18 first-place finishes) was something I was very proud of. I mean, the number of wins you have, heck, if you coach long enough, you’re gonna win a lot of games, because you’re not gonna coach that long and not be good at it, or they’d have fired you!

But the two things that stuck out to me, and are really important to me, are that consistency that you’re talking about … that we try to be great the very first day of practice. And I’d tell our guys, everybody has a great attitude today. Next week, somebody’s not gonna be as good. The following week, somebody else is not. So we’ve gotta have our focus to stay together and be positive and do it throughout the course of the year (regardless of results).

We’d try to get better the first day, be better on practice 21, better on practice 38, better on practice 48, 60, 90. We tried to say that we’re gonna come to work every day and do the best we can, and that’s the way I tried to coach, the way I tried to look at the big picture, and the kids bought into that.

And I’ll even tell you, the other thing that I was always most proud of is … and, yes, I know how many games we won. As I said at the press conference, ‘We did OK.’ But the two that I was most proud of, more than anything, were those 18 (regular-season) conference championships that were built over a period of time (holds hands far apart) and not just for a hot stretch of three days. …

The other one is that, in NCAA Tournament play, Coach Smith set the record one time, because he won the first game in NCAA play 17 times. We broke that record. Until we lost last year to Wisconsin … that was the first time we had ever lost a first-round NCAA game. We had won 29 first-round games in a row, sometimes as a one seed, sometimes as an eight seed, it made no difference. That consistency there is the other one that I was really, really proud of.

Next Time: Roy Williams Goes To College, Part Four (Final)

(Featured image: Todd Melet/Chapelboro.com)

David Glenn (DavidGlennShow.com, @DavidGlennShow) is an award-winning author, broadcaster, editor, entrepreneur, publisher, speaker, writer and university lecturer (now at UNC Wilmington) who has covered sports in North Carolina since 1987.

The founding editor and long-time owner of the ACC Sports Journal and ACCSports.com, he also has contributed to the Durham Herald-Sun, ESPN Radio, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Raycom Sports, SiriusXM and most recently The Athletic. From 1999-2020, he also hosted the David Glenn Show, which became the largest sports radio program in the history of the Carolinas, syndicated in more than 300 North Carolina cities and towns, plus parts of South Carolina and Virginia.

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