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Roy Williams’ favorite Dukies are only half the story.
For some reason — other than it being a long wait before basketball season — Sports Illustrated picked up a podcast that asked the Hall of Fame Carolina coach about his favorite Duke players. Really? Must have been a very slow newsday for SI!
Ol’ Roy’s third favorite Dukie was Shane Battier even though his Kansas teams only played the Battier Blue Devils once in an NCAA second-round loss with Battier getting 21 points, 8 rebounds and 8 blocks in 40 minutes. Battier was not only a great college player and unsung pro, he was such a smart, nice kid that people used to say he could be the President someday.
But Roy’s first and second royal blue favorites are interesting choices, to say the least.
Williams said he had started to recruit Christian Laettner and Grant Hill while they were both in high school before Roy left Dean Smith’s bench for the head job at Kansas in 1988.
Laettner joined the Blue Devils the next season and Hill two years later. They both starred in the 1991 Final Four that Duke won. That was an ultra-painful weekend for Tar Heel fans, who went to Indianapolis hoping their team would beat Roy’s Jayhawks on Saturday and take on unbeaten and No. 1 UNLV in the championship game. Didn’t happen, of course.
Kansas upset the Tar Heels and played Duke on Monday night, when Laettner had 18 points and 10 rebounds. Freshman Hill only had 10 points, but 2 came on the famous flying alley-oop dunk on a fast break in the 72-65 victory.
Laettner claims that when he called Williams and told him he was going to Duke, his mother cried because she wanted him to play for ol’ Roy, who was in his last season as an assistant to Smith. So that story doesn’t make much sense.
And Williams was entrenched at Kansas by the time Hill, supposedly a lifelong Tar Heel fan, surprised everyone by picking Coach K over the Dean. Calvin and Janet Hill wanted to tell Smith in person so they let the UNC coaches come to Virginia for their scheduled dinner. Smith and his aides knew something was up when Grant left the table and went upstairs to do his homework.
The Hills told Smith they respected him so much they preferred giving him the news in their living room. His assistants saw how Smith could respond to such a selfish idea when he said, teeth-clenched, “We wish Grant well at Duke, but I could have been home having dinner with my family.”
Had the fiery Williams been there, perhaps Hill would have never made his top three Dukies.
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