Hard Work Read online

  ROY WILLIAMS

  HARD WORK

  A LIFE ON AND OFF THE COURT

  WITH TIM CROTHERS

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2009 and 2011 by Roy Williams and Tim Crothers. All rights reserved.

  First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, October 2011.

  Originally published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2009.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  All photos courtesy of the Williams family unless otherwise indicated.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this title as follows:

  Williams, Roy, [date]

  Hard work : a life on and off the court / Roy Williams with

  Tim Crothers. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56512-959-7 (HC)

  1. Williams, Roy, [date] 2. Basketball coaches — United

  States — Biography. 3. North Carolina Tar Heels (Basketball

  team) I. Crothers, Tim. II. Title.

  GV884.W58A3 2009

  796.323092 — dc22

  [B]

  2009036970

  ISBN 978-1-61620-107-4 (PB)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Paperback Edition

  TO WANDA, who has helped me with everything,

  including this book, and is the greatest mom in the world

  To Scott and Kimberly, who are my heroes

  And to my mother, my father, and my sister, who

  I wish were here to read these pages

  Contents

  FOREWORD by John Grisham

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Stress

  2 Angels and Demons

  3 Home Games

  4 A Small Fish

  5 Being Like Buddy Baldwin

  6 The Best Dadgum Calendar Salesman There Ever Was

  7 Big-time Ballcoachin’

  8 Decision, Decision

  9 Winning the Whole Blessed Thing

  10 Philosophy

  11 Stealing Brownies

  12 Stress Relief

  13 The 19th Hole

  14 Look Homeward, Angel

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Appendix C

  Index

  Foreword

  BY JOHN GRISHAM

  IT IS SAFE TO ASSUME that Roy Williams’s early years were not filled with great expectations. Look at his ancestors. Few people could (or would) lay claim to the same genealogy that produced the feuding McCoys in Kentucky and the murderous Dalton gang, eventually gunned down somewhere in Kansas. Growing up in the mountains of North Carolina, Roy had an abusive, alcoholic father who abandoned the family, leaving Roy’s mother and her two small children with no support and no place to live. They moved from motels to trailers to rooms offered by relatives. His mother labored in factories and ironed clothes for the wealthy to pay the bills and put food on the table. As kids, Roy and his sister hustled part-time jobs and learned that survival depended on hard work.

  Life was often unpleasant. When he was eight years old he bounced his first basketball, and the game soon became his outlet, his escape. He loved to play alone, to shoot for hours on dirt courts and in local gyms, often when they were closed and he was not supposed to be there. The game consumed him, and his constant practice turned him into a noticeable high school player. He wasn’t tall and he wasn’t fast, but his deadly aim was perfected by hours of hard work.

  It would be easy at this point to say, “And the rest is history.” But not so fast.

  Nothing ever came easy for Roy Williams.

  As an athlete, he was good but far from great. He realized his limitations as a player, and by the time he finished high school Roy had decided to become a college coach. All roads led to the University of North Carolina and Dean Smith. He tried out for the freshman team, primarily as a means of wiggling his way into the program. He juggled part-time jobs to pay for school, slept little, studied hard, got one degree and then another, and managed to land a volunteer position as a statistician for the varsity. From the bleachers, he watched every practice and every game and took endless notes. His hard work did not go unnoticed.

  Dean Smith hired him as an assistant coach, and offered him a salary of $2,700, an amount far less than Roy needed to support his young family. No problem. He hustled dozens of part-time jobs and paid his bills. For 10 seasons he worked under Coach Smith — watching, studying, absorbing every aspect of the game. He learned to teach, to coach, and to win. By the time he left for Kansas in 1988, no coach worked harder than Roy Williams.

  When he returned to Chapel Hill 15 years later, he had few peers. And no coach worked harder than Roy Williams.

  I met him a few years ago. My daughter enrolled at UNC, and I found myself spending a lot of time in Chapel Hill. It’s not unusual to see him jogging the leafy streets around the campus, waving at students and chatting with the neighbors. He loves baseball and is a regular at Tar Heel games in the spring, graciously signing autographs while never missing a pitch. I once bumped into him in a hotel lobby during an ACC basketball tournament, and he was immediately concerned with my ticket situation. I got the impression he had a pocketful and wanted to make sure his friends were covered. I send him a copy of each new book, a small gesture that’s always appreciated. I was in St. Louis with my wife and daughter for the Final Four in 2005 when Roy won his first national title. As the final seconds ticked away and Tar Heel Nation was ready to explode, I shared an enormous sense of pride in the fact that we consider each other friends. There was also a mighty sense of relief in knowing that he would no longer be dogged by the second-place finish.

  Today, his salary is not an issue. With two national titles, he has silenced those who said he couldn’t win the Big One. He has filled the legendary shoes of Dean Smith, and with the same class and grace. The grind of recruiting is somewhat easier since the great players call him. He is still disarmingly warm, affable, genuine, and accessible.

  But success has not changed him. The perfect gentleman with the easy grin still burns the candle at both ends so he can bury you in March.

  Introduction

  THE FACT THAT YOU are reading this book is more surprising to me than to anyone else in the entire world. I never thought I would be writing about myself and what has happened in my life. I have been approached several times about writing a book and I have always said no, but I was finally convinced to do so. I hope I can give you a story that you will enjoy reading and might help you to understand Roy Williams a little better.

  There are some things that I need to say that are easier to express in an introduction than in the book itself. I was very fortunate as a young assistant coach to be mentored not only by Dean Smith but also by Bill Guthridge, Eddie Fogler, and Dick Harp. All of those people played an extraordinary role in my development. To this day, I have never called Coach Smith or Coach Guthridge anything other than “Coach.” That is the way it will always be with me. Dick Harp coached alongside me for only a couple of years, but I learned a great deal from him about Kansas and the tradition, all of which was very important to me. Eddie Fogler taught me so much about coaching and recruiting, and I still follow many of his suggestions today.

  In a book like this, it is impossible to say enough about how lucky I’ve been to work wit
h all of the assistant coaches I have had during my career. I can only tell you that I have the best staff in America, and it’s not even close. A lot of coaches can say that, but none can say it with the conviction that I do. Joe Holladay, Steve Robinson, C.B. McGrath, and Jerod Haase have all been with me for at least 11 years. They make my job so much easier, and they all have tremendous pride in the success that we have had together. I hope they know how important they have been and continue to be. I have also been very fortunate in the past to have had excellent assistant coaches like Jerry Green, Kevin Stallings, Mark Turgeon, Neil Dougherty, Matt Doherty, and Ben Miller. There is no way we could have enjoyed the success we have had over the years if I didn’t say “we”; everyone has contributed to that greatly and they all have meant so much to me personally as well. When you hire an assistant coach, you are putting a part of your life and career in his hands. With all of these people, I realized I was in good hands.

  In the appendices of the book is a listing of all of the players I have ever coached as a head coach. I would have loved to mention all of these players in the course of the book and what each one meant to me. I want every player to know how appreciative I am of the time I had with them.

  To my wife, Wanda, and my children, Scott and Kimberly: during my entire career, I have always hoped that I wasn’t embarrassing you. I hope this book does not embarrass you; it was the hardest thing that I have ever attempted to do, but the most positive aspect of it was when I could describe the three of you and how much you mean to me and the fact that you are my life.

  In the book there is also a section on my “foxhole buddies.” Yes, I know you all think you should be getting even more credit for taking care of me, but I want to keep your heads at a decent size.

  I could never write enough in the following pages to give all of these people the recognition they deserve.

  In this book are parts of my life that I never thought I would share with anyone. That has been extremely hard. So many times it brought an emptiness to my stomach and tears to my eyes. But I hope you will see, as I came to see, that we never need to be pushed by our problems but led by our dreams.

  ROY WILLIAMS

  November 2009

  CHAPTER 1

  Stress

  ONE OCTOBER NIGHT it got so bad that I woke up at 4 a.m. and went for a walk in the neighborhood. It was a little spooky, and I wondered if anybody else was awake and if they were thinking, “Who is that guy walking around at this hour?” So I didn’t walk on the sidewalk. I walked right down the middle of the street, because I didn’t want anybody to think I was a burglar and shoot my rear end.

  I just couldn’t sleep.

  I never sleep very well in the preseason, but I got less sleep during the 2009 preseason than any year I have ever coached. From the start of practice, an average night’s sleep for me was about four hours. So many things were running through my mind. I keep a little notepad and pen on my nightstand and a lot of times I come up with an idea and turn the light on and write it down and then try to go back to sleep. But during the ’09 preseason there was never any going back to sleep. In all my years of coaching I have never felt more pressure.

  It was all because of what I wanted for one kid. I so badly wanted Tyler Hansbrough to reach his dream. This was his last chance to win a national championship. I can never remember wanting something so much for one of my players.

  I think part of it was because Tyler didn’t come back for his senior year at North Carolina to improve his stock for the NBA draft. He came back because he enjoyed college and he wanted to win a national title. A very physical, no-nonsense kid from Poplar Bluff, Missouri, who had been the centerpiece of our team for three seasons, Tyler had received so many individual awards, but he never cared about any of them. All he ever really wanted was the big team prize. It felt like Tyler was carrying all of what is good about college basketball on his shoulders. I know it sounds corny, but I really felt it was only right for him to win a national championship.

  During the preseason, I had tried to tell Tyler not to let a championship be his only goal, because odds were that it was not going to happen. He looked me square in the eye. “Coach,” he said, “I want to win it so bad.”

  I remember it was the very end of August when I first heard that Tyler had a problem with his shin. He told the trainers he thought he got kicked, and they put some ice on it. When our preseason conditioning started in the middle of September, his leg was still bothering him, and it hurt more and more as we got closer to the start of the season. So we did an MRI and a bone scan and the problem was diagnosed as a stress reaction condition. The bone was weakened, leading to the possibility of a stress fracture or worse.

  It’s the kind of injury where nobody really knows what’s going to happen next. Our doctors told me that in two weeks we might see some improvement or we might not. At four weeks we might see some improvement or we might not. I could let him have six weeks off and then he could come back to practice for five minutes and break his leg. Tyler was worried he might miss the whole season. I told our doctors, “You know what they call the guy who finished last in medical school? Doctor. You know what they call the guy who finishes last in coaching? Ex-coach.” Every day I jokingly threatened to fire them, but I wanted them to understand how serious this really was.

  I had no choice but to let Tyler sit out as long as he needed to, which was hard because he was the returning National Player of the Year and a guy that’s going to get 20 points and 10 rebounds every game. That’s a pretty big security blanket for a coach.

  Tyler sat out of practice for two weeks and then we started working him back in a little bit at a time. That was the toughest part. We’d be doing a drill that was 12 minutes long and I planned to let Tyler do half of that, but we’d get nearly through half and I’d think, “Gosh, I wonder if I should take him out?” I always knew that if I let him go one more play, he could possibly hurt himself. Every time he jumped, I worried that he might come down and snap his leg. I was thinking every play could be his last. Every day at practice before I went out on the court, I’d say a little prayer: “Let this team play well. Let me help this team and let no one get hurt, especially Tyler.” In every drill, instead of coaching my team, I was peeking at Tyler with one eye and my watch with the other, wondering if I should pull him out. I finished every practice with a splitting headache. I was so worried I might end the guy’s career.

  On top of all that were the expectations. While Tyler had never seriously considered leaving UNC early for the NBA, three other underclassmen — Ty Lawson, our lightning-quick point guard; Wayne Ellington, our deadly outside shooter; and Danny Green, an excellent all-around player on the wing — had all submitted their names for the NBA draft. In June, when those three guys opted to pull their names out of the draft to improve their stock with another college season, I read a story in the newspaper that said North Carolina could have one of the greatest teams ever. Then, in the summertime when I was recruiting, other coaches would say to me, “The good news is you’re going to have a great team. The bad news is that everybody’s going to expect you to win a national title. And if you don’t win it, everybody will say your season wasn’t a success.” As much as I hated to admit it, I knew what they were saying was true.

  The Associated Press preseason poll came out and we were unanimously voted No. 1. The Sporting News printed a story titled “They Just Can’t Lose” and said that we might be the best college team in 30 years, with a chance to be the first undefeated team since 1976, when Bobby Knight did it with Indiana. What scared me was reading that and knowing my players were hearing about it and, even more, that their families were buying into it. I knew that somewhere in the back of their minds, those guys who had considered leaving early for the pros were going to be thinking about what the NBA player personnel people had told them they should do to improve their draft positions, and they’d have their parents reminding them about it. I don’t care how good a parent you are, if you
’re not careful you can really hurt a child by just focusing on what he needs to accomplish. That will also undermine his team. So I was trying to control what my team heard, but I couldn’t control what their parents told them. I couldn’t control their classmates saying, “We can’t wait until basketball season starts. We’re going to kill everybody!”

  I have never coached any team that had so much pressure put on it. The year before we’d gone 36–3, won our conference regular season and tournament championships, and then lost in the Final Four. Some people thought the season was a failure. Now we were supposed to go undefeated in a time of parity in college basketball when there are so many more high-quality teams that it just doesn’t happen anymore. I knew that every game we played was going to be overanalyzed so that if we won by 25, people were going to say we should have won by 30. It was never going to be enough. That’s an uncomfortable feeling when you can’t be excited about winning.

  Every day I said to the team, “I want you all to realize that our goal to win a national title is realistic, but also understand that the only people you’ve got to please are me and yourselves. That’s it. Don’t be concerned about what anybody else is saying. Those other people have nothing invested in it. You’re the ones who are sweating in the weight room. You’re the ones who are running yourselves half to death at the end of practice.”

  I told them to ignore the expectations and I think they tried to put them out of their minds. I knew I’d be fighting all year to try to keep that weight off my team. I still thought it was something that we could never rest on. We had to attack it every single day. I knew I’d have to keep reminding them to enjoy the ride. But in the back of my mind, I also knew it would always be there. I felt the worst stress of my entire life.

  That night as I walked down the middle of my street at 4 o’clock in the morning, I was thinking, “How can I live with myself if I don’t get Tyler and the rest of these guys back to the Final Four?”