Charlotte, N.C. — When Roy Williams does his 5-mile walk around North Carolina’s campus every day, the mobs of well-wishers make it take twice as long. His weekly radio show on campus is packed with fans.
During the Tar Heels’ walk-through last week before the Sweet 16, their coach spent as much time glad-handing awestruck fans as he did instructing his players.
If Dean Smith is still a god in North Carolina, in the five years Williams has been back in Chapel Hill he has at least achieved sainthood. And don’t look now, but he is starting to move up in class. He’s taking the top-ranked Tar Heels (36-2) to Saturday’s Final Four in San Antonio three years after winning his first national title.
But when he walks on the floor in the Alamodome, part of Williams may feel merely blue. As in royal blue. Kansas blue.
On the opposing bench, for the first time since he returned to North Carolina as head coach, will be the Kansas Jayhawks (35-3), the team he left in 2003 after 15 years there to return to his alma mater.
It has been five years and Williams still looks back at that decision like a man kicking his wife to the curb. “I felt like I was dirty,” he said Friday.
No one in Kansas has forgotten. The day after his announcement, the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World ran a now-famous headline, over a picture of Williams walking away, reading, “Roy’s a Heel Now.”
To this day, North Carolina scores are booed by crowds inside Kansas’ Allen Fieldhouse. The fact that Kansas coach Bill Self, Williams’ successor, hadn’t reached the Final Four until now hadn’t helped matters.
With the fourth-ranked Jayhawks bearing down at him in the premier game of the Final Four, those memories will return. If he tries to forget, the media will remind him. And the memories aren’t good.
“Roy Williams has felt pretty doggone good about Roy Williams most of my life, but when I stood up in front of those kids at Kansas and told them that I was leaving and that the feeling that I had when I walked out of that room, that’s a feeling I hope I never have again,” Williams said. “If I had known that I was going to feel that way and knowing how smoothly things have gone, I wouldn’t have left.”
Everyone knew he was going to leave Kansas.
He had turned down North Carolina in 2000 after Bill Guthridge retired, but in 2003 his alma mater had bottomed out under Matt Doherty, going 6-10 in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
At Kansas, Williams’ 30-8 record and loss to Syracuse in the national title game was tarnished by a strained relationship with Al Bohl, the athletic director hired away from Fresno State in 2001 to fix Kansas’ struggling football program.
Bohl replaced Bob Frederick, Williams’ good friend, and within months had fired football coach Terry Allen with three games left.
A few months earlier, Williams had attended an ethics seminar and endorsed a proposal urging schools not to fire coaches during their season.
After that, Bohl and Williams never clicked. Bohl was booed at the 2003 Final Four and was fired shortly thereafter, leaving him to think Williams was behind it. Maybe Kansas pulled the trigger to prevent him from leaving, but Williams wasn’t happy at Kansas.
“We were not as cohesive as the athletic department needs to be,” Williams said at the time. “This made the atmosphere somewhat difficult.”
Looking back Friday, Williams merely said “things felt different,” but one wonders what — or who — could have kept him at Kansas. He’s still as Carolina as a dogwood tree at Pinehurst. He still has that twang from Biltmore, the little town he grew up in outside of Asheville. He talks in golf analogies, and his father and sister had health issues.
He couldn’t give Kansas a national title in four trips to the Final Four. At North Carolina he has access to players up and down the Eastern seaboard. His salary jumped from about $600,000 to $2 million. Not that money ever mattered. His home state did.
“I even told my wife … I said, ‘Heck, North Carolina is the only place I would leave this place for,’ ” said Williams, who was a Tar Heels assistant coach when Kansas hired him. “I’ve said no to the Lakers three times, no to the Celtics, no to Miami, 11 or 12 different NBA teams. So it wasn’t a big reason for coming back, but it was in some ways really a huge positive for me because I had a chance to spend some time with my dad.”
Williams said he saw his dad 15 times in the first 13 months he was home after not seeing him 15 times in the previous 15 years. His dad died in 2004. His sister died a year ago.
Yes, Roy Williams is a Tar Heel. But former coach Smith never had a record as good as 36-2. He never had a player like Tyler Hansbrough, who set a new standard for work ethic.
Nah…Smith just had a little known player called Michael Jordan