CHAPEL HILL — Roy Williams loves basketball.
He’s a teacher, learned the most from one of the game’s greatest innovators, and can aw-shucks talk the best of them when it comes to recruiting. Basketball has been his life.
The game has changed every step of the way. It always has, always will. And Thursday, the Carolina coach let us know he’d had enough. He’s 70, has a wife of 48 years come July 28, grandchildren to spend time with, and better things to do with his remaining years.
Good for Ol’ Roy.
Can’t blame him one bit. Who among us shouldn’t have such happiness to look forward to at any age?
The game has changed.
Williams’ days of selling calendars out of the back of his car are about as far away as those handful of years coaching Owen High School in Black Mountain. He did those tasks every bit as dutifully as he coached a collegiate basketball blueblood through university scandal — “the junk” he called it — in the 2010s and a worldwide pandemic to begin the 2020s.
In between, he won three national championships. His Tar Heel and Kansas teams won 903 games, but the players from those teams spent April Fool’s through Easter weekend lauding how much more of a man he made them than what he did for them as basketball players, which was quite a lot too.
That part of the game never did change for Roy Williams.
Dean Smith managed the Tar Heels out of a scandal and back into national prominence in the 1960s. He did it “the Carolina way,” treating people with respect both inside his program and on the other bench. His strength in relationships was his mind, and two-way loyalty was never a question.
Roy Williams soaked in every teachable moment. He earned one of his stripes guiding the junior varsity team Carolina kept when other major colleges vanquished them with the 1970s rule change allowing freshmen to play. He was ready when Smith’s alma mater called for its next head coach in 1988, taking them from NCAA probation back to three title games.
He learned in a blueblood, restored one in the Midwest, and came home to fix the 8-20 mess left behind by Matt Doherty.
Ol’ Roy is a lot of things. Brutally honest just zooms to the top of the list. The 2003 national championship postgame interview with Bonnie Bernstein after Kansas lost to Syracuse remains legend. Thursday, in much cleaner language, he reinforced just how much he does care for Carolina saying, repeatedly, he was no longer the man for the job.
The game has changed.
Recruiting isn’t just a time period during the year for putting the blocks of a rolling four-year foundation in place. The transfer portal’s ruination on the game means coaches have to, indirectly more than directly, continue to recruit kids already wearing the school jersey even as the season is unfolding. Coaches have no idea how many will use scholarships the next season.
Parents and travel-ball coaches, some one in the same, bring another element on a level that didn’t exist when calendars were sold out of cars by 20-something aspiring coaches from Carolina Basketball Camp.
The mighty dollar changed a lot in Roy Williams’ 48 years of coaching, and he got a lot of them, too. Those dollars built incredulous brands, sparkling arenas, and dreams for every kid on a playground wanting in on a piece of the pie. Among many players and their parents, it is preferred handed them as they wish and not necessarily as they earn.
The game has changed.
Ol’ Roy kept changing with basketball. He fixed the problems behind Larry Brown at Kansas. He absorbed the blows from Carolina football and university administration in Chapel Hill, then rose above it all to hang another banner. That a former football player’s son would have such an impact is script-writing beyond Hollywood.
Never mind that Ol’ Roy kept fixing problems caused by Carolina grads.
Anything more he could accomplish on Roy Williams Court at the Dean E. Smith Center would certainly be welcomed. But as they say in this game once the outcome is decided, it’s merely stat stuffing in the box score at this point.
Carolina needed Roy Williams more than he needed the Tar Heels in 2000, and in 2003. In 2021, that game has changed too, according to the coach.
Carolina is one of the greatest college basketball jobs.
Roy Williams has got better things to do.
Leave a Reply