University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Two Hues Of Blue Color Williams
September 7, 2007 | Men's Basketball
Sept. 7, 2007
By Adam Lucas
SPRINGFIELD, Mass.--Some old friends went out to lunch Friday afternoon. There were so many of them that they had to push four tables together, and still there were stragglers seated up and down the left-hand side of J.T.'s Sports Pub in Springfield, Massachusetts.
They laughed, they told stories, and they flipped a coin to see who had to pick up the tab for the entire group.
Oh yes, and one of them will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame tonight at 7:30.
Roy Williams spent the last hours before his induction exactly as he probably would have liked--with his wife, daughter, son, and an enormous group of friends. At the Sheraton Hotel, where the tickets requested by the friends of each Hall of Famer are distributed, there are roughly eight or 10 envelopes--each containing a pair of tickets--for the other inductees. The package of tickets for the Williams crew, nearly 100 strong, lands with an enormous thud on the table. "Whew," says Fran Judkins, the Hall's director of development. "These are all of them."
Part of Williams's morning was spent fulfilling HOF obligations, including a press conference and a trip to speak to Springfield middle schoolers. While he was doing that, the Sheraton lobby began to resemble the pregame warmups for a Carolina vs. Kansas alumni game.
There were Marvin Williams and Sean May over there. Here are Ryan Robertson and Nick Collison over here. Look, Raymond Felton and Wes Miller. Oh, there's Kirk Hinrich and T.J. Pugh.
When Williams arrived back at Carolina in 2003, he talked a lot about Kansas. According to some people who preferred the lighter shade of blue, maybe a little too much. That first year, some of his press conferences contained more references to Hinrich and Collison than to Felton and May. It occasionally pinged a nerve: OK, we get it, Hinrich and Collison were great. Now how about our guys?
Listening to him this weekend, though, brought a revelation: it doesn't seem strange to hear him talk about Kansas anymore. For most of this week, including Wednesday's press conference when he met the media with Dean Smith, it seemed like this should be a Carolina-only event. We bred him, we've got him now, and he's ours.
But now it seems like the flag that hangs from the façade of the Hall of Fame is exactly right. Every Hall of Famer gets one, and each one features a team logo representing one inductee. Phil Jackson's includes the Bulls and the Lakers. And Williams's includes Carolina and Kansas.
He's quick to say that if the basketball Hall required inductees to wear a hat on their plaque, similar to the baseball Hall of Fame format, he'd have commissioned a specially made "TarHawk" hat. That seems right. After all, nearly 20 years later he still flawlessly remembers the entire starting five of his first team: Scooter Barry, Kevin Pritchard, Milt Newton, Sean Alvarado, and Mark Randall. He then went on to name four reserves, describe the first game of the season, and probably could have given the play-by-play of their first basket if time hadn't been limited.
When he walks through the airport and someone yells, "Rock chalk Jayhawk" at him, he still responds, "Go K-U." He's in touch enough with the Kansas community to know that some in Lawrence are still bitter about his departure.
"They say time heals all wounds," he says. "I hope they see the kind of attention I've tried to give Kansas during this process. I'm proud to have been the head coach at Kansas for a long time and proud of our former players and what we accomplished...I never cheated Kansas for one second of one day."
It's those former players who are most telling. Nearly 20 of them are here from Kansas this weekend, including Wayne Simien, who was on the team Williams left for Carolina in 2003. Some of them even brought their parents--the fathers of Hinrich and Collison will be in attendance, because they felt Williams had been so important to their families.
We see things from the Carolina perspective. And for the first time, it feels appropriate to have the circle be a little wider, to look out in the audience and see Paul Pierce and Jacque Vaughn seated just in front of Williams, May, and Felton, who are one row in front of Simien and Raef LaFrentz.
Knowing him now, and seeing the bond he still has with his Kansas players, it's all the more remarkable that he returned to Carolina in 2003. Do you know how easy it would have been for him to stay in Lawrence? He could have had statues built and facilities named. The same year he returned to Chapel Hill, he turned down UCLA for a second time, and in the process said to his wife, Wanda, "I don't know why I'm even thinking about it."
To those of us in Chapel Hill, it seemed obvious he'd come back. Of course he would. We knew him.
But Kansas knew him too. And his Hall of Fame induction has emphasized what he built there and how much it meant to him. It brought up this thought, and it's something to remember every time he mentions Kansas--if it hadn't meant that much to him, he wouldn't be Roy Williams and Carolina might not have pursued him so ardently. That passion is part of what makes him a Hall of Famer.
In just a few hours, he'll make a speech that cements those credentials. He's trimmed it to five minutes and 29 seconds, just a half-minute over the five minutes requested by the Hall. Friday afternoon, he didn't seem particularly nervous about the impending live television appearance.
The battle to see who paid for lunch eventually came down to assistant coach Joe Holladay and Cody Plott, a longtime friend of Williams. Holladay "won," thereby earning the right to pick up the tab for nearly 30 people. When the final coin landed, Mickey Bell waved at a waitress. "Ma'am?" he said, just loud enough for all the tables to hear. "Do you have prime rib?"
Williams roared with laughter. Surrounded by friends and family, he looked very much like a man at home.
Adam Lucas most recently collaborated on a behind-the-scenes look at Carolina Basketball with Wes Miller. The Road To Blue Heaven will be released on September 1. Lucas's other books on Carolina basketball include The Best Game Ever, which chronicles the 1957 national championship season, Going Home Again, which focuses on Roy Williams's return to Carolina, and Led By Their Dreams, a collaboration with Steve Kirschner and Matt Bowers on the 2005 championship team.
