University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: One Year Later
November 5, 2013 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
Exactly one year ago, Roy Williams sat in his Smith Center office and said, "There are always those things that you say, 'I'd love to be able to do that.' Well, I'm not just going to say I want to do those things. I'm going to do them."
A visitor to his office raised an eyebrow. Was this really Roy Williams planning to slow down just a little? Was he even capable of doing that?
"Oh, I'm still going to coach my butt off," he said quickly. "But when I'm not coaching, I'm going to do the things my family and I want to do, and particularly the things my kids and grandkids want to do."
That's the perspective of a man who had just heard a doctor tell him he might have kidney cancer. That particular man heard the news from the doctor, then thought it was perfectly normal to visit the home of a recruit one hour later. So how reasonable was it, really, to want to slow down?
Let's be honest: this is not a story about Roy Williams suddenly deciding he wants to add a hobby or learn a new language. This is still a coach, one year after finding out his tumor was noncancerous, who took 14 different flights in one nine-day period in mid-September, visiting 10 different states plus the District of Columbia and traveling through three time zones in that stretch.
He is, as he said, still going to coach his butt off.
But then there's this: this spring, his son, Scott, and daughter-in-law Katie went out of town for four days. Those of you who are grandparents already know what this means: uninterrupted time with the grandkids. The head coach's wife, Wanda, was the primary caretaker during those four days, and got to spend the most time with them.
But on three of the four days, they had a visitor: there was Roy Williams, having made the two and a half hour drive from Chapel Hill to Charlotte, just to see Aiden and Court for an hour or two before they went to bed. Then he drove the two and a half hours home...and did it again the next day. And the next day.
As Scott said, "That's not exactly a good example of slowing down."
OK, maybe not. But if you listened closely to what Williams said one year ago after he'd been through his health scare, he didn't say he was going to slow down. He just said he was going to do what he wants to do. And what he wants to do, almost all the time, is hang out with his grandkids.
Post-summer conversations with the coach used to include detailed descriptions of golf holes. He still does plenty of that, and he still travels with a list of the best golf courses in the country, with the list carefully marked to reflect those he has played and those he wants to play.
But the first post-summer story he relayed this year was about playing tee ball with Aiden and Court in the front yard. "He got smacked in the mouth," he says of Court, "and looked like he might cry. And I said, 'You're OK!' and he brushed his hands off and kept going."
Doesn't that just sound like a story Roy Williams would love about his grandkids?
But pay attention to that list of states he visited. One of them was the District of Columbia, for a very good reason. At the 2013 Final Four, the Coaches vs. Cancer organization asked Williams to go to Washington as part of their effort to raise awareness for cancer research fundraising.
"They've asked before if I'd be interested, and I said, 'Yeah,' but it just didn't work out," he says. "And so at the Final Four last year, they brought it up and said what day it was going to be, and it hit me."
The date was exactly one year from the day that Williams had heard his possible diagnosis for the first time, then trucked on to a recruit's home.
This year, on September 10, Williams was in Washington, D.C., where he spoke to 600 volunteers plus an assortment of members of Congress about the importance of securing funds for cancer research.
It was something he'd never done before, but it was also, as he said, something he wanted to do.
And he even found time for a recruiting visit on that same trip.
Adam Lucas is a GoHeels columnist and the editor of CAROLINA.
