University of North Carolina Athletics
CAROLINA: Coach 'Pop'
December 24, 2013 | Men's Basketball
NOTE: This article originally appeared in the Dec. 17 issue of CAROLINA.
by Robbi Pickeral
Scott Williams could only laugh and shake his head last February when he walked downstairs early one morning to find an unexpected visitor asleep on his couch.
"It was the morning after the Clemson game, and there was my dad—like one of my bum friends who needed to crash," said Williams, the son of North Carolina coach Roy Williams and a former Tar Heel reserve. "He had driven from Clemson back to Charlotte so he could be there before the boys woke up in the morning, so he could say hello to the grandkids before he drove back to Chapel Hill to start the workday.
"I guess I shouldn't have been surprised—that's Pops."
Or 'Pop,' as he is known to his grandsons Aiden (who turns 4 on New Year's Day) and Court (who turned 2 in August). When the Hall of Fame basketball coach isn't burning up the recruiting trail, prodding his 19th-ranked Tar Heels to play better defense, or pondering how to put the right pieces together for a third national title; he can often be found at the beach pushing a jogging stroller, in the backyard with a set of mini golf clubs, or on the road taking impromptu trips to the Queen City to spend a couple more hours with the boys.
In a career in which Williams still takes every loss to heart, sleeps less than a handful of hours every night, and is as driven as ever to make an impact on his players every day, Aiden and Court have become his stress relievers-high-energy soul-soothers who allow their grandpa to put everything into perspective. "To the grandchildren, they don't care if we win or lose; they don't care if I'm a basketball coach or an insurance salesman," Roy Williams said. "To them, I'm just 'Pop.' And it's a pretty nice deal."
The Right Time
It's a deal that came along at just the right time for Williams, now 63.
Aiden was born on January 1, 2010—just three days before UNC infamously lost in overtime at the College of Charleston. That meltdown jump-started a jaw-dropping downward spiral for the Tar Heels, who finished with 17 losses and a trip to the NIT just one year after winning Williams' second NCAA championship.
Williams often has called 2009-10 the worst season he ever has coached. One thing that helped him persevere: becoming a 'Pop.'
"I don't think I'm important enough that some higher power sent Aiden here to make sure Ol' Roy would be OK," Williams wrote in the autobiography, Hard Work, which was co-authored by Tim Crothers. "I think his arrival was a coincidence. But it was a wonderful coincidence. I could have made it through the season without him, but it would have been much harder. He was something else to live for. Something there to make sure I got my exercise, to make sure I took my heart medicine."
And to make sure he occasionally got some sleep. Williams likes to tell the story of what happened that January, after UNC lost by 19 points at Clemson. Unable to fly home because of ice, he sent the team back to Chapel Hill by bus while he made a pit stop at Scott and Katie's house in Charlotte. There, the less-than-two-week-old baby fell asleep on his chest, and they napped together.
"It made me really appreciate the warmth that you have when you have a grandchild on your chest, falling asleep," Williams said earlier this season. "And it made me realize how good that felt mentally and physically, just to cuddle. It was the neatest feeling I ever had."
It was a scene the Williams family would see replayed often over the years—with Aiden, then Court. And it never gets old.
"In coaching, the highs are never as high as the lows are low," Scott Williams said. "But now, with the [birth of the] boys, I almost feel like there's a floor on how low the lows can be, because he has that release, he has that escape.
"Last year, I'd ask Aiden, 'Who is the coach of the Tar Heels?' and he said 'Coach Rob [referring to assistant coach Steve Robinson]' ... He knew his Pop coached, but to him 'Pop' was 'Pop'—he was Pop, first. And I think that's why [my father] finds that release with them. Because they're not old enough to see him as other people see him.'
A Natural at Grandfathering
They do recognize Williams, though. Whether it's watching a UNC game on TV, or sitting in the Smith Center stands, or seeing one of the plastic stadium cups that Scott's family often uses turned just-so, Aiden and Court like to point and yell 'Pop!'
Which, of course, tickles the granddad/coach.
"At the Reece Holbook Charity Auction, I bought the opportunity to sit in the dugout and watch a baseball game [at South Carolina] that close," Roy Williams said. "And I love baseball. So I'm sitting in the dugout and I turn around ... and I stuck my head out to wave and Scott and Katie [Scott's wife] and Wanda and the kids ... and for about the the next three innings, about every five minutes, I hear someone yell 'Pop!' So I had to turn around and say 'Shhhh.' Those kids are something."
Then again, so is their Pop.
Scott Williams said he's been a little surprised about how his dad has taken to grandfathering. Don't get him wrong—Williams has been a great father, Scott said, making sure he always spent time with Scott and his sister growing up, no matter how much he traveled during the grueling college basketball schedule. (Back in his assistant coaching days, he once flew home from Tokyo with his wife Wanda on Christmas Eve to spend the holiday with the kids, only to turn around a day and a half later to meet the team back in Hawaii.) Thus, Scott had a feeling his dad would be a great granddad.
But his parents' visits and their hands-on help has been more frequent than Scott ever dreamed. And the family loves it.
At the beach, Pop likes to be woken up by the grandkids, and loves to take them out to watch the sunrise. Last spring, when Scott and Katie took a trip out of town and Wanda (who the boys call "Bubba") went to Charlotte to watch the kids, Pop made the five-hour round-trip trek three out of four days just to spend an hour helping to tuck the boys in.
Phone calls are frequent. The number of Christmas gifts last year, Scott said, was so "obscene" that new ground rules had to be set. And even during the season, Roy Williams said, the goal is not to go more than two weeks without seeing Aiden and Court.
"Wanda gets credit for raising our two kids; she did a fantastic job, and I don't feel like I did a poor job helping," he said. " ... I don't feel like I would change a lot of things with them, but I would change a little bit. So with the grandsons, I don't want to feel like I would ever change anything."
For his part, Williams said he doesn't think becoming a 'Pop' has changed him as a coach; Scott Williams said his dad continues to work as hard as he ever has, to push as hard as he ever has, to react to wins and losses as strongly as he ever has.
With the boys, though, the man with more than 700 victories does show his soft side.
One of his favorite things to do, when the kids come to town, is ask the managers to lower one of the goals in the Smith Center to ankle-biter height. It's a tickling sight, those around him say, watching him rebound for the boys as they play.
And although he hasn't started coaching them on how to box out (or run the secondary break) yet, it's only a matter of time.
"Up until '97, my dream was to win the national championship,'' Roy Williams said. "And after '97, when I thought we had the perfect year [at Kansas] except for winning a national championship ... I started saying at that time I hoped I would live long enough to coach my grandchildren in little league baseball and little league basketball."
He doesn't plan to leave Carolina any time soon, he said. But to a Pop who loves to play and snuggle and make surprise trips to Charlotte just to watch the boys wake up, "coaching the grandkids still seems like a pretty good goal."
