University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Go Where He Goes
February 15, 2015 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
By Adam Lucas
PITTSBURGH—During the basketball season, Roy Williams doesn't play golf.
During the basketball season, Roy Williams doesn't go to the beach.
During the basketball season, Roy Williams doesn't do much of anything other than see his immediate family, go recruiting, and coach the Tar Heels.
This is not relayed to you to make you feel sorry for him. He is, of course, very well compensated (although there's an argument to be made that the compensation is low compared to his lesser-accomplished peers, but that's another story) for that job, and he chose this career. This is what he does. This is what he lives.
But you need to understand that for the previous 26 seasons of his head coaching career, Williams has attacked the season with a singular mindset that enables him to focus on nothing but basketball. He doesn't watch movies. He doesn't see anything on TV that isn't basketball. For those six months of the year, he doesn't really have a life. There's what happens with Carolina basketball, and then there's everything else, and he has a staff and a family that is very good at keeping those two areas separate.
And then there's this season. Most recently, there is Saturday's 89-76 loss to Pittsburgh, as the Panthers shot the ball better than pretty much any game since they cut the bottoms out of the peach baskets.
Carolina's defense was not good enough in the loss. Carolina's effort was not good enough in the loss, starting with giving up a layup on the game's opening play. But if you want to see what really happened on Saturday, look at this picture from J.D. Lyon, Jr., which was taken in the minutes before the game:
You can argue for any of those conclusions. But you can't argue about this:
That's an exhausted human being.
If you've dealt with the death of a loved one, you know that sometimes early in the process you can fool yourself. There are details to take care of and arrangements to make and friends who call. But at some point, the rest of the world goes back to their normal and you're left to realize it's real, and your life has changed, and you're emotionally and physically drained. There comes that one day when you wake up and without warning realize that you're just…so…tired.
Even with a week off, there was no way to escape the realities of this season. You know all of those former players you read about this week who were so affected by Smith's death? Williams feels responsible for all of them, because that's how Smith would have done it, and Williams is committed to running his program as close to Smith's as possible.
All those calls to the basketball office, all those arrangements (approximately 200 of Smith's former players were in town for Thursday's private burial service), all of those emails and texts, all of those were in some way Williams' responsibility. Not just to manage them, but to care for them, because that's how Smith would have done it.
Williams went recruiting in the middle of this week, and former Tar Heel player and close friend Mickey Bell met him at the airport just to give him a hug and cry a little. That needed to happen, and Bell is the kind of friend we all wish we had when facing stress. But that's just not normal life during a basketball season for Roy Williams. Nothing stops recruiting, not even for a second. Except for this.
Assistants have always said his first season back in Chapel Hill was the finest coaching job Williams has ever done, as he began to mold an entirely new group of players and a program into what he thought they should be. Tactically, that may still be the case after this year.
Personally, however, it's impossible to imagine a tougher year in coaching than this one. His best friend, Ted Seagroves, died after a long battle with cancer. Stuart Scott, a beloved member of the Carolina basketball family, died after a long battle with cancer. Every time the coach goes out recruiting—an aspect of his job with which he is relentless—he is reminded of off-court troubles that have plagued the University. And this week, his longtime mentor and the spiritual father of the entire program he loves and has devoted his life to, died after a long illness.
Any one of those would be a challenge. All of them together, within a span of three months, is grueling. This does not mean you should feel sorry for Williams, because he would dislike your pity more than he dislikes floor stickers. But it does mean that as much money as he makes, and as much as we see him on TV, and as much as we think we know him, he's still just a person.
“It was a tough week,” Williams said after the game, and after a group of Pitt students had presented him with a card expressing their condolences on Smith's death. “But that had nothing to do with the game.”
Well, maybe not. But the game didn't have much to do with real life, either.
“It's been a tough week,” said Marcus Paige. “If our coach is that emotionally affected, then of course we are. Our whole campus is.”
Duke, of course, energizes everything. The Blue Devils are the next opponent, and that fact alone means campus and the basketball office will find a little bit of normalcy in the chaos of a typical UNC-Duke week.
During the laborious 2009-10 season, which now seems like a relative delight with only silly things like losses and temporary injuries to worry about, the Tar Heels lost to Clemson at Littlejohn Coliseum. Then, as Williams is fond of retelling, he drove to Charlotte to see his new grandson, Aiden. The youngster fell asleep on Williams' chest, and the coach remembers thinking, “This is as good as it gets.”
Woody Durham famously told all of us to “go where you go” when Carolina needed a big play. We all have that place where things feel right, where emotion triumphs over logic and we believe, for some reason and against any rational explanation, things will get better.
Roy Williams won't play golf over the next couple of days. He won't go to the beach. But here's hoping he gets at least a small opportunity to go where he goes, and that his grandkids are there to greet him with a giant hug when it happens.
