Lucas: Big Problems

By Adam Lucas

ATLANTA—Apologies in advance for not making this about basketball.

Carolina lost to Georgia Tech, 72-67, on Wednesday night. Maybe you want to wallow in that, and if so, there will be plenty of places on the internet to do that. There's no disputing that the Tar Heels have some problems right now.

Those are basketball problems. But perhaps you might appreciate a window into some real world problems. If you're young enough, here's hoping you've never really had to balance a serious problem with your "regular" life. That's the very best kind of ignorance, that phase of your life before you realize that your loved ones aren't immortal.

Roy Williams would be the first one to tell you he is lucky. He works at a place he loves. He has a wife and children and grandchildren he adores. He is compensated beyond what he ever dreamed.

And none of that good fortune protects anyone from real life.

There is a tendency among outsiders to believe that when someone gets paid very well or has a job we all covet, that their only life happens on our television screens or as we see them when we scroll through Twitter. That their bad days are somehow different than our bad days, that the nadirs of their life somehow don't hit quite as hard as ours.

Don't interpret a word of this to mean that Carolina basketball isn't important. If it wasn't important, you wouldn't be reading this and I wouldn't be writing this and Roy Williams wouldn't be saying, late as Wednesday night turned into Thursday morning, "I need to be doing a better job." It is a very big part of all of our lives and it matters. But there is more to life than whether the Tar Heels can stop dribble penetration.

On Wednesday night, it felt like a very big problem that Carolina turned the ball over too many times and struggled defensively against Georgia Tech. You know what's a real problem? Watching someone you love, someone you've repeatedly described as one of your heroes, lose over 70 pounds in the months before he died.

Here's what you haven't seen on television or Twitter: since the world changed in March, Williams made nearly 20 trips to Asheville to be near his ailing father-in-law, Fred Jones, who passed away on Wednesday morning.

Maybe you don't know too much about Wanda Williams' father. The personal life of the head coach really isn't our business, except when it helped shape the man who has personally delivered three national championships—three of the best nights of our lives—in the past 17 years.

Here's what you should know: Fred Jones was an NC State graduate, proving there are a few good Wolfpackers out there. He was attending games in the Smith Center as recently as December 2019 and January 2020, and when he went back to the home of Roy and Wanda Williams after the game, he'd wait up for the head coach, even at then 96 years old, because he knew Roy would bring him a stat sheet and he wanted to peruse the numbers from the game.

It's hard to imagine Roy Williams finding a more perfect father-in-law than a 96-year-old who wants to go over the stat sheets past midnight on a game evening.

But Williams would tell you that basketball was the least important of Fred Jones' impact on the head coach we know today. That influence began the very first evening the Jones family had a Carolina undergraduate student named Roy Williams over for dinner. And on that evening, Williams did something he'd never done before—he sat around a table with a mother and a father and their children, and they ate together.

"Until I started dating Wanda," Williams has said, "I had never had a dinner together."

It became a Saturday night ritual, Williams soaking in every moment of watching Wanda's parents orchestrate the family in a way he had never experienced. Those Saturday nights around the dinner table make the man who as a Carolina assistant coach once flew home from Tokyo just to watch his children open their presents on Christmas morning, then jetted off to Hawaii to meet the Tar Heels 36 hours later.

Those Saturday nights helped Roy Williams establish the foundation of what he wanted his life to be about. "I've always tried to be about family, whether it's with my basketball team or my own family," Williams said on Wednesday night.

Williams learned how to be a father largely by watching a combination of his mother, and his high school coach, and by making sure he did the opposite of what his own father had done. He learned how to be a grandfather by watching Fred Jones.

"He set the standard for being a grandfather," Williams says, recalling with a smile all the times Fred Jones—better known by that point as Granddaddy—was there for Scott and Kimberly Williams. He was there when they were born and he never missed a birthday and he'd let them sit on the tractor at the farm.

And as you'll hopefully find out one day if you don't already know, there is absolutely no way anyone can endear themselves more to you than by being nice to your kids.

So imagine what it was like to stand on that sideline less than 12 hours after getting word Jones had passed away. Williams is fanatical about traveling with his team. He does not miss team flights; he doesn't even miss team snacks. He sent the team ahead without him on Tuesday. They went to Atlanta while he went to Asheville for yet another trip, just to spend a couple hours with Wanda and her family, and then hustled to Atlanta to be there for his team at their late night snack.

Usually, Wanda would be with him on the road, occupying that familiar front right-hand side row of the team bus. She's been in Chapel Hill less than a month total since March. Most of her time has been spent as a caretaker, one of the most difficult jobs in the world, a job that is with you constantly. Even when you're not in the presence of the one you're taking care of, you're wondering how they're doing, or whether it's really OK for you to be having fun for that one instant, or whether you should be doing something to help them instead of focusing on yourself. It is constant and it is completely emotionally draining. That's the life their family has lived for nine months.

Ninety-seven years is a long life. And you can say you're ready for it, say you're prepared, but the moment it happens still leaves you empty. Most of us don't suffer that loss and then appear on national television a few hours later. Wednesday was another reminder that these people we scream at on the television are real life people. We think we know them but--just like anyone else we encounter--we have no real idea what's happening in their lives, what challenges they might be facing, how many tears they've shed on that particular day.

So maybe you didn't know Fred Jones, who had a 21-acre farm in Asheville on which he raised honeybees. All you need to know about his legacy is this:

Roy Williams went back to Asheville late on Wednesday night, arriving after 1 a.m. He planned to watch the full game tape from the loss to the Jackets before going to bed. Even on the way to Asheville, he was still talking through a few of the key sequences, wondering what he could have done differently to find his Tar Heels six more points.

His team will have an NCAA-mandated day off on Thursday. They will practice Friday.

And then Williams will do something that would probably delight Fred Jones: he'll travel to Charlotte. It's his grandson Aiden's birthday.

And Aiden's grandfather knows he needs to be there.

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