On the night in 2002 that Maryland won the national championship, I was standing on the Georgia Dome floor with Gary Williams’s daughter, Kristin. As she watched her father cut down the last strand of net, she said, “Maybe now he can relax a little.”
I laughed and said something like, “Have you met your father?”
Maryland basketball coach Gary Williams announced his retirement Thursday, saying "it's the right time" for him to end a career in which he led his alma mater to the 2002 national championship. (May 5)
Relaxing was never something Gary Williams was any good at during his remarkable career as a basketball coach. On that same night, when I congratulated him on reaching the top of the mountain he had spent his entire adult life trying to scale, he shook his head almost as if he was bewildered. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do with myself tomorrow.”
Now that he has decided to retire after 22 years at Maryland, who knows what Gary will do with himself.
“I didn’t want to be one of those coaches who is still hanging around at 70 and can’t stand up to get off the bench during a game,” he said in a phone conversation Thursday. “I’m 66. There are a lot of things I want to do.”
I know he believes that right now. I know he was worn out by a lot of things: 15 years of battling an athletic director who couldn’t stand Williams being the face of Maryland sports; the skepticism of his own fans even after he revived a beleaguered program and delivered its only national championship; the complete cesspool high school recruiting has become; and, finally, his most talented player’s misguided decision to turn pro rather than return for his junior season.
Gary would never put it on any kid, but I suspect Jordan Williams’s departure was the last straw.
“I told Joe Smith to go; I told Chris Wilcox to go; I told Steve Francis to go,” he said a couple of weeks ago. “They were lock lottery picks. Jordan’s not. It’s better for him to come back. Sure, we’re better with him than without him, but I’ve been at this long enough that I think I can look a player in the eye and tell them the truth.”
The flaw in that reasoning? Today’s players often don’t want to hear the truth. So they listen to those who tell them what they want to hear.
Gary had already come very close to quitting a year ago, largely because of his ongoing frustrations with former athletic director Debbie Yow.
He decided to come back for at least one more season and seemed energized when Yow left and was replaced by Kevin Anderson.
“I definitely liked working with Kevin Anderson this year,” he said Thursday afternoon. “He’s a straight shooter, and I think with him in charge, this is a very good job for whoever takes my place. But I just got to the point where I thought 43 years was enough.”
He laughed for a second. “I mean, who does anything for 43 years?”
People who are very good at what they do and love doing it. Williams was both. Forget the numbers and the championships; no one ever put more heart and soul into coaching basketball.
Sure, he hated recruiting as he got older, but it was never his style to recruit 10 McDonald’s all-Americans anyway. Those weren’t his type of players.
He won with the guys no one else wanted — in part because he reminded them no one else wanted them and Maryland was their chance to show others they had made a mistake.
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