Ol' Roy Has Earned The Right to Relax

SAN ANTONIO Ol' Roy was pretty relaxed on Friday afternoon. He didn't snap at anyone who asked him about playing Kansas or about playing NCAA tournament games a bus ride away from Chapel Hill. He even joked about being thin-skinned.

"Okay, if I walk out there and 37 people throw tomatoes at me, that will hurt," he said. "I'm not going to tell you it's fun seeing a sign on a men's room that says 'Roy's room' on it or walking into a commode and seeing my picture. But I still have a lot of close friends from Kansas, and that will never change."

In so many ways, North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams, who likes to refer to himself as Ol' Roy, has modeled himself after his former boss and mentor, Dean Smith. He tries like heck not to curse, even though in 2003 an objectionable word came tumbling out on national TV minutes after Kansas had lost the national championship game to Syracuse. He runs the same offense and the same changing defenses as Coach Smith, which is what he always has called him and what he always will. He stands and claps for the other team's starters just as his old boss did, and all the Carolina reserves stand every time a player leaves a game just the way they did when Ol' Roy was Coach Smith's No. 3 assistant and sold Carolina basketball ads in Chapel Hill publications to augment his income.

But there's one way in which he is completely different than Dean Smith. No one was more predictable when talking to the media than Smith. He was notoriously careful about saying the right things and about trying to steer the spotlight away from himself. Williams is a loose cannon. He might snap at a question one day; make a joke about himself the next day or break down in tears a day after that talking about his seniors.

"I am corny," he readily admits.

That might be why there's been a lot more attention focused throughout his career on his crying jags than on his extraordinary coaching record. In 15 seasons at Kansas, he was 418-101 with four trips to the Final Four. He enters Saturday night's national semifinal against the Jayhawks with a five-year record at North Carolina of 142-32 that includes a national title and, now, two Final Fours. Add those numbers up and you come up with 560-133, six Final Fours and a national championship. To add a little perspective, his average record in 20 years is 28-7, if you round the losses up.

That's why he's already in the Hall of Fame at the age of 57. It is why those who know him bristle at the notion he's a very good, rather than great, coach. It is at least part of the reason why he can't seem to escape all the talk about his departure from Kansas.

"I think time helps it," he said Friday. "I was really happy last night when four of the Kansas players wanted to have their pictures taken with me."

He went on to name the four players, his relationship with each and how much he liked them all. He talked about three close friends from Kansas whom he had told not to come Saturday: "I said if we win you can come Monday and root for us. If Kansas wins you can come Monday and root for them."

Part of the problem for Ol' Roy is trying to live up to the iconic status of Smith, even though Smith insists Williams's teams at Kansas and Carolina ran his offense better than his teams did. To most who live there, about the only flaw Smith ever had was his nasty habit of leaning to the left politically. (The great irony is that many, if not most, Carolina fans fall into the same right wing political category as Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski.) Williams doesn't ever want to hurt people's feelings and, as he said Friday, he is thin-skinned.

He was crushed when he was turned into an outcast in his home state in 2000, when he told Coach Smith he didn't want to leave Kansas to succeed Bill Guthridge as the coach at his alma mater. People had been expecting Roy to ride in on his white horse and resurrect the program (which went to just two Final Fours in three years under Guthridge) from the moment Smith retired in 1997.

Three years later, after Matt Doherty had failed, Coach Smith called Ol' Roy again. Having spent three years in purgatory for having said no once, he couldn't do it again. It was a perfectly reasonable decision to make both professionally and personally. But instead of telling everyone how much he had loved coaching at Kansas for 15 years and just moving on, Ol' Roy kept coming back, literally and figuratively. It was as if he felt a daily need to go to church and confess: "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned against all the people who live in the great state of Kansas."