An excerpt from Hard Work

Roy Williams won his second national title with North Carolina last season. John W. McDonough/SI

A coach can sometimes manipulate what his players think. I think we all try to convince our teams of something that isn't exactly right when we need to. But that night I believed everything I said and I wanted to help frame their opinion. Walking out of the arena that night, I said a little prayer to myself, "Lord, please let these kids realize that their dreams and goals are realistic. Amen."

On the bus ride home I watched the game tape. It reinforced for me that we had played very poorly and made a lot of silly mistakes. It gave me hope because I thought our mistakes were easy to correct. I was ticked off, as I always am, about losing, ticked off that we didn't show Wake Forest that we could stand up to them at their best. But I also felt pretty doggone good because I really didn't feel that anybody else would make us play as badly as Wake did that night.

Before practice the next day, I asked myself, "As a player, what would I be thinking?" I can sense when my team is expecting to get hammered by me and sometimes I will fulfill their expectations, but I think that resorting to screaming and yelling at them shows a lack of confidence, not only in them but in myself. How can I expect players to be as good as I want them to be if I'm not doing the best that I can? I treated that practice as "get better," not "get even." I sensed they were going to have a great practice and they did. They were very attentive to doing things the right way and they saw better results when they took better shots. We showed them two hours of tape from the Wake Forest game. I kept asking them, "Isn't it easy to change that? All right, then let's change it."

We won 12 of our next 13 games before our Senior Day game against Duke. Two days before the game, Ty Lawson jammed his toe in practice. It was swollen, so our doctors gave him a cortisone shot to relieve the pain.

We didn't know whether Ty was going to play until right before the game, and then he really struggled in the first half. At the end of halftime, as we were walking back out to the court, I grabbed Ty and I said, "Hey, put that half behind you and play your tail off in this half." Ty finished the game with 13 points, eight rebounds, and nine assists, and he made a key three-point play down the stretch, and we won the game and the ACC regular season championship. Ty would be voted the conference Player of the Year.

After the game the cortisone shot began to wear off and Ty told me he was really hurting. He left the gym with his dad and his dad suggested he try some Epsom salt and hot water. That was about the worst idea you could have. Ty's toe swelled up the size of a lemon.

I wanted to win a national championship more than I wanted to breathe, but I was not going to let Ty Lawson have another cortisone shot. I worried about Ty every day at practice and I decided to sit him out of the ACC Tournament. We played Florida State in the semifinals and we got beat. I tried to reassure everybody in the locker room after that loss by telling them I'd been to the Final Four six times in my career and five of those six times my team had lost in the conference tournament.

President Obama picked us to win the NCAA tournament again and it was broadcast everywhere. That was fine with me, because I couldn't possibly have felt more pressure than I already did going into the tournament.

I decided we could afford to sit Ty in our NCAA opener against Radford, but we played him in the next game against LSU. At one point in the first half, though, Ty's foot got bumped and he felt something pop in his toe. He limped to our bench and said, "Coach, you've got to get me out."

I thought he was done for the game, but he went back in a few minutes later. I could tell he was struggling to trust what he could do on the court. It was the same scenario as on Senior Day, because as we were walking back out after halftime, I grabbed Ty and said, "Remember, against Duke you didn't do too much in the first half, but you were great in the second half. Put that first half behind you. Son, we need you to be great this half."

We quickly fell behind by four points early in the second half, and at a timeout I walked into our huddle and barked at our seniors, "Is this how you want your careers to end? Then keep playing like this."

From that moment on, Ty had one of the best performances of any point guard I have ever coached. The very next possession, Ty made an unbelievable layup and there was a lot of chest bumping going on, and all of a sudden our team was feeling confident again. Ty attacked the rim every possession, and we were running and pushing the ball and LSU was having trouble getting back in time to keep Ty in front of them. Ty loaded everybody up on his back and won the game for us.

We normally don't like to make major changes in the middle of the NCAA tournament, because in the past if we changed anything it really screwed things up. But against Gonzaga in the round of 16 game I thought we needed to make a change from how we had played ball screens all season. Their attack was to set a screen with one of their big guys, who would look for a pass cutting to the basket. We normally have our big guy step out and hedge, but that game, we decided to squeeze and go under, and our guys adapted to that idea very well. We shut down their favorite option and Ty scored 17 points in the first half. We won easily, 98-77.

Then we were playing Oklahoma and Blake Griffin, the guy who had the best season of anybody in the country. Again we made a major defensive adjustment. I decided to double-down on Griffin as soon as it was passed to him in the post. We had about 15 minutes during our one day of practice before the Oklahoma game to teach our guys when to double-team Griffin and then how to rotate to the open man. Our players did a great job of it. For much of the game, Griffin passed the ball out of the double-team and Oklahoma missed its first 15 shots from three-point range. We won 72-60. After the game I told our guys that I'd never seen a bad defensive team win a national title, and I thought we'd won our last two games with our defense. In the locker room that day the guys were so excited, but right before I walked out, I said, "Remember, we were here last year."

I said it again right before the NCAA semifinal against Villanova. I never mentioned the word Kansas because I thought that could bring back bad memories, but I repeated, "Remember, we were here last year." I also told them we should win the game because we were bigger and better than them. Reversing what had happened a year earlier, we jumped out to a 40-23 lead with Tyler Hansbrough outmuscling their smaller post players inside and then passing the ball out to open shooters when he got double-teamed. Tyler finished with 18 points and 11 rebounds, while Ty scored 22 points and Wayne Ellington had 20, and we won the game pretty easily.

After our game, I watched a tape of the other semifinal three different times, and I was surprised by how easily Michigan State beat Connecticut. I was happy, because I thought playing Michigan State would be great for us psychologically. I was thinking, "Hey, we beat the crap out of them earlier in the season, we can beat the crap out of them again."

In our locker room before the game I said, "We're going to attack. We're not going to back down. We're going to attack and attack and attack. They're saying we can't beat them again because we beat them by 35. Hey, we can beat them worse. We can beat them by 45. We're better than they are. They say that Michigan State winning is going to fix the nation's economy, well then, I say, hell, let's stay poor a while longer. All of that stuff is B.S. This is a basketball game. That's all it is. We are better than they are. Now let's go play. Tonight somebody is going to win the national championship. Why not let it be us?"

*****

The last time I ever saw my dad was on a Wednesday in May 2004. I was going to St. Louis for a meeting, and I got a charter plane to fly me from Chapel Hill and stop over in Asheville so I could visit with him. Over the years, we'd seen each other on Christmas a few times. He came to watch me coach two games. He had never come to my house. By the time I came back to North Carolina in 2003, my dad had late-stage cancer. We saw each other about a dozen times during that first year I was back.

When I arrived at his house on that May afternoon, he said, "Well, good God, look what the dogs drug in."

Later, he said to me, "You know, I really didn't do a good job with you as a father."

I said, "I was all right."

"No, I could've taught you so many things."

"You did."

"What the hell did I ever teach you?"

"Daddy, I just looked at what you did and I tried to do the opposite."

"That's the only goddamn way I could ever have taught you anything."

Then I said, "Daddy, you did something else, too. When you came to Mom's visitation I appreciate you saying what you did."

He looked at me and said, "It's still the only goddamn thing I've ever regretted in my entire life."

As I was leaving, I said, "I'll be back on Sunday."

I will never forget that he said, "Well, maybe I'll be here, maybe I won't."

That next Sunday, as I drove to Asheville, I was heading toward my dad's house when I decided I needed to stop at a golf course right near the airport because I wanted to work on my putting. So I putted for about 30 minutes. Then I thought to myself, "It's time to go now."

I got back in the car and drove over to my dad's house, and my half brother, Danny, came out of the house. "He's passed," he said. "He's been gone for about 30 minutes."

I said, "I know." I knew because I didn't want to see my dad like that anymore. The last thing he had said to me was, "Well, maybe I'll be here, maybe I won't." That was right somehow."

At my mom's funeral when I delivered the eulogy, I said, "Life was never easy for my mother, but she never belabored that point. She never made me feel like she was feeling sorry for herself, and that made me feel how strong she was. Very seldom did we ever tell each other, 'I love you.' But there was never a moment in my life that she didn't make me feel like I was the most important person in her world. I thought she was an angel, but she treated me like one."

My dad had heard about the eulogy. He asked one of my cousins, "Do you think Roy will talk at my funeral like he did at his mom's?"

That was my dad's way of asking me. Because he wouldn't actually ask me. He had too much pride. But he knew my cousin would tell me.

So I spoke at my dad's funeral, too. I said, "The song that came to my mind when my mom died was "Wind Beneath My Wings," because that's what she was. The song that reminds me of my dad every time I hear it is "Papa Was a Rolling Stone," because he was married five times and the only thing he ever left us was alone, where he laid his hat was his home, and he spent all his time chasing women and drinking. That was my dad.

"He didn't always do a great job living, but my dad was really good at dying. He had three grandsons and he had three shotguns and before he died, he gave each grandson a shotgun. He had two sons, my half brother Danny and me, and he tried to mend fences with both of us. Before my dad died, he cleared everything off his chest and all of us in this room should hope to be able to do that. I know Daddy would want everybody to say I love you more than he and I ever did, and so I would hope that all of you would take the time to tell people that you love them. My dad would like that. My dad made some mistakes while he was alive, but he tried to make amends before he died, so I believe he died a contented man.

"Some of you may be upset about the bad things I'm saying about my dad at his funeral. You know what? It doesn't bother me, because my dad told me one time that he didn't give a damn what other people thought. Well, I'm Babe's son."

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