Another Shot: Williams enjoys trips to Final Four, but he's not happy about everything

DETROIT -- Roy Williams, the most sophisticated basketball coach in Mayberry history, has done just about everything.

He has made birdies at Augusta National and Asheville municipal, and last week in Memphis he served as honorary duck master at the Peabody Hotel, leading five mallards down the red carpet to their marble fountain in the lobby.

He won a national championship working for Dean Smith, and four years ago he won another title as the North Carolina boss. Even so, today is his favorite day in coaching, the day when thousands of fans watch open practice at the Final Four.

"It's the coaches' convention going on as well," Williams said, "and all your peers are in the stands. Some of them don't come to practice, but there's a lot of them up there, and they're wishing they were where you're standing."

When the Tar Heels jog onto Ford Field this afternoon, Williams will conduct his seventh Friday practice at the Final Four and his fifth in the past eight seasons. That's enough to make jealous rivals break out in a carbon-monoxide rash. That's more than everyone except John Wooden (12), Smith (11) and Mike Krzyzewski (10).

Williams ranks first among active coaches in winning percentage (.811) and third all time, trailing only Clair Bee and Adolph Rupp. He is the only coach with at least one victory in 20 consecutive tournaments. If Carolina prevails -- a humongous if -- he would become the 13th coach with at least two titles.

The numbers go on and on, and so does Williams. Two years ago, upon his election to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Williams vowed to work harder so voters would feel justified in their choice.

"I love teeing it up," Williams said. "I love being with my buddies and my family, but if it's time to work, it would bother me like crazy if somebody else was out there recruiting, for example, and I wasn't. It would bother me a great deal if somebody was watching tape and I wasn't. So, probably a little wacko."

Humble aspirations

A little wacko goes a long way in a big-wacko business. Williams makes about $2 million a year in guaranteed money, and then there's Nike money falling off the trees in his country-club yard. Williams reports that since returning from Kansas in 2003, he twice has rebuffed NBA offers worth more than $5 million per.

"I thought, ‘I'm already overpaid, so that just would be really outrageous,'" he said. "That's a lot of money. I'm one of those guys that when I was born, I had no money, and when I die, I hope the last check we write is to the guy that gave us the casket -- and I hope the check bounces. If I've got enough money to pay my bets walking off the 18th green the last day, that would be really a good deal for me."

Williams, 58, never expected riches 31 years ago when he left Owen High in Swannanoa for the last coaching seat on Smith's bench. He was a public-school teacher, athletics director and coach with experience in golf and 9th-grade football.

He took a substantial pay cut and took on odd jobs. Williams drove copies of Smith's basketball show to TV stations around the state on Sunday mornings. He sold ads on Carolina basketball calendars. In 1979, he started a clinic at the faculty/staff farm. Total package: $35 a week. He also worked for a trucking company with Carolina roots, Kenan Transport.

"Try this," Williams said. "They hand you stacks of paper -- bills of lading -- and they're stapled together. I'd take the staples out and put them in numerical order and then staple them back together and give them to somebody else. God almighty, I've got a dadgum master's degree and I've got to learn how to count again. So I did that during my first year here. All right, now, I realize I'm as lucky as you can possibly be, but I can't think of many people that have paid a higher price than what I did to get started."

Along the way, he discovered that in coaching the lows seem lower than the highs seem high. The lows seldom sink lower than last season, when Kansas bolted to a 40-12 lead and beat the Tar Heels in the semifinals. Carolina fans led the crude chorus questioning Williams' sideline decisions and ridiculing his appearance at the title game wearing a Kansas sticker.

Politicians talk about transparency. Williams lives that way. He is genuine, occasionally to a profane extreme, and sometimes there's no hiding the raw mountain-boy anger. Bad losers pushed his button a year ago, and the button is still stuck deep in his craw.

"I've been criticized more for that game than for the rest of the games I've coached in 21 years," he said. "I mean, there were seven dadgum timeouts in the first half and everybody acted like I'm supposed to call a timeout every 13 seconds. Seven timeouts. You go back and look." (Here, he starts sounding like a raspy, outraged Bill Clinton during Hillary's primary march to second place.) "There's seven timeouts in the first half. Every time we went directly out of a timeout, we screwed it up again. I thought I should call timeout and go to the bathroom. It's a game that has bothered me. It will bother me forever."

Carolina's putrid performance was one thing. There was another.

Very high expectations

"It bothered me because I'm throwing up in a towel over there during the first half because I'm sick as a dog," Williams said. "It's the first time in 21 years as a head coach I've leaned over to an assistant and told him to stand up and call a play. Steve Robinson stood up and called B-23, and we get a back-door layup. I pat him on the knee, but I didn't want to barf on him, so that's all I did. So, I've got memories there that are going to last me forever. Plus, I felt like very, very, very, very -- add as many as you want -- unfair treatment of me two days later, so I'm going to remember that after you guys are all dead and gone."

He remembers -- wryly -- that the team looked worse than he did. He remembers friends dropping by the next day, which he spent confined to his hotel.

Williams also remembers the 2009 preseason AP poll that picked Carolina No. 1 unanimously -- the only time that has happened -- and speculation that the Tar Heels might go undefeated. "I think it was unfair -- the whole bit -- because you just don't do those kind of things in college basketball now," he said.

His greatest stress came from the stress reaction in Tyler Hansbrough's shin last fall, the precursor to fractures that could have ended his senior season. As the tournament started, Williams had to deal with Ty Lawson's jammed toe.

"You cannot imagine the stress that you, as a coach, feel when you have a drill or an exercise or something that you're doing for eight minutes and you have a kid on your team that chose to come back and play college basketball and you're afraid if you go one more minute that you're going to hurt that kid," he said. "You have no idea. And then you have no idea, about three months later, when you've got another kid who has got a toe that's swollen up -- and he threw his dad under the bus about the hot water and Epsom salts. You have no idea what it feels like to say, ‘Well, I need to get him out there for one play, but what if he tears his toe up?' I've never coached like that in my life."

Despite the slew of injuries and outlandish expectations, Williams guided the Tar Heels through the morass. Senior Danny Green observed: "I think we handled it well, and I think he handled it well."

Williams will receive one reward this afternoon, open practice at the Final Four. The trophy is another dadgum matter for another day.

■ Lenox Rawlings can be reached at lrawlings@wsjournal.com.