Roy Williams is just a ‘dad-gum country bumpkin’

University of North Carolina men’s basketball fans are prepared to politely sit back and endure a season-long Atlantic Coast Conference “farewell tour” that pays tribute to Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski (shah-SHEV-skee), as he prepares to retire from the game in 2022.

 

Coach Roy

It’s not that Coach K doesn’t deserve the spotlight, for he is the winningest college coach of all time. But still, you know those Tar Heel faithful will be doing a slow burn. 

Carolina’s beloved coach Roy Williams chose to retire in April 2021 – after all the games had been played and the arena was dark, deftly avoiding extended hoopla and folderol. 

There’s no animosity between the two venerable coaches; they’re friends and each loudly sings the other’s praises. Krzyzewski is from Chicago and played basketball at Army under coach Bobby Knight. Krzyzewski was team captain his senior year.

 

Williams, who was reared in the North Carolina mountains, graduated from T.C. Roberson High School in Asheville, and went to Carolina to hopefully play basketball under coach Dean Smith. That didn’t work out, but Williams became the team statistician. 

Observers of the sport say Coach K and Coach Roy have different styles and different personalities. 

Williams is the third most common surname in the United States, after Smith and Johnson. Krzyzewski is pretty much at the other end of the spectrum. 

Ron Kantowski of the Las Vegas Review-Journal once calculated that Krzyzewski was worth a whopping 42 Scrabble game points, because “Z” counts for 10 points and “K” scores 5 points. 

Kantowski said he knows there is a 7-letter limit for each player and that there is only one “Z” and one “K” in the real Scrabble game…but he said he was using “Jim Boeheim-at-Syracuse rules.” 

Roy Williams deserves a little “ink,” so readers of the Carteret County News-Times can appreciate what Coach Roy brought to Chapel Hill.

 

When Roy Williams left Asheville in 1968 to enroll as a freshman at the UNC-Chapel Hill, he was the first in his family to attend college. 

“I came down here (to Chapel Hill) as a country bumpkin from the mountains of North Carolina and probably still am,” he said. 

He added that he gained confidence that he could succeed from his high school coach, Roy Eugene “Buddy” Baldwin. The coach’s wife, Rosa Lee Case Baldwin, did her best to test that new-found confidence. 

Mrs. Baldwin taught math at T.C. Roberson, and in class one afternoon, she chided Roy for turning down a full scholarship to study engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Mrs. Baldwin warned all the girls in class, including Williams’ future wife, Wanda Jones, “not to have anything to do with him.” 

Williams, imitating her slow drawl, still recalls her remarks with relish: “Now, you grrr-lls, I don’t want any of you grrr-lls to mess with Roy, cuz Roy is not gonna take this engineering scholarship cuz he wants to be a coach. An’ one of these days, Roy is gonna come over to my house to borrow a loaf of bread....” 

At Carolina, Williams played one season on the junior varsity basketball team. His relationship with Coach Smith began when Williams volunteered to serve as a statistician. 

Williams began “to attend practices as if they were academic lectures,” wrote William Nack of Sports Illustrated. “Sitting high in the bleachers, Williams was a lone and feverish scholar, scribbling notes on how Smith taught the game and orchestrated his clockwork practices.”