CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — For the first time in 48 years, Roy Williams was no longer a coach. He walked out of the Smith Center 10 minutes before 6 p.m. on a cold, windy Thursday. Wanda, his wife of 47 years, walked alongside him. A couple dozen people were waiting, some of them holding things they hoped Williams might sign; others who'd come just to see him or to say goodbye.
Eighteen years as the head men's basketball coach at North Carolina, and how many times had Williams made this walk? After countless practices and after hundreds of games. After hundreds of victories and far fewer defeats. Year after year, for almost two decades, out of his office and through the doors and to the first parking spot closest to the building, and then back again, day after day.
Now it was all over, his life's work suddenly in the past, and Williams acknowledged he was "scared to death" of the unknown — of walking into a new world and new identity. It wasn't even two hours after his farewell press conference began when he sat on a raised table at mid-court of the Smith Center and tried to hold back the tears. He'd written out his statement like he did when he went into the Naismith Hall of Fame; like he did when he spoke at his parents' funerals.
He'd written it out, he'd said, "because I think I have a better chance of holding it together."
But then he choked up when he described walking onto the court for the last time as a coach; when he recounted breaking the news of his retirement to his team; when he thought about failure. Williams grew up without luxury or much of anything else in the Biltmore neighborhood in Asheville, raised mostly by a single mother, determined to make something of himself.
His high school basketball coach, Buddy Baldwin, gave Williams the gift of confidence and made him believe. From then on the only thing Williams ever wanted to do was become a coach himself, so he could give that same gift to others. And then not long after another season of too much heartbreak and too little joy, Williams came to believe that perhaps he'd given all he could.
"I no longer feel that I am the right man for the job," he said Thursday, and when he didn't say a version of that to explain his decision to walk away, he said this: "I just didn't think I was good enough anymore."
Now he was walking out of the Smith Center and for the first time in almost 50 years he was going to wake up the next day and no longer be a coach. The tears had dried but Williams' eyes were tired. A security guard had told the crowd that Williams was going to stop for autographs and pictures, just as he always had when he walked out after a game.
The crowd followed him to his car, a black Mercedes SUV. Williams, still in his light blue blazer and pastel-striped tie, opened the passenger door and let Wanda inside and turned on the engine to provide some heat. He stepped in front of the line of people who'd been waiting, supporters who didn't believe Williams when he said that he was no longer good enough.
"Thanks for everything," somebody said, and then another, and then "I hope you enjoy your retirement, Coach," and, "Congratulations, Coach," and, "Have fun, Coach." A voice rose from the crowd, somebody yelling, "We love you, Roy!" Williams thanked them all. One woman looked like she might cry while she rested her head on his shoulder while someone took a photo. Most wanted a picture and Williams, who'd just spent an hour baring his soul in a way that few who've accomplished as much ever do, appeared happy to oblige.
"I'm smiling behind the mask," he said while he put his arm around an admirer.
Soon enough there were no more requests and it was time. But time for what, exactly?
Williams moved toward the SUV but stopped for one final question: How was he going to spend his first day in 48 years without a job?
"Tomorrow's pretty easy," he said, and that was true in part because he was headed home. His first stop after retiring was going to take him back to where it all began. He was on the way to Asheville.
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Roy Williams never forgot where he came from, never forgot the people back home who helped make him who he became. He reserved his highest praise Thursday for his mother, Mimmie, who worked long hours in the Vanderbilt Shirt Factory and ironed other people's clothes at home to support Williams and his older sister. In the next breath, Williams mentioned Baldwin.
"My mother was my hero," he said. "But Buddy Baldwin was really, really something for me."
Williams was about 5-foot-5 when he first played on the junior varsity at T.C. Roberson High in Asheville, and Baldwin, then the varsity coach, once turned to one of his players and said: "He's going to make me a good point guard before he leaves." And so it was. Williams blossomed those two years under Baldwin and became all-conference on the court and transformed off of it.
Baldwin, now 81, his mountain drawl raspy and thick, remembered two things in particular that Williams had told him a long time ago. The first: "He said they may outcoach me, but they won't outwork me." The second, Williams told him even earlier and when he was still in high school: "He told me Coach, someday I'll have allllll the Coke I can drink."
Baldwin had told the story before, first to a writer from Sports Illustrated after Williams became the coach at Kansas, and Baldwin found himself telling it again Thursday night, because in many ways it personified Williams' drive and his yearning to rise above. The story began on the asphalt court not far from where Williams lived with his mother. He played with older, bigger kids.
"There was a filling station there and they'd all go in and back then a Coke cost a dime," Baldwin said. "And they'd get a Coke, (and) Roy would drink water out of the water fountain in there. And he said, 'I didn't have a dime.' And his mom found out about it, and she started leaving a dime."
Fast forward more than 20 years, when Baldwin and his wife visited Williams in 1992 in Lawrence, Kan. The season before, Williams led the Jayhawks to the Final Four — the first of nine times his teams reached one. Williams drove the Baldwins home from the airport, carried their luggage up and then met Buddy back in the garage, and said: "Look at that refrigerator."
"And I believe it's the biggest refrigerator I ever saw," Baldwin said. "He said open that thing up, and I opened it up, and every shelf was just filled — lined up with Cokes. He said, Coach, I told you one day, I'd have all I can drink."
It was Baldwin, a UNC graduate, who encouraged Williams when he was in high school to go to college in Chapel Hill. Baldwin knew by then that Williams wanted to become a coach, but Williams expressed doubt about attending UNC, not because he didn't want to but because it cost money — much less in those days but still a considerable burden for someone like Williams.
"He said 'I can't go down there, I can't afford it,' " Baldwin said. "I said, 'It'll work out if you go.' "
Everything opened up for Williams there. He played on the freshman basketball team at UNC under Bill Guthridge. He encountered a young head coach named Dean Smith, and began watching his practices. He became enamored with what he saw, so much that he hung around Smith's program and soaked it in. Soon Williams was working Smith's summer camps.
Williams was on his way. He met Wanda in Chapel Hill and she, like him, was from the North Carolina mountains. By the time Williams graduated from UNC, he'd positioned himself to become the head boys basketball coach at Owen High in Black Mountain, where the football field backs up to a steep-rising slope.
It was 1973, Williams' first season, and the Warhorses won two games. Yet he inspired his players so much that a lot of them still keep in touch; so much that one of them, Porky Spencer, drove more than six hours, roundtrip, to watch almost every home game Williams coached at UNC. Spencer, who lived for years without running water when he was growing up, found a father figure in Williams, and in Spencer and others Williams found a purpose.
On Thursday morning, Spencer awoke to foreshadowing text messages but didn't want to believe them. Then the retirement announcement came, and he still didn't want to believe that either.
"It killed me," he said.
Not long after Williams returned to North Carolina in 2004, he told Spencer he'd always have a seat in the Smith Center. He encouraged Spencer to take advantage of it, Williams said then, "because Ol' Roy is not going to be here forever."
"I went to every game," Spencer said. "I went to everything. Because I knew this day was coming."
"I'm glad for him," Spencer said by phone late Thursday night, around midnight, after he'd sent a text saying he was ready to talk now that he'd "just got done with all the crying and hugging." On the phone, Spencer said, "I'm his number one fan. I always will be his number one fan. Coach Williams has 'it.' I can sit here for an hour and try to explain what 'it' is, and unless you played for him, you'll never know what Coach Williams' 'it' is."
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How had it come to this, then, with Williams insisting he no longer had it?
Throughout the course of an hour during his final press conference, he argued that he could no longer do what he'd done so well for the vast majority of his 33-year head coaching career. Yes, Williams said, part of his decision was about making up for lost time.
"I want to see my children and grandchildren more," he said. "I want to give Wanda more time. I still don't know about getting an RV and driving across the United States of America, though. I'm all in for going to baseball parks with the grandkids.
"But the biggest reason we're having this meeting is I just don't feel I'm the right man any longer. I love coaching. Working with kids on the court; locker room. The trips. The 'Jump Around' music, and trying to build a team. I've always loved that. And I'm scared to death of the next phase.
"But I no longer feel I'm the right man."
He'd won 903 college games. He'd won three national championships, all at UNC. He'd won seven conference tournament championships and 18 times — more than half the seasons he coached — his teams won regular-season conference championships. And yet he barely mentioned any of that during his farewell. Instead, he bemoaned the defeats. He expressed agony over the losses.
He beat himself up over the past two seasons — a 14-19 finish in 2020, his worst season, and an up-and-down 18-11 this year, against the backdrop of a pandemic that made everything more difficult.
"I felt like I made mistakes," Williams said of defeats long gone, but still fresh in his mind. He grew a pandemic beard last summer and looked relaxed during Zoom sessions with reporters. Beneath the surface, though, he simmered, the defeats from the previous winter playing over in his mind, haunting him.
There was the time against Clemson in 2019 that he failed to tell his players to foul late, before the Tigers made a 3-pointer to tie and won in overtime. The time he told his players to foul late against Duke, which found a way to tie the game, anyway, and also won in overtime. And the other four games that came down to one last shot, UNC losing them all.
"My first year as Coach Smith's assistant, we had five games where the other team had the last shot that would've won the game, and they missed all five," Williams said. "That was the difference between me and Coach Smith."
It was, in reality, the difference in how a ball bounced; the arbitrary whims of fate. And yet Williams' self-deprecating reference to Smith reflected his long-held perception that he could never measure up; that he could only hope to be a competent caretaker of what Smith built before he called Williams to come back in 2003, after Williams had already turned down the job once.
Smith has been gone since 2015 and in some ways, he was gone years before that, a victim of a dementia-like condition that robbed him of his memories and his mind. Even so, Williams said during one revealing moment Thursday, "I talk to him every night." During his 15 years at Kansas, Williams often patted James Naismith and Phog Allen's tombstones. It made sense, perhaps, that after Smith died Williams often visited his grave, too, near the edge of UNC's campus.
"I'm a little weird," Williams said.
In those moments in the cemetery, Williams could have thought about a lot of things. His relationship with a man who gave him his start in college coaching in 1978, when Williams drove around North Carolina in a Carolina blue Mustang, selling calendars and delivering tapes of Smith's weekly TV show to far-flung stations.
He could have thought, too, about how fast everything goes by, how it wasn't long ago he was a young man, black hair, the youngest member of Smith's staff. And now it was 2021 and somehow he was 70, his white hair growing thinner, the losses mounting along with the wrinkles, his team unable to do what he wanted it to do.
"Heck, I'd like to coach for 30 more years," Williams said. "But I just don't think I'm the right guy."
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Up in the mountains, Buddy Baldwin was watching on TV and disagreeing with Williams' assessment but also accepting that "that's just the way he is." Inside the Smith Center, Porky Spencer felt pain while he listened to his old coach say he wasn't good enough, that he was no longer the right man.
"Come on," Spencer said. "If he ain't the right man for that job, who is?"
And yet Spencer understood, too, that college basketball had long changed, that it was no longer the sport Williams entered in the late 1970s and no longer the game his teams dominated throughout much of the 1990s and 2000s and at times even much more recently. Four years ago, Williams won his final national championship with players who'd stuck around for a while. It wasn't that long ago and yet already it feels like something from a bygone era.
"If the kids were like they were six, seven years ago," Spencer said, maybe it'd be different.
Wanda had wanted him to retire after 2017 but, then, UNC was still awaiting the outcome of a years-long NCAA investigation into academic misconduct in the African Studies department — a saga that forced Williams to answer questions, for years, about his players' enrollments in suspect courses. By the time an NCAA committee determined it could not levy sanctions, Williams, who was never charged with wrongdoing, had spent years defending his integrity.
That, too, wore on him, just like his bad knees wore on him, along with the death of one of his close friends, Ted Seagroves, in 2014. For years, his teams became his salvation, the court a place to escape. And then, gradually, it all changed. His teams grew younger. The wins grew fewer.
"I've known Roy for a long time," Bill Mott said by phone on Thursday. He and Williams had once been young coaches when they worked together at Owen High in the mid-1970s. "And he either does something and he does it to his absolute best ability, or he doesn't do it."
Mott is part of the Black Mountain crew, a group of guys in their 60s and 70s who play golf together and see Williams when he's back home, when they all gather and tell stories from when they were much younger men. For a while now, the guys who go back decades with Williams have been hoping he'd retire while he still had enough years and strength to swing a club whenever he'd like.
"He's done it all," Mott said. "There's nothing left to do. And he's not getting any younger, and he's retiring and enjoying himself. Well, he enjoys it doing basketball. But, I mean, I don't want to see him die doing basketball."
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Williams grew up on Warren Avenue in Asheville, in a small house less than a half-mile and a world away from the entrance to the Biltmore Estate and its unimaginable opulence. He grew up trying to outrun his circumstances, be it poverty or his absent father, Mack Clayton Williams, who was known as Babe.
In 1997, a Sports Illustrated writer named Bill Nack found Babe Williams sitting on a porch next door to where Roy had grown up. Babe, Nack wrote, was "smoking unfiltered Pall Malls, one after another," inhaling nicotine and exhaling smoke and regret.
"We had good times around here until I started drinking," Babe told Nack. "... If I had only done like a man's supposed to, but I didn't."
At the time of that story, Babe Williams was 70 years old — the same age as his son was Thursday when he retired a millionaire several times over, a man widely adored in his native state even if rival fans loved to hate him. Once, years ago, Williams went to Asheville to play golf with Buzz Peterson and Mitch Kupchak, two former UNC players who are now executives with the Charlotte Hornets.
Kupchak asked Williams if his childhood home was still standing, and Williams drove him by.
"I could not imagine that the house he grew up in was that tiny," Kupchak said. "If I had to guess, it was under 1,000 square feet. On a teeny plot in a kind of run-down neighborhood. You think of where he is today, and you look at that house and the way he grew up, it's a great story.
"He grinded his way from very humble beginnings to one of the all-time best college coaches ever."
That was where the journey began, off of Warren Avenue and within walking distance to the asphalt court where Williams learned to play, and the gas station where he learned the value of a dime and a mother's sacrifice. It ended Thursday about 220 miles east, when Williams and Wanda walked out of the Smith Center and into a cold breeze, where a couple dozen waited to see him leave the building one final time.
Williams signed all the autographs and posed for all the pictures. People walked away looking down at their small treasures — a signed jersey or a picture on a phone. The crowd was gone and Williams stood outside and said, "Tomorrow's pretty easy."
"Because I'm going to Asheville tonight," he said, "and pick up a car and drive to Charleston and meet my children and grandchildren there tomorrow night. So tomorrow's pretty easy," he said again, but it hadn't been long since he acknowledged that "in some ways, I'm very sad."
"He's going to be fine," Buddy Baldwin said, and it was similar to what he'd told Williams more than 50 years ago now, pushing him toward UNC.
Still, this was all new. Finally, Williams climbed into the black SUV and shut the door. He backed out of his parking spot at exactly 6 p.m. and turned the wheel and slowly drove off. His first stop was home, the mountains, and there'd be time to figure out the rest.
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Charlotte Observer reporter Rick Bonnell contributed to this story.
