CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The lights of college basketball in the Carolinas grew dimmer Thursday morning, when Roy Williams unexpectedly retired in what most UNC fans wished was an April Fools’ Day joke.
It wasn’t, though. Williams, 70, will hang up his whistle after 33 years as one of the best college coaches ever — 15 years at Kansas, 18 years and three national championships at his North Carolina alma mater. Ol’ Roy, as he sometimes called himself, was done.
His timing was sublime. As the old saying goes, you always want to leave the people wanting more, and Williams has done that here. No one was anywhere near ready to kick him out, and there will be tears in Chapel Hill and many other places about his retirement.
But the man is also 70 years old, and UNC basketball’s last two seasons weren’t up to his astronomically high standards. Williams deserved to coach as long as he wanted to and then leave when he wanted to, and he’s done both things.
Williams liked to say that “Ol’ Roy ain’t that good,” whenever he was compared to his mentor Dean Smith or when his team was picked to win a national title before the season began.
But Ol’ Roy really was that good — a folksy, emotive, eminently likable disciplinarian who learned the college coaching trade from Smith and then mastered it himself. At UNC, he won national titles in 2005, 2009 and 2017, and his record was so good for so long that he had already made the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame before titles Nos. 2 and 3.
As the most famous Tar Heel, Michael Jordan, told The Charlotte Observer’s Rick Bonnell on Thursday, Williams is getting “to choose (his) own path, to walk away from the game when he wants.”
Continued Jordan: “It’s great he now gets to spend more time with his children and grandchildren. … (But) I’m sad that he’s leaving because he has meant so much to basketball.”
Who will replace the coach? Hubert Davis? Wes Miller? Jerry Stackhouse? Mark Few? The speculation will grow to endless proportions over the next few days — and certainly the Tar Heels certainly shouldn’t limit themselves to “the Carolina family” during this search. But that column is for another time.
Williams deserves his own day and his own celebration, dadgummit. The man is retiring with 903 wins, nine Final Fours and a bushel of unused timeouts tucked somewhere inside that plaid sports coat.
Williams has been a celebrity in North Carolina for so long it is easy to forget how unlikely his rise was. As Williams once told me in an interview: “When I was growing up in western North Carolina near Asheville, I never even thought about going to college until I was in high school. It just wasn’t part of what we talked about in my family. I thought I would go to work in a sawmill like everybody else.
“But Buddy Baldwin was my high school basketball coach and my history teacher, and he was also a UNC graduate. He loved the Tar Heels. … The first time I set foot on the UNC campus came in 1967 during the fall of my senior year. I was on our high school square-dance team. I know it sounds comical, but it’s true. We came to Durham for a performance at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Yes, I square-danced at Duke.
“I had never been to either Duke or UNC,” Williams continued. “The next day after our performance, Miss Weir, the teacher who was the sponsor of the square-dance team, brought us to Chapel Hill. She pulled me aside after we saw the campus and said, ‘This is where I want you to go to school. This is where you belong.’ … So I came to Carolina, mostly because Buddy Baldwin and people like Miss Weir felt it would be a great place for me.”
What Williams did in Chapel Hill was extraordinary, and he has left a permanent legacy via his generous scholarship contributions and the many Williams family members who also graduated from UNC.
Cut Williams’ vein open and he bleeds true blue. Even after those 15 years in Kansas, even after he turned down the UNC basketball job the first time in 2000 before accepting it in 2003, I don’t think anyone has ever loved the place more.
The coach deserves this ride off into a Carolina-blue sky, golf clubs slung over his shoulder, family and players at his side. Ol’ Roy didn’t always manage the clock perfectly, but he timed this one just right. He left us wanting more.