Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 26, 1991 TAG: 9103260109
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JIM LITKE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
After beating Arkansas to claim the biggest victory of his brief coaching career, you knew what the first words out Williams' mouth were going to be:
"Every success that Roy Williams has had," he said, "is because of Dean Smith."
There is always sadness when a student tries to surpass his master, but that is the lot that has fallen to Williams. Because after overrunning Indiana and Arkansas in the Southeast Regional, the next obstacle in Kansas' improbable run through the NCAA Men's Basketball Championships is North Carolina.
Every assistant coach owes his mentor something, but it would be impossible to total the psychic debt Williams rang up during 10 years at Smith's right elbow on the North Carolina bench. Stories abound, but this one is perhaps the most telling: For eight of those years, Williams rose at 5 a.m. every Sunday of the basketball season and made a 500-mile circuit to stations in Raleigh, N.C., and Asheville, N.C., to deliver videotapes of Smith's TV show. And never once complained.
Smith got him the job at Kansas in 1989 after the Jayhawks' sudden abandonment by Larry Brown, whose legacy was both the national championship from the season before and the NCAA probation for the season that followed. Grateful for the opportunity, Williams approached work each day the way he imagined "Coach Smith" - he is never referred to as just "Dean" or "Smith" - would have.
It went much deeper than killing floor practices and coats and ties on the road. From the outset, Williams' x's and o's were easily decipherable - as Smith's were. The insistence on developing a deep rotation, the relentless man-to-man defense, the intricate cuts, the quick passes, the intolerable waiting for all this precision to provide an opening worth exploiting. Vintage Smith.
Kansas looked, played and even felt like nothing so much as North Carolina West, and it all didn't always sit well with the locals. The Jayhawks' tradition, after all, was one of the most storied in all of college basketball and nothing to sneeze at. But Williams never disguised his loyalties.
"I'm my own man," he once answered the critics, "but I don't mind admitting that there are times I ask myself what he would do in a given situation."
That never has been more true than it is going to be in Indianapolis come Saturday. And it never will be of less value. But when it is over, we will have a better measure of how much the 40-year-old student has progressed in the three seasons since he parted from his 60-year-old mentor.
Indeed, Williams already has come a long way.
Last year he coaxed 30 victories and a brief stay at the top of the polls from a sneaky good team whose deficiencies were unmasked by UCLA once the tournament got under way in earnest.
But it was a much more masterful job that he managed in his first season, piecing together a team devastated by the departure of Brown and their chance to defend their national title and nursing them home 19-12.
He no doubt felt some bitterness after the NCAA took the unprecedented step of postponing a similar banishment for defending champion UNLV this year - "I sure wish they'd given us a multiple-choice penalty," Williams said in December - but most of that seems to have subsided.
Right after the paean to Smith following the win over Arkansas, Williams was asked what Kansas' return to prominence meant to him.
"It was difficult the first year, I'll be honest," he said. "It was not the most enjoyable thing I've ever gone through. The kids tell me they got a lot of strength from me and yet, I know I got a lot of strength from them."
Williams went on to say that he also drew sustenance from two rules he set himself to live by, both of which sound remarkably like something drawn from Smith's repertoire.
"One, that I'm going to try to outwork anyone that wants the same thing I want; and second, that I'm going to treat everybody the way I'd like to be treated. If I'm doing that," he said, "I've got to be pretty satisfied with myself."
But nothing, perhaps, would make him more satisfied than to look in the mirror as a winner Sunday morning - and see Roy Williams staring back.
by CNB