HARD WORK: My Life On and Off the Court
by Roy Williams and Tim Crothers
If the Carolina Blue jacket design doesn’t give away the market for this book* then John Grisham’s foreword does, wherein he disposes of Roy Williams’ 15 years as the head coach at Kansas in a single sentence between paragraphs about Williams’ years as an assistant at North Carolina and his return six years ago to become head coach there. It would be a shame, though, if Kansas** fans, fueled by some ridiculously long-standing grudge, avoided the book.
*This isn’t a criticism. There’d be little point to publish a Roy Williams autobiography that focused on his years at Kansas at this point.
**I presume Carolina fans need no encouragement to devour the volume under consideration.
The chapter (Yes, singular. His decision to turn down the North Carolina job in 2000 and his decision to take the job three years later get a separate chapter.) on Williams’ 15 years at Kansas won’t be enough for anyone who, like this reviewer, would read an entire chapter that just covered the 1991 Southeast Regional Final or wonders why there isn’t an Alonzo Jamison* autobiography available for purchase but it builds on the admirably honest and revealing opening chapters to demonstrate what makes him both a wildly successful and extremely frustrating (in his rare moments of failure) head coach.
*I’d also like to know what caused Williams to give up on the 1-3-1 halfcourt trap that, with Jamison at its point, brought so much delight to my adolescent self.
Williams’ effort, during his year of graduate school at North Carolina, to construct and run a university-wide All-Intramural championship team reveals perhaps the most fundamental aspect of his personality: hard work and winning are not separate things and both the pride he earna from his successes and the crushing disappointment he feels in defeat derive from this conflated vision of how the world should work.
He’s still (sort of charmingly) proud of this accomplishment on its own merit and as an example of the tangible virtue of effort and desire. In the context of this long-ago All-Intramural championship, Roy Williams can certainly outwork his competition and this effort will lead directly to victory. In the context of major college basketball, effort and desire cannot insure victory, other coaches work hard, other coaches want to win, some other coaches cheat* and the National Championship is decided through a competition with a high degree of inherent variability. No amount of hard work and virtuous effort can insure a season-ending victory. There’s little doubt that Williams has found greater peace after winning two national titles at North Carolina than he felt without a title at Kansas but one suspects he’s still irked that his hard work, though it essentially guarantees victory over 80% of the time, can still be second-best on a given day for reasons out of his control.
*Any Kansas fan who followed the unsuccessful recruitments of Maurice Evans, Mike Miller, Quentin Richardson, or Baron Davis will appreciate that, in Williams’ telling of the recruitment of Sam Perkins while an assistant at North Carolina, he gives almost equal weight to signing Perkins as to catching, turning in, and seeing coaches from the University of San Francisco punished for breaking NCAA rules in their recruitment of Perkins.
This overriding belief in how things should be allows Williams to succeed with a unique style of play (Who else runs an extreme up-tempo offensive system that prioritizes getting high-percentage two-point shots?) but it also limits his ability to make adjustments one the rare occasions when his team’s hard work and preparation fail to overwhelm the opposition. First at Kansas and now at North Carolina, Williams has shown a greater ability than any other coach in the country to get his team to play the way he wants them to play. This focus, coupled with top-line talent, has been wildly successful but does not allow time to prepare a backup plan. Great satisfaction* can be taken from letting opponents know what’s coming and daring them to stop it. Except that, sometimes, opponents will stop it and, with all energy having been put into perfecting the best way to play, there is nothing to which Williams can turn with confidence.
*In which Williams, to his credit, readily admits he partakes.
In contrast to the emotional honesty and the sound explanations for why things work most of the time, the book offers little in the way of self-analysis regarding any of the disappointing NCAA Tournament losses that came to define Williams’ public persona prior to the 2005 National Championship victory. Little tactical self-analysis, that is. Williams is not shy about describing the pain and disappointment of those losses in terms of his feelings for himself and his feelings for his players. His confirmation that he allowed a one-handed Jerod Haase to play 11 minutes (0 points, 4 turnovers) in the three-point loss to Arizona in 1997, which kept his best Kansas team from advancing beyond the Sweet Sixteen, simply because he couldn’t say no to a player to whom he felt so close may provide some closure for Kansas fans. On the other hand, that the only tactical mention of the “point zone” is in reference to its succesful use in Kansas’s comeback from 19 down with a minute left in the first half to beat UCLA 85-70 in Allen Fieldhouse in 1995* may encourage the Jayhawk-inclined reader to pick at the scabs caused by its extremely unsuccessful and seemingly interminable use in that same Arizona game or in the 2002 National Semifinal loss to Maryland. Tar Heel partisans may find reading about the 2007 Regional Final loss to Georgetown or the 2008 National Semifinal loss to Kansas a similar experience.
I found comfort in that bit of parallelism. Roy Williams has two national championships now, he has the job he’s always wanted (one for which his personality and talents are somewhat better suited than they were for his previous job), but he’s fundamentally the same person. This book makes clear that, were he not who he is, the hard work of his life: what he demands from himself, his players, and his coaches would not amount to what it has thus far. Sure, there are elements of Roy Williams’ personality that he’s reluctant to acknowledge or appear more transparent than he perhaps believes. That’s true of all us and most of us have the benefit of not having to be ourselves in public. Were he disingenuous or phony, the underlying structure of his successful system would crumble. It has not. It’s unlikely to and he will continue to win basketball games until he decides he doesn’t want to anymore. Unfortunately for the rest of the college basketball world, Williams thinks that Dean Smith retired too soon and wants not to make the same mistake.
*In my experience, the loudest the Fieldhouse has ever been. Louder than the 150-95 win over Kentucky. Louder than when Mike Maddox tried to fight Jevon Crudup after Crudup slammed Patrick Richey into the basket support in 1991. Louder than the #1 vs. #2 game against Missouri in 1990. Louder than the 100th anniversary game.
