From Dean Smith to Roy Williams and beyond: UNC, Kansas basketball share storied history

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories exploring the storied and unique relationship between two of college basketball’s historically elite programs, North Carolina and Kansas.

The night before he retired at North Carolina, Roy Williams walked onto the court at the Smith Center, alone with his thoughts and the history. There wasn’t anyone else there. The next day, April 1, 2021, the building hosted his retirement press conference, packed with media and Williams’ loved ones and players and members of UNC’s extended basketball family.

But the night before, he had the basketball court bearing his name all to himself. He walked out toward center court, and into the heart of the big outline of the state of North Carolina stretching across it, and he sat down on the floor. He cannot remember, three and a half years later, how long he stayed there. Long enough for the memory of that moment to linger.

Williams that night took in the magnitude of the place. The vastness. The scope of the Smith Center is clear to anyone who’s ever been inside but it somehow feels larger when it’s empty, with the Carolina blue seats stretching high above the court and the banners and the retired and honored jerseys hanging even higher than the highest seat, rustling in the rafters.

Williams said recently that he sat there “and just remembered.”

“And had great, great thoughts.”

It was not the first time he had done something like this. Eighteen years earlier, when he left Kansas, Williams walked into Allen Fieldhouse and did the exact same thing. He was alone, as he was that night many years later in the Smith Center, and he sat down at center court and let everything wash over him — “an emotional experience for me,” he said.

Looking back, Williams earlier this week couldn’t quite articulate the motivation; couldn’t say why, exactly, he’d been drawn to sit at midcourt, alone, in the two places where he’d been a head coach for a combined 33 years. It was a lot of things. A desire to appreciate what’d happened there. To relive some of it, perhaps. To take in one last quiet moment before saying goodbye, as a coach.

“It was sort of, maybe, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it was my way of saying, ‘Thank you.’

“Because I had such wonderful experiences in both buildings.”

Since his retirement, Williams has rarely missed a Tar Heels basketball game. He and his wife, Wanda, sit above the home team tunnel at the Smith Center, first row, not far from UNC bench. They’ve become regulars on the road, too, where fans often fill the aisles in the pregame, waiting in line for a picture with Ol’ Roy. He will not be in attendance, though, on Friday when UNC and Kansas play a rare regular season game — and their first in Lawrence since 1960.

It was not a hard decision for Williams to miss it. Too many emotions. Too much respect, for Kansas. Too much awareness, that though his admiration and love for the Jayhawks remains, there’s no way he’d be able to maintain any sense of impartiality. And so he’ll watch from home.

“I’m about people more so than buildings,” Williams said, “and I love Allen Fieldhouse. It’s the greatest, greatest home court advantage; greatest place for college basketball, because the fans in Kansas — that must have been where the word fanatics came from.”

And yet it’s simple, for him: On the Kansas bench, there’s nobody Williams coached or recruited. And on the UNC bench, he coached or at least recruited pretty much everybody — including his successor, Hubert Davis, who was the last player Williams helped recruit as a UNC assistant before he became Kansas’ head coach in 1988.

“So that’s the team that I’m pulling for, right?” Williams said of UNC. “Well, to me, it would be dishonest — I don’t even know what word to describe it. But there is no way that I can go into Allen Fieldhouse and clap when the other team scores a basket.

“Because those people, for 15 years, treated me wonderfully.”

UNC, Kansas bridge past to present

Williams embodies the deep ties between the North Carolina and Kansas basketball programs. He’s something like a living bridge between the two. During his 15 seasons at Kansas, the Jayhawks reached four Final Fours and won nine conference championships. In 18 seasons as UNC’s head coach, the Tar Heels won three national titles and regularly finished atop the ACC standings.

There was always a symmetry between UNC and Kansas to Williams’ basketball journey. He is a native son of North Carolina who learned a lot of what he has ever known from Dean Smith, who was born in Kansas, attended KU and played for Phog Allen. Through Smith, who was the original connection between Kansas and North Carolina, an even larger story can be told.

It is, in many ways, the story of the entire sport of basketball. James Naismith, the game’s inventor, brought the sport to Kansas in 1898 and served as the Jayhawks’ first coach. One of his players was Allen, who later coached Smith, who in turn became a UNC assistant coach, and then its head coach in 1962, and then a mentor and teacher to countless other coaches, Williams included.

Through UNC and Kansas, there’s a straight line that connects basketball’s present and past: Naismith to Allen to Smith to Williams, yes, but also Wilt Chamberlain, the Kansas alum who was among basketball’s first national superstars, to Michael Jordan, who became a national name when he made the game-winning shot for UNC against Georgetown in 1982, and then a global icon.

Two other programs — UCLA and Kentucky — have won more than UNC’s six NCAA championships, and those three schools and Connecticut, Duke and Indiana have won more than Kansas’ four. But arguably no schools have contributed more to the game than North Carolina and Kansas have, starting with Naismith’s arrival in Lawrence just more than 125 years ago.

“Now, this is Roy Williams” talking, he said earlier this week, and “it doesn’t mean it’s true for everybody. But historically — and I think you have to say it like that, historically — they’re the two greatest places for college basketball. And, you know, of course — Kentucky and Duke and Indiana, and there’s a lot of people.

“But to me, those are the two that did it first; did it before anybody else.”

Rare meeting of college basketball royalty

For all their shared history and those deep connections, both physical and symbolic, the Tar Heels and Jayhawks have rarely played each other by design, with intention. Their past seven meetings, including the 2002 preseason NIT, came in tournament settings, with both needing to win games and advance through a bracket in order to face each other.

The stakes of those meetings have usually been among the highest in the sport: Kansas’ victory in the 1991 Final Four, with Smith’s late ejection a lingering memory; UNC’s victory in the 1993 Final Four, on the way to a national championship two nights later; and then Kansas’ victories in the 2008 Final Four and 2012 Elite Eight, and in the national championship game two years ago.

The last time UNC and Kansas met in a non-tournament setting was at the start of the Tar Heels’ 1981-82 national championship season, with UNC prevailing in a 74-67 victory in Charlotte. The last time they played each other on one of their home courts was in 1960, in Lawrence.

Dean Smith was a 29-year-old assistant coach at UNC, under Frank McGuire. Allen Fieldhouse was in its fifth year of existence. Roy Williams was 10-years-old and growing up in the North Carolina mountains, still years away from meeting the high school coach, Buddy Baldwin, who first inspired Williams to become a coach, himself.

UNC over the past 25 years has played scheduled regular-season games against all of its peers among the royalty of the sport. There have been meetings against UCLA and Indiana and a lot against Kentucky and even Connecticut, along with the annual reunions with Duke. But it hasn’t played Kansas in a non-tournament regular season game in 43 years.

In 36 seasons as UNC’s head coach, Smith only played against alma mater twice in the regular season. Williams, when he returned to North Carolina in 2003, did what he could to avoid playing against the Jayhawks — who sometimes proved unavoidable in March.

“And so basically they knew my feelings on that part,” he said of playing KU. “And I think it was only one time ever that I was asked about a home and home, and I just said, ‘No.’”

That they’re playing on Friday night is stirring all kinds of emotion, in both North Carolina and Kansas. The connections run deep. For once, it’s not in the NCAA Tournament. For once, it’s not in the Final Four or for the national championship, as it was last time they played each other in 2022 in New Orleans. This time it’s just an early regular season game, the stakes relatively low.

And yet ... there’s still something about it. A mystique, perhaps. A sense of appreciation of the rarity of the moment, that the Tar Heels and Jayhawks are tipping it off in Allen Fieldhouse; that two of the most celebrated and most connected powers in college basketball are getting together like they rarely have.

Every legacy has a beginning

Williams won’t be there, no, but he has still found himself reminiscing this week. He can still see himself sitting down at midcourt and looking up and all around at Allen Fieldhouse 21 years ago, one last quiet moment before he came back to North Carolina. He can see himself doing the same thing in the Smith Center, sitting in solitude at midcourt after he’d coached his final game there.

Like Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence, the Smith Center in Chapel Hill is now a monument to its namesake; a building named after a beloved North Carolina figure who was born and educated in Kansas. It took a while, though, for Dean Smith to become the coach and teacher he’s remembered to be. He arrived at UNC in 1958 as a young and anonymous assistant coach.

In his fourth season as head coach, in January of 1965, he was hung in effigy after a defeat against Wake Forest. And then it happened again, a week later, after his team surrendered a 14-point lead in a home loss against N.C. State. Only, this time, they not only hung a dummy in Smith’s likeness but set it on fire, too. Soon enough, though, he found his way.

After his death in 2015, at 83, he was buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, under an oak tree near the east edge of the UNC campus. His grave is a short walk from Woolen Gym, site of those early tribulations, and Carmichael Arena, home to many of his greatest triumphs. Smith’s grave marker resembles an old writing desk, with an open book, made of stone, permanently adorned atop it.

One of the pages contains a passage from the Book of Micah, an Old Testament prophet, and on the other are several lines of text: “Reflect gracefully on those who went before you. Embrace those loved ones among you, and honor those who contribute to a better future for those who follow.” Williams and Davis have been by together to visit Smith’s grave and spend quiet moments with their mentor and coach and, in many ways, one of their greatest teachers.

And indeed, the marker at Smith’s final resting place is an homage to his first calling, as an educator. It’s a nod to his roots, and to growing up the son of a teacher and coach in Emporia, Kansas.

Next: A journey to the heart of Dean Smith’s childhood, and an even deeper link between two of college basketball’s preeminent programs.