UNC, Kansas, Roy Williams — and the reunion they tried to avoid for more than 40 years

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

Roy Williams spent 15 years coaching inside Kansas’ Allen Fieldhouse, working amid the noise and the energy of one of college basketball’s great cathedrals. His teams were pretty much always worthy of the atmosphere. During one stretch, they won 62 consecutive games there. They lost just 17 times in the building during Williams’ tenure. Then, like now, the place was a madhouse.

And yet there was something he missed during those 228 days and nights when people traveled from all over the heartland plains to come see his Jayhawks. There was something he never had a chance to fully appreciate. He only realized it a long time after he’d been gone, when he returned to Allen Fieldhouse for the first time in nearly 20 years in January of 2022.

By then, Williams was nearly a year into retirement. The old wounds here, if they were ever all that deep to begin with after he left Kansas to come home to North Carolina, had healed. Kansas invited him back for a game against Iowa State, and Williams obliged. For the first time, he entered the arena as a fan. And for the first time, he heard it — like, really heard it:

Kansas’ venerated Rock Chalk chant, slowly filling the place with an eerie and deafening hum.

It was, Williams said recently, the “first time in my life I’d ever heard the whole thing.”

Fifteen years of games at Allen Fieldhouse, and he’d always been too involved in the moment to ever hear the place come alive in unison. When heard it that night two years ago, Williams said, “I was stunned.”

He turned to his wife, Wanda, “and I said, ‘Gaah-lee plum, I’d never paid attention’ — and I’d hear part of it at a Jayhawk Club meeting. But it was the first time I ever really sat there and listened to the whole thing.”

Suddenly, in the retelling, Williams found himself as he often does — reminiscing and wistful and appreciative. He found himself thinking of the atmosphere in Allen Fieldhouse, the students and “their enthusiasm” and how it was always “just a great, great place” — the kind that made it especially difficult for him to say goodbye all those years ago.

Soon he found himself repeating a familiar old line, the one James Moeser, the former UNC chancellor, told Williams when he came home in 2003: “It’s not immoral to love two institutions.”

“And I really do,” Williams said.

The anticipation builds

There will be all kinds of recollections and nostalgia when UNC and Kansas play Friday night in Lawrence. There will be all kinds of retellings of old stories; reflections of what these programs have meant to college basketball and also to each other. Williams has been a bridge between the history — a North Carolinian who proved himself at Kansas, and then went back to his roots.

But he’s hardly the only tie. Dean Smith is the original connector, a native son of the Kansas flatland of Emporia, a graduate of Topeka High, a student of math and education and basketball at KU under Phog Allen in the early 1950s, when he was a part of the Jayhawks’ ‘52 national title team. And then not long after all of that, Smith made his home in North Carolina and built something that endures.

There are perhaps a handful of college basketball programs that can stake their claim atop the sport. UCLA, for those dynasty years under John Wooden. Indiana, with what it did under Bob Knight. Duke, with the five national championships under Mike Krzyzewski. UNC and Kansas, though, are arguably the sport’s oldest and original royalty.

Their shared pedigree, at least, makes it seem inarguable — that straight line from James Naismith, basketball’s inventor who became Kansas’ first coach in 1898, to Allen to Smith to Williams; to this very moment the programs are sharing Friday night and all the ones that came before: the 2022 national title game and the one in ‘57, and a few others in the Final Four in between.

By Thursday morning, more than 24 hours before tip-off, the ground-level concourse at Allen Fieldhouse was already filling with students waiting in line for Friday night. They read books or studied or played video games. One group of young women put the finishing touches on a sign: “UNC ya later,” it said. The anticipation slowly built.

‘I want to play at Phog Allen’

Around noon on Thursday, Allen Fieldhouse waited quietly for its moment. One of the loudest venues in college basketball sat empty, full of only the ghosts and the mystique. The place looked ready for a show: a sparkling new floor; what looked to be fresh blue and red paint that shined on the bleachers.

That classic old sign hung high above one of the baskets: “Pay heed, all who enter: Beware of the Phog.” The Tar Heels will see those words Friday night above the visiting team’s entrance to the court. They’ll see them again, an unavoidable sight, upon their entrance.

The force of the atmosphere must dwindle the more times any team visits here, but UNC hasn’t played in Lawrence since 1960. That game, and a 78-70 Tar Heels’ victory, remains the only one of 12 meetings between these schools that has happened on either team’s home court. Their past seven meetings came in tournaments, with Williams upon his return to North Carolina always dreading the thought of playing Kansas.

A home-and-home between the schools was pretty much a non-starter during Williams’ 18-year head coaching tenure at UNC. It’s only happening now because a couple of years ago, UNC coach Hubert Davis raised the idea of it during a conversation with Clint Gwaltney, a senior associate athletic director who handles a variety of tasks for the Tar Heels’ men’s basketball program.

As Gwaltney remembers it, the first conversation about scheduling Kansas came during Davis’ first season. The two were casually talking before UNC’s game at Louisville during the 2021-22 season.

“He says, ‘You know where I want to play?’” Gwaltney said, quoting Davis. “He says, ‘I want to play at Phog Allen. I’d love to play at Kansas.’”

Gwaltney put the idea “in the vault,” he said. A couple of months later, though, UNC found itself in the 2022 Final Four. The Tar Heels dispatched Duke in the national semifinals — ending Coach K’s career in the process — before playing against Kansas on the final Monday night of the season. Gwaltney crossed paths with his KU counterpart the day before that game.

“And I said, ‘I got something for you,’” Gwaltney said. “’You’re not going to believe this, but what do you think about doing a home and home?’ And he’s like, ‘Seriously?’”

“Absolutely,” Gwaltney told him. “Let’s, let’s see if we can get it done.”

Soon enough, it was. For two programs with so much in common, and for so long, UNC and Kansas have gone out of their way to avoid each other. This is their first non-tournament regular season game in more than 40 years. Now comes a reluctant and overdue extended family reunion.

Photos: Take an inside look at Allen Fieldhouse, before Tar Heels visit Lawrence, Kansas

A perfect symmetry

Several of Williams’ old players at Kansas implored him to come back for Friday night.

“Coach, come on,” Williams said they told him. “You can come here and watch the game.”

But no, he decided. He couldn’t. Not in person.

He couldn’t walk back into a place that meant so much to him, and for so long, and cheer for the other team. Even if he came back, though, Williams would find that some of what he remembered about Lawrence to be a lot different. Time is undefeated. His old barbershop on a corner off of Mass Street went and got all fancy, for one — no more of the old basketball memorabilia everywhere.

A shirt used to hang in the window of another nearby shop that said: “KANSAS: The birthplace of North Carolina basketball.” But that’s gone, too. Businesses have come and gone, new replacing old, but then there are the familiar constants.

Williams during his years as Kansas’ coach almost always made at least one trip before home games, and often made two. The trips were to cemeteries. Allen is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery and Naismith in nearby Memorial Park Cemetery, where near the entrance there’s a large memorial (but not his grave, which is farther back) in Naismith’s honor, and in recognition of Allen and Dean Smith and, now, even Williams, himself.

He used to jog past both graves, about a half-mile apart, and he did that “just for good luck.”

Sometimes he talked to Allen and Naismith, and made a request: “Give us some help tonight.”

It worked.

Or, well, something worked, at least. During Williams’ 15 seasons, Kansas won more than 92 percent of its home games. More and more, Williams, a native of Western North Carolina, became entrenched in his position, and his adopted hometown. There was symmetry there: Smith leaving his home state to build something in North Carolina, and Williams leaving North Carolina to build something in Kansas.

The long journey home

Williams hadn’t known a thing about Kansas basketball until joining Smith’s staff in 1978, hustling around North Carolina doing grunt work. Even now, after one of the most successful coaching careers in the history of the sport, it burns Williams — the perception among his “detractors,” as he put them, that he was lucky; that he simply got breaks to land the Kansas and UNC jobs.

“I was a part time assistant for eight years,” he said. “I sold freakin’ calendars. I drove copies of TV shows and everything. But I gave North Carolina everything I had for 10 years as an assistant, and some people can’t stay that long. But I told Coach Smith — he said, ‘You keep your patience.’ I said, ‘Coach, I just wanted to be a great fit.’

“And he told me, and you’ve probably heard this, he said, ‘Stay as patient as you are, and the right job will open up for you, and it’ll have your name all over it.’”

It so happened to be at the place Williams learned a lot about during those years as an assistant, driving around slinging calendars and delivering television tape. Smith used to regale his team with stories of how his Kansas teams did things — “about Doc Allen, and the way they practiced,” Williams said, and about “Doc Allen writing handwritten notes to the players.”

There are details about how UNC runs its program, even now, that Smith learned at Kansas more than 70 years ago. Early during Williams’ tenure as one of Smith’s assistant coaches, sometimes Kansas’ 1952 national title came up. Smith got in the game, but not the box score.

“He would giggle about it,” Williams said, “but I also knew he didn’t like that fact too, because Coach was so competitive. But each and every day, I learned to appreciate the history more and more with Coach Smith.”

The story has been told countless times but Williams found himself telling it one more time earlier this week — detailing his decision to stay at Kansas in 2000 and then leave a few years later. When the UNC job came open the first of those times, after Bill Guthridge retired, Williams said he found himself wanting “to go to both places.” But he’d made a promise to some of his Kansas players and remained loyal, too, to his boss, Bob Frederick.

By 2003, things had changed. Frederick had retired. UNC had suffered through its worst men’s basketball stretch in decades under Matt Doherty, whom the school fired after the 2002-03 season.

Smith called his protege.

“Three years ago,” he told Williams, “we wanted you. Now, we need you.”

And so, he went home.

There were, Williams said, “a lot of hard feelings” when he left. They’ve long since subsided. UNC went on to win three national championships upon his return. Bill Self, who succeeded Williams at Kansas in 2003, is now is in his 22nd season and has led the Jayhawks to two national championships of his own. Things have worked out for both programs, like it usually has, and they’ve remained intertwined, like they’ve been for a long time.

Now, both UNC and Kansas have found themselves confronted with a new challenge: how to maintain what they’ve been, pretty much forever, in an era that’s less about history and tradition and the ways of Dean Smith and Roy Williams and more about other things. NIL? Managing the transfer portal? Adaptability? They’re both attempting to hang onto the past, to some degree, while navigating the present and an uncertain future. And now comes the next moment in their shared history.