UNC’s Roy Williams on ACC Tourney in Charlotte, square dancing, and his toughest player

If you ask Roy Williams about some of his fondest memories in Charlotte, he won’t hesitate.

The retired UNC men’s basketball coach, with 903 wins and three national championships to his Hall of Fame name, will start with the deep NCAA Tournament runs that passed through here. That includes the first two games of the 2005 national championship season. That also includes the 1991 year, when Williams was an assistant under Dean Smith and their Tar Heels won two games in Charlotte to secure Williams’ first trip to the Final Four.

He might also sneak in a story about the celebrity Pro-Am he played in last year at Quail Hollow, when he birdied from the bunker on 18 and saw some former players taking his shot on video.

If you then ask about some future moments he’ll spend in Charlotte — specifically about what he thinks of the ACC Tournament being hosted in Charlotte in 2025, 2026 and 2028 — he’ll light up again.

There’s a simple reason why.

“I love the ACC Tournament being in North Carolina,” Williams told The Charlotte Observer on Friday. “Particularly Greensboro and Charlotte, they make it look like a really big deal. It is to the players and the coaches and the fans. You know, if you go outside the state, other places do a nice job, but not like we do it here in North Carolina. So I’m happy that it’s coming back.”

Williams, a native of Marion and a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, will always mean a lot to the Tar Heel state. And that’s because the state will always mean a lot to him.

That love for North Carolina was evident on Friday afternoon as Williams spoke to a crowd of over 600 people as a special guest for the Charlotte Touchdown Club in The Sheraton Hotel in Uptown. The 73-year-old retired coach reeled off life stories with the pace and ease of a Ty Lawson-led fast break, interspersing them with the aphorisms that made his press conferences toward the end of his career appointment viewership.

Before the speech, in an interview with The Observer, he also freely answered a question about another thing he loves: college athletics — and the enterprise’s uncertain future.

“I don’t know what’s going to work out, so I don’t know or want to say it’s going to happen,” Williams said, when asked specifically about the recent development of the NCAA allowing schools to directly pay their players. “But name, image and likeness, I like. I think it’s good for the student-athletes; I think it’s good for them to share in the money. We raise a lot of money.

“I don’t like what it’s turned into because it’s not name, image and likeness. You’re just paying guys to go to school. And so, maybe if we get a little more control it’ll get back to name, image and likeness, where a young man or a young woman should be able to get some of that. And I have zero problems. But right now, the toothpaste is out of the tube, and it’s hard to get it back in there.”

Here are the rest of the highlights of Williams’ appearance in Charlotte.

Roy Williams on Joel Berry, square dancing in Cameron Indoor Stadium and the suit he couldn’t clean

▪ Williams still remembers checking on point guard Joel Berry the night before the 2017 national championship game and seeing Berry’s swollen ankles and thinking to himself. There’s no way he can play tomorrow. Berry was among Friday’s crowd, and Williams pointed to him as he told this story.

“I’ve had a lot of really great players,” Williams said. “And I’ve had a lot of really good players who were really tough. But I’ve never had anybody in my life tougher — stand up big fella — than that guy right there.”

▪ Williams is still mad at Mike Gminski, Duke’s big man Williams coached against as an assistant. And he isn’t afraid to say it. He did so, after all, with a smile after he noticed Gminski in the ballroom crowd and recalled the 1979 game against Duke in Cameron Indoor Stadium.

“We were down 7-0 at halftime,” he said. He added, “At halftime, we had to go right through that little trail. And they’re doing all this kind of stuff. Coach Smith was right in front of me. And somebody threw a rotten grapefruit at Coach Smith. And missed. It hit me, and I only had one suit at that time. ... I had to get that suit cleaned two or three times to be able to use it.”

▪ The first time Williams stepped foot in Cameron Indoor Stadium wasn’t as a coach, however. It wasn’t as a player, either, even though he was a point guard for UNC’s junior varsity team as an undergrad. In fact, it was as a member of the square dancing team when he was a senior at Roberson High School.

“The reason I was on the square dance team was because my girlfriend was on the square dance team,” he said. “She wanted me to be a square dancer. So I was a square dancer.”

Also … why no timeouts?

One thematic throughline during Williams’ speech Friday was about why he rarely spent his timeouts. It was one of his most distinct qualities as a coach — and one that drew the ire of fans and press alike even at the height of his success.

He offered two stories about this philosophy that stuck out.

The first was about a reporter questioning him about his coaching tactics early in his career. Williams noticed it and delivered a famously snarky response: “So finally I said to him, ‘Go ahead and write your article, I don’t care. Nobody reads it anyway.’ And then I added, ‘Besides, the two easiest jobs in the world are being a college basketball coach and a golf course superintendent because everybody knows how to do your job better than you do.’ It’s the greatest press conference I ever had. Within 10 days, I had 21 letters from golf course superintendents across the country inviting me to come and play their golf course.”

The other was what John Calipari told him after Luke Maye hit the game-winning shot against Kentucky right after Kentucky’s Malik Monk hit a crazy, game-tying three.

“We walked out to the bus and I hear someone. ‘Roy!’ I turned around and it was John Calipari,” he said. “And John came up, he cursed a little bit, and he said, ‘When we hit that shot, I was trying to call a timeout. Because I knew you weren’t going to. I wanted to get my defense set. But no, you got it in so quickly.’ He said, ‘I turned to my staff as soon as the ball crossed the 10-second line, and said we just lost the game.’ So it was something we practiced all the time. I didn’t want to call a timeout because we knew what we were going to do.

“But I will admit, later on in my career, sometimes I didn’t call a timeout just to piss the media off. Or the fans, too, you know. Coaches gotta have fun too!”

He then punctuated the funny story with a coda from his heart.

“I will tell you, I coached for 48 years, and nobody had more fun than I did,” he said. “And I mean that sincerely.”