Roy Williams: Stayed at KU to fulfill promise to Nick Collison | Trending Now

0:01Hey guys, Graham here. It's Friday, which means we get to share with you another one of our most popular clips from a past interview. What you're about to listen to is trending this week on our Facebook page. Hope you enjoy it. Closest you ever came to coaching in the NBA? Well, I've been very lucky. I think it's 14 or 15 different teams that either called and asked me to come and talk to them about being their head coach. and some of those even just flat out offered me the job. But there was only one time that I thought about because I thought recruiting was getting out of hand on the negative side.

0:39And I went home and told Wanda, I says, if I want to keep coaching, I may have to go to high school again or I may have to go to the NBA because I'm not enjoying where recruiting is going. And then all of a sudden, Nick Collison, Drew Gooden, and Kirk Heinrich. That was the class that we brought in at Kansas in 99, I guess, and they restored my belief that you can find kids who really do want to play college basketball and want to get a degree and love playing as a team, and I was able to make it for another 21 years, 22 years, something like that. Take me through the frenzy around when you were considering making the jump from Kansas to UNC the first go around and ultimately decided to stay.

1:29Wow. You said in your book, it was the toughest time that I ever had. It far surpassed whatever pain, anger, and sorrow that I'd endured as a kid. Yeah. Oh, I believe that still. That was the toughest time because North Carolina was my school. It was not my dream job because I never, people don't believe this, but it's true. I never dreamed about being a North Carolina basketball coach. When I was an assistant here, I was going to be happy to be Coach Smith's assistant for 30 more years. And then all of a sudden, you know, people started asking me about it. And then all of a sudden, I ended up being the coach at Kansas.

2:05And I loved Kansas. And so North Carolina was home. Our children, our families, it was home. Kansas is really freaking good. Okay. And so I loved that place. and I was torn because it wasn't, there was no good answer, but there was no great answer either. For several nights, I didn't sleep. I cared, and I can't even say cared. I loved both schools, but I had promised Nick Collison that one of the schools we were recruiting against that said, if you go to Kansas, Roy Williams is not going to be there. He'll be at North Carolina, And so the family asked me, and I said, I'll be here as long as you're here.

2:48And I know some people think it's sort of silly or corny or anything, but I never could answer that question of what to say to Nick. And I loved what was going on at Kansas. I loved everything about it, and it was hard. Describe that feeling, though, when you announced it to the football stadium. Well, it was sort of crazy because, you know, there was so much attention. and I just wanted to let me get by myself to do some thinking. And every time I'd turn around, there was a camera there or something. And I said, come on, guys, can I just go have a few moments of peace? And I did shame them because they all got this sad look on their face and they left me alone.

3:30So that day when I made the decision, it was the most emotional I'd ever felt in my life about what words am I going to say. but we were talking earlier about I haven't had an affinity for Coca-Cola classics and I think I'd had about 200 ounces that day I'm not exaggerating and so I'm sitting there and I'm still not knowing so I just said I'm staying you know and that was about the if only if you were grading it on how eloquent it was it was about as low as you could be but it was at that time it was the perfect decision. What was interesting is when that happened, you said folks at UNC kind of, some folks kind of wiped you off as coach.

4:18Long-time relationships kind of ceased to exist, obviously since repaired. But then the same thing happened kind of in a different way when you left Kansas. How strange was that dynamic for you on both fronts? It was strange and it was hard to handle because when I stayed in Kansas, a lot of very good friends were really disappointed in me or upset or mad. And then when I did come back three years later, it was the same thing at Kansas, and that was really hard. Other than the serious injury or death to my family, I've never had anything more difficult than what I went through this afternoon, talking to my team and telling those 13 young men that I was leaving them.

5:00Last time I decided to stay because it was the right thing. This time, I decided to leave because it was the right thing. I tried to learn from it and tried to talk to my teams and my children. What you want in life is you want people that are with you regardless. And you don't have very many of those. You have other people who are with you if you do what they want you to do. But no matter how small it may be, you want to have some people who are really with you. I call it my foxhole buddies. That stuck with me the whole time. But there were some sad moments. There were some very difficult moments on both sides.

5:42Some people said some things and terminated our friendship. That was just very hard. And then when I came back, you know, there were some things said in both cases that hurt me deeply, still do. But still, I had that group, the foxhole buddies that took care of me. As always, thanks for listening. To see more trending clips from my team, go to youtube.com slash Graham Bensinger.