Williams spent career in Smith’s shadow, now leaves big one

For someone who spent his entire career in the shadow of a man he considered a giant, a mentor and a friend, Roy Williams leaves North Carolina having done as much as anyone ever could in the footsteps of Dean Smith.

Williams announced his retirement Thursday having left a legacy of his own at the alma mater he so loved, as high a compliment as could be paid to anyone in his position.

The 70-year-old left hints along the way this season, whether it was kissing the court after the Tar Heels’ final home game of the season, yet another Senior Night win over Duke, or last month’s $3 million donation to UNC that felt like Williams’ own encomium to the university.

Yet even as the news is still shocking in its finality, given the length of Williams’ tenure and the way the past two seasons went, in some ways it has been a long time coming. Over the past decade, Williams has endured the scandal at North Carolina — “the junk” as he always called it — health scares of his own and within his family and the loss of some of his closest friends, Smith among them.

Despite all of that, he recruited and groomed the 2016-2017 teams that won one national title and nearly another, and had every chance to win a fourth national title if Kendall Marshall had been healthy in 2012. Still, the toll it took on him was apparent, even before the pandemic.

The last two seasons, a rare noncompetitive one last year and this season’s scratch-andclaw to the NCAA Tournament, certainly raised questions on multiple fronts, not only about Williams’ emotional capacity to endure such losing, but the suitability of the basketball precepts that guided him so well for so long to the modern game.

Just as Smith walked away and left the keys on the table for Bill Guthridge when college basketball started to veer away from what he knew and loved — coaching a teenaged Rasheed Wallace might do that to anyone — there may be some of that going on with Williams in an environment where the game is changing quickly and so are the players.

Maybe, it was just the right time. For Williams. And for North Carolina.

If he didn’t go out on a high note — that 23-point, first-round loss to Wisconsin was a doozy — he hit so many along the way to wipe out the hard feelings when he chose to stay at Kansas instead of taking over for Guthridge, unthinkable apostasy within the Carolina family. He answered the call the second time, righting a program that lost its way under Matt Doherty and turning UNC basketball back into what it had always been.

Whether it was his inimitable Royisms or his tempest-in-a-teapot controversies (that always seemed timed to take attention away from his team when it was struggling) or his afternoons spent at Boshamer Stadium watching baseball, his tenure was supremely and uniquely Roy through and through. He did things his way, which was his own spin on the Smith way, and he did them well.

That sounds easy now, in retrospect, two decades of success later, with three more banners hanging in the Smith Center.

It was anything but. Smith’s legacy loomed over whoever held that position. Guthridge was the chosen heir. Doherty tried to turn the page. Williams was the prodigal son.

Now there’s a new legacy hanging over whoever occupies that office next. Williams did as well as anyone could in Smith’s shadow, and he leaves a shadow of his own, different but in some ways just as large, over his successor.