One-on-one with UNC’s Roy Williams

When Roy Williams arrived at a Raleigh, N.C., bookstore last week to sign copies of his newly released autobiography, the North Carolina basketball coach was greeted by a line that stretched out the door.

“The store ordered 1,000 books and sold them all that night,” Williams said. “I felt like I signed every one of them. The publisher thinks it has a chance to end up on the New York Times best-seller list.”

Williams paused and chuckled.

“I didn’t even know how to respond to that,” Williams said, “because it sounds so bizarre.”

Maybe to Williams – but not to the legion of Tar Heel fans who adore him more than ever following last season’s victory over Michigan State in the NCAA championship. Gratifying as the title was for Williams, he’s now shifted his attention to an even tougher task.

Winning another one.

Williams addressed the Heels’ chances during a 30-minute phone interview last week with Yahoo! Sports. Along with discussing his team, Williams offered up opinions on a variety of other random subjects: books, rankings, recruiting, travel tips, Coca-Cola and John Wall.

Q: Even after losing standouts such as Tyler Hansbrough, Ty Lawson and Wayne Ellington, North Carolina was ranked No. 6 in the preseason top 25 poll. Is that about right? Or is the ranking off base?

A: The rankings are way out of whack. We lost five of our top seven players. We have two freshmen [John Henson and Dexter Strickland] who are really highly rated, but we’re asking them to play positions they’ve never played before. We have two seniors, one junior and everyone else is a freshman or sophomore. So the rankings may be a little too kind. In saying that, if things were to go really well, by the end of the year we could be a really good club.

Q: What are the main question marks? A: We’ve got two of them: Number one is, “Are we going to get good point-guard play?” Every really good team I’ve ever had has had great play at the point-guard position. The second one is, “Are we going to make our outside shots?” We lost 92 percent of our scoring from three-point range. We don’t have a single pure shooter on the team.

Q: You mentioned the point-guard position, where sophomore Larry Drew takes over for Ty Lawson. How is he coming along? His stat lines from your first two games looked decent.

A: “Decent” is a good way to put it. He’s shown some flashes of being really, really good. He’s just never been counted on. It was like that for us at Kansas in 1990-91, when Adonis Jordan went from playing behind Kevin Pritchard as a freshman to being the main man. We went through some growing pains with him but, at the same time, he had some big, big nights for us. That’s what it may be like with Larry. He has a chance to be a big-time player. We’ve got confidence in the fact that he’s going to get to that point. But right now his consistency is something we’re concerned about. Right now a lot of teams are playing young point guards at this stage in the year that will end up being very, very good by the end of the year.

Q: Your teams at Kansas and North Carolina have always played so fast – especially last year with Lawson. Will you be able to play that fast with Drew?

A: Nobody has Ty Lawson’s speed. But Larry has great speed. He really does. The main thing we need is to get guys running with him to give him someone to pitch ahead to. Kirk Hinrich was fantastic with the ball, but for a while Kirk didn’t have another Kirk to throw the ball to. Kirk was the best runner we ever had, and when Aaron Miles came in, he was a great benefactor of Kirk’s running. Aaron didn’t push it nearly as well as Kirk did in his first year or so, but he had Kirk to throw it to. That was a huge bonus. I think if we can find someone for Larry to throw it to, we’ll be fine with that part.

Q: Marcus Ginyard is back after missing last season because of an injury, and you signed guard Dexter Strickland. How much will they handle the ball?

A: Marcus will handle it some for sure, and Dexter is playing backup point guard right now, which is an adjustment for him because he’s really a two-guard. He’s never played point guard in his life.

Q: Speaking of freshmen, some websites have said that John Henson would be a top-10 pick in the NBA draft if he decides to turn pro after his freshman year. How is he coming along?

A: He’s a wonderful kid that has tremendous potential but he’s not ready to be a perimeter player and he doesn’t have the size to be an inside player. He’s 6-foot-10 and 189 pounds. We’re trying to make him a perimeter player because that’s where his future is going to be. That’s where his greatest potential is. Because of his lack of bulk and lack of strength, he’s not going to be able to be a post player, so it’s a huge change for him. Down the line he has a chance to be a big-time player, but whether or not it’s going to be this year, I don’t know.

Q: Obviously, the recruiting battle you had to go through to get Henson – along with plenty of your other players – was intense. What are your feelings about the process you have to go through to land a top player these days? Toward the end of your career at Kansas, you expressed frustration at the “seediness” of the recruiting game.

A: I still get those feelings sometimes, but not like I had at that time. What I’ve tried to continue to do is to make good judgments about people and to try to recruit kids like Kirk Hinrich and Nick Collison. There are so many great players out there. I just choose to try not to recruit in situations that I think have the possibility of being unpleasant. Since Nick, Kirk and Drew Gooden came along, I haven’t been involved in very many bad recruiting situations. We’ve lost some guys. Delvon Roe – we thought we had him. We thought it was a done deal, the whole bit. We ended up losing him. We’ve lost some other kids, but at least it hasn’t been the messy kind of thing that it was getting to be a couple of years ago.

Q: Why didn’t you make more of an effort to recruit John Wall, the nation’s No. 1-ranked player who signed with Kentucky? He’s from Chapel Hill.

A: That gets so much publicity here. A friend of mine who is also a friend of his asked me to call him [during the Final Four] and talk to him about the recruiting process. I made one phone call to him and that was it. He’s the best point-guard prospect I’ve seen since Jason Kidd. I love the way he plays. It was a tough situation for us with so many other things going on, so we chose not to go there. But he’s the best point-guard prospect I’ve seen since Jason Kidd – just a tremendous, tremendous player.

Q: You once flew all the way to California to watch a player [Eric Chenowith] shoot one free throw during a private workout. He made it, and you walked out of the gym, convinced that you wanted to sign him. Any other humorous recruiting stories?

A: After we signed Tyler Hansbrough, I wanted to go see him play during his senior year, so I got a private plane to take [my wife] Wanda and I to Poplar Bluff, Missouri. But we had to land in Jonesboro, Arkansas, because the airport in Poplar Bluff was shut down because of bad weather. It was about 90 miles away, and we had a rental car waiting on us and thought we’d be able to make it for some of the game. But when we landed, I called Tyler’s dad and he said, “Coach, they’re already taking the court and the weather is horrible. There’s no way you’ll make it. Don’t come.” So I got in the rental car, drove to Sonic, bought two burgers and two chicken sandwiches for my wife and the two pilots, and then we flew back home. I told Wanda, “Isn’t this great? Not too many people will get their wives on a private plane, fly them to Jonesboro, Arkansas, to go to Sonic and then come back home.” It’s part of that glamorous life that everyone thinks we lead.

Q: Poplar Bluff must’ve seemed like a short trip compared to California, a state in which you make frequent recruiting stops. What’s the secret to keeping your sanity during all those five-hour flights?

A: I take a lot of reading material. I read autobiographies from very successful people. I love reading old Western tales and stories. I do a lot of reading. Plus, now with computers, you can have game tape and just pop it in a laptop. So that part is so much easier. I do more reading than anything, though.

Q: What about music?

A: Believe it or not, I actually have an iPod. My daughter [Kimberly] gave it to me, and she put a lot of songs on there for me. I used to never listen to country and western, but the past five or six years, I’ve listened to more and more of that. They have some of the greatest titles and the greatest stories in those songs. You can’t help but laugh at some of the things they say. I listen to Shania Twain from time to time, or maybe a little Sugarland. My buddy from Lawrence, Scott Buxton, has a daughter [Sara] who is trying to make it big in the country-music industry. I listen to her stuff a lot too. If it’s not country, it’s soul music: Marvin Gaye, Tina Turner. No Metallica. No heavy metal. No rap. A little bit of country western and a little bit of soul.

Q: You mentioned your daughter, Kimberly. Has it been good to spend more time around her since your move back to North Carolina?

A: Absolutely. She’s a dance instructor in Charlotte, and my son, Scott, is a bond trader in Charlotte. His wife is a physical therapist. Sometime around January 1, I’m supposed to be a grandfather.

Q: Congratulations. Another random question: In the past, you’ve said you’re addicted to Coca-Cola. How many of those do you drink each day to stay awake and alert amid your busy schedule?

A: I used to drink seven to 10 Cokes a day for 35 years. I’m still on the Coke products, but I drink Sprite Zero now because the sugar content of the Cokes is just too much for me. I went to the Mayo Clinic a few years ago to see about my vertigo, and they told me I needed to stop that other stuff. My triglycerides were through the roof, so they told me to cut back, and I ended up going on Lipitor also. Now I may have one Coke every two or three weeks. If I’m going to have a really good steak, I still love having a Coca-Cola Classic with that.

Q: Are you still an avid runner?

A: I can honestly say that during the season, six days a week, I do five miles at lunch. I used to sprint it with my buddies at Kansas. Then we started jogging it. Just before I left there, we were jogging and walking, half-and-half. Now at North Carolina, we basically just walk at a really good pace and only jog about three-quarters of a mile. Back in the day, we’d run five miles at less than an 8-minute-mile pace. We’d go pretty doggone hard. It really was a sprint for us. It wouldn’t be for Jim Ryun.

Q: Let’s talk about your book: “Hard Work: My Life On and Off the Court.” There are a lot of stories and details in those pages that haven’t been public until now. Some of them involve your father, who battled alcoholism. Others involved some of the behind-the-scenes happenings as you tried to decide whether to leave Kansas for North Carolina. What was it like getting some of those things off your chest?

A: I shared so many things in the book that I’ve never shared with anyone else. It’s hard when you have some tough times or some sad times in your life … it’s hard to talk about those, and I did. When I was asked to do a book, I had no idea what kind of book it was going to be. The consensus among everyone was that it should be an autobiography. I was like, ‘That’s easy for you guys to say. You don’t have to open up your whole life.” Once we got into it, I was like, “Well, if we’re going to do this, let’s talk about everything, and that way I won’t look back and regret leaving something out.” I just decided to tell the whole story. Buddy Baldwin, my high school coach, told me a long time ago that if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you said. There’s nothing in there that isn’t true.

Q: Are you hoping some of the stories you shared will help others who may be going through a tough time?

A: You know me. I’m pretty corny. I don’t try to be that analytical with things I do. My hope would be that, if people choose to read the book, they’ll learn about so many times when I was a kid when people helped me. I had the parents of my friends, my coaches, my teachers … so many people that helped. So now, if they see another youngster out there that they can help, even if it’s with little things … those little things add up. They end up making a drastic difference in the way people carry themselves and the way people are able to overcome things in life. So if that purpose is served – if people can understand how big of a difference they can make in a little kid’s life just by helping them with little things – then I think it’s great.