Before Roy Williams became North Carolina’s second-winningest coach in program history, he was an assistant on Tar Heels legend Dean Smith's coaching staff for 10 years.
North Carolina won a national championship 1982 when Williams served as an assistant for Smith, and six years later, Williams left to become the head coach and Kansas. But before Williams’s first North Carolina tenure ended, he was courted for a job opportunity by the Indiana coach Bob Knight.
In a conversation with Sports Illustrated's Jon Wertheim on Wednesday, Williams recalled the moment Knight approached Smith about adding someone to his staff
“Coach Smith said to Coach Knight, ‘Well, who are you looking for?’” Williams said. “And I think Coach Knight said, ‘Somebody like Roy.’”
Wertheim: Varsity Letters: Inside a Basketball Bromance
Smith offered to loan Williams to Knight for a year. However, when Williams asked his wife, Wanda, what she thought of him coaching on Knight’s staff, she was not thrilled about the opportunity.
Per Wertheim, Wanda had recently finished reading John Feinstein’s A Season on the Brink, a book that portrayed Knight as both a basketball genius and an emotionally-turbulent bully.
“She said, ‘Are you serious?’” Williams recalls.
Williams did not accept the offer. He then won 419 games at Kansas, reaching the Final Four three times before returning to Chapel Hill in 2003. North Carolina reached four Final Fours with Williams before his retirement in 2021, winning the national championship three times.
