HOME AT LAST AFTER A CHILDHOOD IN WHICH WARM FAMILY SCENES WERE ALL TOO RARE, ROY WILLIAMS HAS FOUND IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE COACHING TOP-RANKED KANSAS

Roy Williams, the coach of Kansas, can still close his eyes and
see his mother, her raven-black hair pulled back, standing at
the stove with her apron on, cooking biscuits and milk gravy and
sausages. Or canning green beans and tomatoes for winter meals.
Or standing over an ironing board with piles of other folks'
clothes at her feet. He doesn't remember her ever taking a
vacation. As a mother of two--Roy and his older sister,
Frances--and as the ex-wife of an alcoholic whose life had spun
out of control, Lallage Williams had all she could do to provide
for her family.

Hers had become a mean, hardscrabble existence, and it pained
Frances and Roy to watch her struggle. Lallage, known to her
family as Mimmie, had grown up picking cotton east of Asheville,
N.C., and later worked in factories most of her life, including
25 years as an inspector at the Vanderbilt shirt factory. But
after her marriage collapsed and the family income dwindled, she
had to take on part-time work as a maid and a laundress to make
ends meet.

"For several years there, I really felt my mom had to battle
every day to make things go, so that on Friday she could pay
this bill and that and then have enough left for food," Roy
says. "Some of my worst memories are coming home in sixth or
seventh grade and finding her ironing. Ten cents for a shirt, 10
cents for a pair of pants. And this after she had worked all
day. You don't think that was hard to see? I knew that a lot of
moms didn't have to do that, and I didn't want to watch her, so
I'd just leave."

Every day Roy would go over to the basketball courts at Biltmore
Elementary School, and afterward he and his friends would stop
at Ed's service station on Hendersonville Road, where each of
them got a Coca-Cola from the vending machine--each of them
except Roy. "I couldn't, because I didn't have 10 cents," he
says. When Mimmie heard that the boys stopped at Ed's after
basketball, she asked Roy what he drank when the other boys had
Cokes. "Oh, I just have some water," he told her. All these
years later, Williams, who's now 46, can't tell this story
without pausing to swallow hard as he describes walking into the
kitchen the next morning, after Mimmie had gone to work, and
seeing there on the corner of the table what would become for
him the symbol of her goodness and her struggle. "There was 10
cents sitting there," he says.

This remains prominent among the searing memories of his boyhood
days in North Carolina. So much so that when his old high school
basketball coach, Buddy Baldwin, came to spend a weekend at
Kansas two years ago, Williams told him the story all over
again. At one point Williams escorted Baldwin out to the garage
and pointed to a large refrigerator and told him, "Open that up."

Baldwin swung open the door and looked inside. All the shelves,
from front to back, were lined with hundreds of cans of
Coca-Cola Classic. Four unopened cases were piled on top of the
fridge. Williams then told Baldwin, "I said to myself back then,
'Someday I'm going to have all the Coca-Cola I want.'"

Clearly, Williams isn't a man who has forgotten where he came
from.

For Baldwin and all those who remember Williams from his days at
T.C. Roberson High, the first and foremost truth about him is
this: Neither all the years of grinding in North Carolina nor
all the seasons of glory in Kansas have altered his nature a
whit. "He's like he was as a senior in high school," Baldwin
says. "He hasn't changed at all."

What has changed dramatically, of course, is Williams's status.
As of Monday, Kansas not only was ranked No. 1, as it has been
through most of the season, but also was favored to win this
week's Big 12 tournament and, indeed, the NCAA title. With wins
at Oklahoma and Nebraska last week, the Jayhawks ran their
record to 29-1, their only defeat a 96-94 double-overtime loss
at Missouri on Feb. 4.

This is the eighth straight season under Williams in which
Kansas has had 25 or more victories. No major college coach has
won more games faster. From 1946-47 to '54-55, North Carolina
State's Everett Case had 241 wins, the best mark ever for a
Division I coach over his first nine seasons--until Sunday, when
Williams got No. 242 in Kansas's 85-65 defeat of the
Cornhuskers. Along the way Williams has won five Big Eight or
Big 12 regular-season conference championships outright. And his
Jayhawks have made the NCAA tournament every year for the last
seven seasons and twice have gone as far as the Final Four,
including that magical tour de force in '91 when, at the end of
his third season at Kansas, Williams guided his 12th-ranked
Jayhawks past No. 3 Indiana, No. 2 Arkansas and No. 4 North
Carolina--the team coached by Dean Smith, whom he'd served as an
assistant for 10 years--before losing the tournament final 72-65
to Duke.

"The thing that amazes me most about Roy is how he's gone from a
total unknown to truly one of the elite," says Oklahoma State
coach Eddie Sutton, one of Williams's chief conference rivals.
"He has accomplished so much so quickly."

Just as remarkable is the fact that Williams almost didn't take
the Kansas job. It was July 7, 1988, and Williams had just cut
short a Bermuda vacation with his wife, Wanda--the first he had
taken alone with her in four years--to answer Kansas athletic
director Bob Frederick's request that he fly at once to Lawrence
for an interview. Just three months earlier Danny Manning and
the Miracles had cut down the nets in Kansas City after beating
Oklahoma 83-79 for the national title, but no sooner had the
cheering stopped than Larry Brown, the Jayhawks' coach, bolted
for the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA, leaving behind an empty
chair and a scent of impropriety strong enough that the NCAA had
come sniffing.

At the urging of Smith, a Kansas alumnus, Frederick had already
met once with Williams, at the Atlanta airport when Roy and
Wanda were en route to Bermuda. Before that two-hour meeting was
over, Frederick sensed that he had found his man--the heir to
James Naismith, Phog Allen and the 90 years of basketball
tradition in Lawrence.

"I know I'll catch a lot of heat for this in Kansas," Frederick
had told Smith after his first meeting with Williams. In fact,
Frederick caught heat for it in his own household. The night
before Williams was to arrive in Kansas, as Frederick was
undressing for bed, his wife, Margey, asked him, "Who are you
going to hire?" Her husband did not answer. Reading a message in
his silence, she said, "You're not going to hire that no-name
assistant from North Carolina, are you?"

"Yes, I am," he replied firmly.

"You can't do that," she said. "The alumni will kill you. They
want a big-time coach."

So it was, the very next evening, that this obscure, unproven
lieutenant of Smith's--who wasn't even his first assistant, mind
you, but his second--sat uneasily in Frederick's office, facing
a skeptical search committee and trying desperately to come to
terms with his own ambivalence.

Because Williams had grown up in a family devastated by alcohol,
he had emerged from adolescence reaching for those
moorings--predictability and structure--that had always been
denied him. Williams had found those things in Chapel Hill
during the years he had safely cocooned himself in the
regimented world according to Smith, and now suddenly there he
was on the brink of trading them away for the chance, with all
its uncertainties, to run his own show.

That he was also hounded by doubts about his own
abilities--"Coach, are you sure that you think I can do this?"
he had asked Smith--only paralyzed him further. True to himself,
thinking that he ought to share his doubts with Frederick and
the others, even at the risk of scaring them away, Williams
launched into a moving soliloquy about his love for Chapel Hill
and North Carolina.

He told his interviewers about how he had grown up in Asheville
and gone to high school there; about how he had played freshman
basketball as a walk-on at North Carolina in 1968-69 and, not
having been good enough to make the varsity, as a sophomore had
begun to keep team stats and dream of one day coaching in Chapel
Hill; about how he had married a North Carolina girl, born and
bred; about how they had raised their two children, Scott and
Kimberly, in the state; about how he had gone home again to
Asheville as a high school coach and then had been invited by
Smith to join the Tar Heels' staff as a part-time assistant; and
about how he and Wanda had packed up the U-Haul and left the
mountains of western Carolina to fulfill their dream.

The group listened in silence. "Chapel Hill has been a dream
place for me," Williams told them in his Blue Ridge drawl.
"Everything I wanted my dream world to be started and happened
there. I am coaching college basketball at North Carolina....
Folks, I'm not trying to upset you or anything. But I've got
this little ol' voice in the back of my head saying, 'Boy! Why
don't you tell these people, Thank you, and apologize for
wasting their time and get your tail on back to North Carolina.'
That's what I've got to fight. My love for North Carolina and
leaving there."

His voice caught once or twice as he spoke, and then his eyes
welled up as he finished and looked around the room and saw
Galen Fiss, Smith's old Kansas roomie and a former linebacker
with the Cleveland Browns, "with big ol' tears rolling down his
face," Williams says. And Fiss blurted, "Roy, I want you to know
this doesn't make me think any less of you at all. It makes me
think more of you! Nobody can love Kansas any more than I do,
and I know that you could love it like that too. I want that
kind of person as our coach."

Williams is straighter than an Arrow shirt, so square that he's
divisible by four, and cornier than a corncob pipe. But his
emotions play very near the surface, and through Fiss he
glimpsed a love of home that he'd been searching for, a sense
that Chapel Hill was possible in Lawrence. So when, at the end
of that interview, Frederick formally offered him the job, he
shook Frederick's hand and took it.

Margey Frederick looks back in amusement at her reservations
about Williams, but she had been right. When her husband chose a
man who had not coached a varsity game since he had a high
school job 10 years earlier, there were stirrings among Jayhawks
alumni. Monte Johnson, a former Kansas athletic director, says
the prevailing sentiment at the time was, "We don't know Roy
from Adam." Now Johnson calls him "the best coaching find of
maybe the last 20 years." And Williams has become as large a
part of the Jayhawks' basketball ethos as Phog Allen's
tombstone, at which he dutifully stops and pays homage during
his regular jogs through Oak Hill cemetery near the Kansas
campus. Eddie Fogler, who worked alongside Williams for eight
years as an assistant at Chapel Hill and is now the coach at
South Carolina, looks back at all the hand-wringing in Kansas a
decade ago and says with a chuckle, "Kansas people wanted every
big name in the business, and rightfully so, and they got stuck
with this little rinky-dink from Asheville, North Carolina...."

Asheville is the birthplace of Thomas Wolfe, the author of You
Can't Go Home Again, and Roy's father, Mack Clayton (Babe)
Williams, has long lived his own painful variation of that
novel's theme. Babe is 70 and works part time doing yard work
and hauling loads in his pickup, and on this February night he
is smoking unfiltered Pall Malls, one after another, on the
front porch of the house on Warren Avenue that he shares with
his fourth wife, Margaret. Almost 40 years ago, from 1958 to
'63, Babe lived next door with Mimmie and their two kids, in a
household tossed and buffeted by Babe's drinking.

"I had the nicest family," says Babe. "I had the nicest woman
that a man could ever have. There wasn't no better cook, no
better wife in the United States. She was the best mother I've
ever known. I've never known two kids as sweet, either. I was
stupid, I reckon. I wanted to be a damn smart aleck, trying to
show people I could do things which I shouldn't be doin'. We had
good times around here until I started drinking. Well, like I
said, I went on the wrong track, that's all. If I had only done
like a man's supposed to, but I didn't."

Roy had just turned eight when the Williamses moved to Warren
Avenue, and he remembers well the pain and turbulence of the
five years there. "Things were really tough," he says. "It
wasn't pleasant. Back then I didn't understand it, I didn't like
it, but I didn't let it dominate my life."

There were days when life with father grew rockier than usual,
and Mimmie would pack up and leave home with the children. More
than once they lived for a couple of weeks in a room at the
Shamrock Court Motel, owned by a relative, and they spent one
hot, dusty summer living in a small motor home in a trailer
park. Mimmie's periodic flights and the subsequent
reconciliations made for a nomadic existence for Frances and
Roy. "We bounced around quite a bit," Roy says.

Through the years, Roy grew fiercely devoted to his mother--a
strong, shy, humble woman of whom he says, "If there was ever an
angel, it was my mom." Sometimes Frances would stay with a
cousin for a while, but Roy would remain behind with his mother.
"He never spent a night away from home until high school,"
Frances says. "He felt he needed to be there. He was like a
protector to her."

Mimmie and Babe split up permanently in 1963, when she moved
with the children from Warren Avenue into a small, two-bedroom
house on Reed Street that she rented for $50 a month. After
years of bouncing around, Roy at last felt grounded. And free to
be a boy. "I was like a kid left all night in a candy store," he
says. Just two blocks away was Biltmore Elementary, which had a
gymnasium with indoor hoops and lighted outdoor courts, and Roy
began spending endless hours there shooting baskets. He had been
a loner in those gypsy years, and the game of basketball, more
than any other, fit his solitude. "I loved it more because I
could do it when I was alone," Williams says. "Give me a ball
and a goal, and I was in heaven. It was my refuge. I could go to
Biltmore, and there were no problems in the world."

For all that he has been through in his life, Williams betrays
no trace of anger or self-pity over his early home life. "I
never, never cried myself to sleep at night," he says, "and I
never wanted to run away from home." The boy who emerged from
the house on Reed Street was his mother's son. Possessed of an
easy manner, a surpassingly generous nature and a will to
sacrifice, he always eschewed the easy way to get where he was
going.

If you look closely, you can find expressions of Williams's
resolve in the way his teams play the game. As close as Smith
and Williams are in the style of basketball they teach--and much
of what Williams preaches in Lawrence has its origins in Chapel
Hill--they disagree on one finer point of the game: Confronted
by a screen, do man-to-man defenders switch or do they fight
through the pick? With all the illegal moving screens being set
these days, Smith argues in favor of switching. Not Williams,
who says, "I don't want to give players the easy way out. That's
lazy. Ever seen anybody screened when he is in a defensive
stance? Get in a defensive stance and fight through it!"

This is vintage Williams, and it expresses, with simple
eloquence, the approach he has taken at some of the crucial
bends and forks of his life. At T.C. Roberson High, Williams
found in Baldwin the father figure he lacked, the man who taught
him how to play the game and gave the boy a sense of purpose and
a belief in himself that he'd never had before. "I liked Roy's
attitude, his competitiveness, the way he was always 'Yessir!'
and 'Nosir!' and how he played both ends and tried to do
everything you told him," says Baldwin. "Watch his teams play.
That's how he was."

Baldwin hit all the right chords. "He was the first person to
give me confidence," Williams says, "the first to really make me
feel good about myself, the first to make me feel I could be
somebody."

At Baldwin's prodding, Roy had decided by the time he was a high
school senior that he wanted to be a coach. That decision was
father to a passion. "It became the most important thing in the
world for me," Williams says. "I woke up in the morning, and it
was the first thing I thought about, and when I went to bed at
night, it was the last thing I thought of." Again at the urging
of Baldwin, who had attended North Carolina, Roy aimed straight
east toward Chapel Hill, but because he had no money, it was the
hardest of the three routes he could have taken to college. He
was a good enough high school player that he could have had a
ride at some smaller western Carolina school. He was also an
excellent student and was tendered a full scholarship to study
engineering at Georgia Tech, but he spurned that offer, much to
the dismay of math teacher Rosa Lee Baldwin, whose lilting
Southern accent belied her reputation as the toughest instructor
at Roberson High. In class one afternoon she chided Roy for
turning down the Georgia Tech scholarship, warning all the girls
in class, including Williams's future wife, Wanda Jones, not to
have anything to do with him. Williams, imitating her slow
drawl, still recalls her remarks with relish: "Now, you
grrr-lls, I don't want any of you grrr-lls to mess with Roy, cuz
Roy is not gonna take this engineering scholarship cuz he wants
to be a coach. An' one of these days, Roy is gonna come over to
my house to borrow a loaf of bread...."

He could have used a loaf or two during his first year at
Carolina, which he financed by patching together enough in loans
and grants to make it through. In his second semester he began
working four nights a week as an intramural softball umpire and
thereby hit upon a way to subsidize his education. Williams
later became an intramural official for other sports and then
the supervisor of officials. He kept stats for Smith at home
games and, with Smith's permission, began in his sophomore year
to attend practices as if they were academic lectures: Sitting
high in the bleachers, he was a lone and feverish scholar,
scribbling notes on how Smith taught the game and orchestrated
his clockwork practices.

In 1973 Charles Lytle, the principal of Owen High in Swannanoa,
N.C., which is 10 miles east of Asheville, hired Williams as
basketball coach, and the reaction was a harbinger of what would
happen in Lawrence many years later. "I was laughed at when I
hired him," says Lytle. "Everybody told me, 'He's nothing but a
statistician at North Carolina!' But I've never known anybody
who could motivate kids like he could."

During his five years at Owen High, he turned his teams into an
extended family and tried to instill in his players the same
sense of self-worth that Baldwin had imparted to him years
before. He took them on steak cookouts, had them over to his
house to watch television and fed them milk and doughnuts during
off-season shootarounds. He and Wanda, whom he had married in
1973, right after getting a master's degree in education at
Chapel Hill, packed ham-and-cheese sandwiches and drinks for
road trips. "I felt like a part of his family," says one of his
players, Porky Spencer. "My father drove a truck and wasn't
around much, and Roy was my father."

The players began to sound like Williams after Baldwin got to
him. "He always made you feel like you were somebody," another
former player, Bobby Stafford, says. "I don't care how much you
had or who you were. He made you feel like you mattered. See his
players diving on the floor in Kansas? That's what he had us
doing."

Smith had employed Williams at his basketball camp for several
summers, and in 1978, when a position for a part-time assistant
opened on his staff at North Carolina, Smith offered it to
Williams. The job paid $2,700 a year. By then, the Williamses
had an infant son and a mortgage to pay on their new house, and
they both had good jobs--Wanda was a high school English
teacher--that would pay them a combined $30,000 a year. When
Williams mentioned the offer to Wanda, she groaned in protest.
"That's the dumbest idea I've heard of," she said. "We've got a
new baby. We just moved into this house. I'm from here. You're
from here. Our friends are all here. For $2,700 a year?"

Roy nodded, but the look in his eyes said that staying in
Asheville would be like taking that scholarship offer from
Georgia Tech. "When do we leave?" she asked.

And so, with that U-Haul hitched to their old blue Mustang, they
left the mountains for Chapel Hill. They scratched to survive.
Smith had arranged a high school teaching job for Wanda, at
$9,000 a year, and he gave his new lieutenant a job as courier.
Every Sunday, during football and basketball season, Williams
would rise at 5 a.m., climb in his car and drive 250 miles to
deliver videotapes of Smith's weekly television show--or in the
fall, the football coach's show--to the TV stations in
Greensboro and then Asheville. After pausing in Asheville to
have breakfast with his mother, he would drive back to Chapel
Hill. That was 500 miles of driving for $105, minus the cost of
gas. "On his day off, he's spending nine hours in the car,"
Fogler says. Williams did that for five years.

When school was out, he had to find another source of income, so
he began another career, as a traveling salesman, selling
calendars that pictured members of the Tar Heels basketball
team. In the summer of '79, sharing all profits with a middle
man who did nothing, he drove 9,000 miles around North Carolina,
sold 10,500 calendars and netted $2,400 for himself. "The
hardest thing I ever did in my life," he says. "The middle man
never made one phone call or drove a mile. I got a lot smarter
and got rid of him." The summer of '80 he made $9,000, and his
profits soared every year thereafter. By 1987, with all the
contacts he had made over the years, he was making $30,000 a
year on this sideline. "I was the best calendar salesman in the
country," he says.

A year later, of course, Williams was selling Kansas
door-to-door around the country, and he was just as persuasive
as a recruiter. That first fall he got verbal commitments from
three highly regarded prospects--Adonis Jordan and Harold Miner,
both from California, and Thomas Hill, from Texas. But then
trouble came. Kansas was hit with NCAA probation that fall for
violations that had occurred on Brown's watch, and the penalty
was severe: no postseason play for a year, and the loss of three
scholarships and all paid campus recruiting visits for one year.
That scared off Hill, who called to say he would be going to
Duke instead. A teary-eyed Miner told Williams that he was sorry
but he was going to USC. Now Williams had to do the sales job of
his life and persuade Jordan, the point guard he needed, to
stay. "Sometimes you just have to believe in somebody, and
that's what I'm asking you to do--to have some belief in me," he
told Jordan. When Jordan said he would honor his commitment,
Williams went into the coach's office and wrote on the
blackboard, HOORAY...ADONIS IS COMING.

Just as revealing was an incident that occurred later in
Jordan's career. He was late for the bus as the Jayhawks left a
road game at Oklahoma. That's an intolerable sin in Williams's
world. So the bus left without Jordan, who had to catch a ride
back to Lawrence with the radio crew. Yes, Williams had wooed
Jordan hard--but not so hard that he couldn't discipline him
later.

Williams's players uniformly offer that they trusted him right
off, at the moment they met him. Scot Pollard, the Jayhawks
6'11" senior center, says that one recruiter buttered him up by
saying he would be the next Shaquille O'Neal. "I knew that
wasn't true," Pollard says. "Coach doesn't blow smoke, and I bet
he loses players because he doesn't. He just told me, 'You have
the chance to be part of a great program and be a great player
in it. I've got some things I can teach you, but it's up to
you.' No promises."

Not surprisingly, Williams relates to mothers as though they all
are named Mimmie. In 1990 Patrick Richey was a high school
senior leaning toward Missouri when Williams paid a visit to his
home. At one point, Richey says, Williams looked June Richey in
the eye and said, "If your son comes to Kansas, I will take care
of him exactly the same way I would want you to take care of my
son if I sent him to live with you." After Williams left,
Patrick says, "My mother stood up and said, 'Folks, we're going
to Kansas!'"

What players find when they get to Lawrence is a regimented
world. Williams is a compulsive organizer. His practice plans
are organized literally to the minute, in the manner of Smith's,
right down to the Deano touch that seniors get more time for
water breaks than freshmen do. In consequence, when matters get
tight late in a game, the players know they have a system they
can count on. Says Nebraska coach Danny Nee, "Looking at Kansas
basketball is similar to looking at Nebraska football. You might
have a turnover here, a bad pass there, but the Jayhawks play
with consistency, and certain things are always going to be
there--rebounding, defense, the contesting of shots, hustle.
That's what separates them from the pack. The team, even when
it's playing poorly, plays together. It's not disjointed, ever.
The system is a constant. Kansas plays like a team that always
has momentum on its side."

Williams demands that players work tenaciously at both ends of
the floor, and when they don't, he can go off. He has an
explosive, vein-popping temper--he fires Magic Markers against
walls, kicks over trash cans, throws duffel bags across
rooms--and more than once has kicked all hands out of practice
for lack of effort. One day, when guard Rex Walters was playing
defense lackadaisically, Williams heaved him from a workout,
bellowing, "Get out of my sight! Don't contaminate me!"

He has been known to plunge into dark depressions when the
season is over, and he stews on the defeat that has ended the
Jayhawks' latest run in the NCAA tournament. His peers say that
no coach takes losing any harder than Williams. "I don't have
nightmares, because I don't sleep," he says.

Whatever happens this March, Williams cannot see himself in any
better place. He has already turned down a couple of offers to
coach in the NBA, including a bid from the Los Angeles Lakers
for $1 million a year in 1992, and he has no intention of going
anywhere right now. The abiding fear in Lawrence is that Smith,
66, will be leaving soon and that Chapel Hill will again be
beckoning Williams. "The Kansas guys keep calling me," says
Smith. "You know, 'Are you all right? Is your health O.K.?'"

It has been a long, often difficult journey for Williams, but he
has brought to his life the kind of order that his childhood
lacked--though not without sadness. On July 7, 1992, while
undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, Mimmie died of cardiac
arrest. "Part of my life ended there," he says. "Not just her
life, but part of mine."

Roy has what Wanda describes as "an uneasy relationship" with
his father--"It's something that his dad doesn't necessarily
handle any better than he does," she says--and while Roy phones
Babe occasionally, sends him Jayhawks hats and shirts, and keeps
a picture of him in his wallet, he's not as close to him as he
is, for instance, to Baldwin. Williams has never had his father
come for a visit to Kansas. Says Wanda, "It's not like Roy's
dying to be best friends with his dad, and I think part of it is
not so much that his father hurt him but that Roy thinks he hurt
his mom." When Babe attended Mimmie's wake, father and son spoke
for a few minutes alone, and for the first time Babe apologized
to Roy. "I told him I was sorry about everything that happened,"
says Babe. "I said I loved his mother, and I still do. There's
nothing I can do to change what I did."

Roy says he understands that. "It's over and done with, so let's
go on," he says. He doesn't blame his father for what happened,
he says, and while Frances believes Roy is still angry with Babe
for how he treated Mimmie, Roy demurs. "I think I'm mad at
alcohol," he says. "I don't think it's my dad that did that. I
don't want him portrayed as the villain here. I believe
[alcoholism] is a disease. I believe he is remorseful. How can I
be mad at him for that? I love him. He's my dad, and that ain't
gonna change."

Nowhere has it been more vividly clear that this child of a
broken home has found a place for himself than it was on Feb.
22, after Kansas beat Kansas State in its final home game of
this season and each senior was given the chance to speak to
that day's crowd of 16,300 fans who lingered to hear them. The
place was electric. Guard Jerod Haase, who lost his father just
before he transferred to Kansas, said to Williams, "You've been
like a father to me." And guard Jacque Vaughn began by saying,
"You're not just a coach..." but he choked up and couldn't go
on, and he and Williams ended up in a long, emotional embrace.
In the end Williams told the crowd, "This is not only the
greatest place in the world to play college basketball, this is
the greatest place in the world to coach college basketball."

The standing crowds erupted as he walked away, reminding him
once more that he was home again.

B/W PHOTO: COURTESY OF FRANCES BAKER ROY AND FRANCES SHARE A HAPPY MOMENT WITH THEIR FATHER ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 1962 [Mack Clayton (Babe) Williams, Frances Baker, and Roy Williams]

COLOR PHOTO: JOHN BIEVER [Roy Williams]

COLOR PHOTO: MANNY MILLAN LAFRENTZ (45) AND POLLARD ARE BIG KEYS TO WILLIAMS'S PUSH FOR THE TITLE [Raef LaFrentz, Scot Pollard, and others in game]

COLOR PHOTO: JOHN BIEVER [See caption above--Roy Williams]

COLOR PHOTO: BILL FRAKES WILLIAMS'S TIGHTLY DRAWN PRACTICE PLAN EVEN INCLUDES FOOD FOR THOUGHT [Roy Williams coaching players in practice]

COLOR PHOTO: BILL FRAKES BABE (WITH WIFE MARGARET) HAS APOLOGIZED, BUT STILL ISN'T CLOSE TO ROY [Mack Clayton (Babe) Williams and Margaret Williams]

COLOR PHOTO: COURTESY OF FRANCES BAKER MIMMIE TAUGHT ROY SACRIFICE, WHICH HELPED HIM GET THROUGH COLLEGE [Roy Williams and Lallage Williams]

COLOR PHOTO: JERRY WACHTER WILLIAMS ALMOST PASSED UP THE KANSAS JOB TO STAY WITH SMITH (RIGHT) [Roy Williams and Dean Smith]

COLOR PHOTO: BILL FRAKES IN THE WILLIAMS 'FAMILY' NAIL POLISH IS O.K., AS LONG AS IT'S KANSAS BLUE [Scot Pollard, wearing blue nail polish, and Roy Williams]

#1 KU PRACTICE PLAN FOR Oct. 15, 1996

EMPHASIS OF THE DAY: Off.--Sprint to offense.
Def.--Sprint back on defense.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: It's amazing how much can be accomplished
when no one cares who gets the credit.

STATIONS: A--Stretching
B--Jump Rope
C--Shooting Form
D--Individual Work
(Perimeter--Beginning dribble Post--Favorite & Counter)

TIME SUBJECTS
6:40 On Track--Stretching
7:00 On Court--Shooting Form
7:08 Individual Work (This is time to improve individually.)
7:22 Discussion
7:24 Fast Break Drills #1 - #4 (Pacers drill)
7:30 Defensive Stance & Step-Slide (3:00 min.)
7:35 Defensive Stations 1) Guarding ball--middle--JH
(3:00 min.) 2) Deny--MD
3) Close out & challenge shot--ND
7:45 Free Throws and Water (At every basket)
7:49 Group Work I--Shooting (Continue shooting form) Group A
II--Defense--Group B & C (1-man front shell)
7:55 Rotate
8:01 Rotate
8:07 Shooting and Water Break (3:00 min.)
8:13 Fast Break Drill # 3 (3 on 2, 2 on 1)
8:17 Secondary Break--5 on 0 (Corner option Finish it)
(Dribble option)
8:25 Half-court Offense (Quick passes)
8:35 Controlled Secondary Break Game (Secondary into quick
passes)
(Look for drive)
8:55 Conditioning

BLUE RED INJURED
1) Robertson 1) McGrath Vaughn
2) Haase 2) Thomas Bradford
3) Ransom 3) Pierce
4) Williams 4) LaFrentz (Branstrom)
5) Pollard 5) Pugh