They will never say never again about Roy Williams.
They will never say he can’t win the big one.
They will never say he’s a good system coach, but not a good game coach.
They will never say he’s 0-for-the-Final-Four.
They will say he’s a champion.
North Carolina won the national championship over Illinois, 75-70, Monday night, losing all of a 15-point lead but scoring the final five points to set off a jubilant celebration.
The first player to get to Williams and hug him was Sean May, the finest player in the NCAA tournament this year. The junior center squeezed Williams like he was an orange, but Williams was flying by then and didn’t feel a thing.
“I just wanted to hug that big rascal as long as I could hug him,” Williams said later.
Williams’ voice would break in his first interview after the championship, with CBS, but his team was never broken Monday. Williams coached a masterful game when it mattered most. The coach kept making the right little decisions–playing Raymond Felton through his foul trouble, switching to a zone to give Illinois a different look, shoving the ball inside to May despite his being double-teamed.
After returning home to resurrect the North Carolina program in 2003, it only took Williams two seasons to take his alma mater to the national championship. He did it by melding great talent that he mostly inherited from Matt Doherty into an unselfish team. The Tar Heels led the nation in scoring for the first time in school history, but they also won games with their defense during the tournament.
“I’m really not a better coach than I was three hours ago,” Williams said, echoing something Dean Smith told Williams after the 1982 Tar Heel championship, which was Smith’s first.
In a 12-month period where one sports curse after another seems to have been lifted–Phil Mickelson’s slump in the majors, the Boston Red Sox’s World Series jinx–Williams now has his title as well.
