UNC's Roy Williams on ACC Tourney in Charlotte, square dancing, and his toughest player

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — If you ask Roy Williams about some of his fondest memories in Charlotte, he won’t hesitate.

The retired UNC men’s basketball coach, with 903 wins and three national championships to his Hall of Fame name, will start with the deep NCAA Tournament runs that passed through here. That includes the first two games of the 2005 national championship season. That also includes the 1991 year, when Williams was an assistant under Dean Smith and their Tar Heels won two games in Charlotte to secure Williams’ first trip to the Final Four.

He might also sneak in a story about the celebrity Pro-Am he played in last year at Quail Hollow, when he birdied from the bunker on 18 and saw some former players taking his shot on video.

If you then ask about some future moments he’ll spend in Charlotte — specifically about what he thinks of the ACC tournament being hosted in Charlotte in 2025, 2026 and 2028 — he’ll light up again.

There’s a simple reason why.

“I love the ACC tournament being in North Carolina,” Williams told The Charlotte Observer on Friday. “Particularly Greensboro and Charlotte, they make it look like a really big deal. It is to the players and the coaches and the fans. You know, if you go outside the state, other places do a nice job, but not like we do it here in North Carolina. So I’m happy that it’s coming back.”

Williams, a native of Marion and a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, will always mean a lot to the Tar Heel state. And that’s because the state will always mean a lot to him.

That love for North Carolina was evident on Friday afternoon as Williams spoke to a crowd of over 600 people as a special guest for the Charlotte Touchdown Club in The Sheraton Hotel in Uptown. The 73-year-old retired coach reeled off life stories with the pace and ease of a Ty Lawson-led fast break, interspersing them with the aphorisms that made his press conferences toward the end of his career appointment viewership.

Before the speech, in an interview with The Observer, he also freely answered a question about another thing he loves: college athletics — and the enterprise’s uncertain future.

“I don’t know what’s going to work out, so I don’t know or want to say it’s going to happen,” Williams said, when asked specifically about the recent development of the NCAA allowing schools to directly pay their players. “But name, image and likeness, I like. I think it’s good for the student-athletes; I think it’s good for them to share in the money. We raise a lot of money.

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