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

One thematic throughline during Williams’ speech Friday was about why he rarely spent his timeouts. It was one of his most distinct qualities as a coach — and one that drew the ire of fans and press alike even at the height of his success.

He offered two stories about this philosophy that stuck out.

The first was about a reporter questioning him about his coaching tactics early in his career. Williams noticed it and delivered a famously snarky response: “So finally I said to him, ‘Go ahead and write your article, I don’t care. Nobody reads it anyway.’ And then I added, ‘Besides, the two easiest jobs in the world are being a college basketball coach and a golf course superintendent because everybody knows how to do your job better than you do.’ It’s the greatest press conference I ever had. Within 10 days, I had 21 letters from golf course superintendents across the country inviting me to come and play their golf course.”

The other was what John Calipari told him after Luke Maye hit the game-winning shot against Kentucky right after Kentucky’s Malik Monk hit a crazy, game-tying 3.

“We walked out to the bus and I hear someone. ‘Roy!’ I turned around and it was John Calipari,” he said. “And John came up, he cursed a little bit, and he said, ‘When we hit that shot, I was trying to call a timeout. Because I knew you weren’t going to. I wanted to get my defense set. But no, you got it in so quickly.’ He said, ‘I turned to my staff as soon as the ball crossed the 10-second line, and said we just lost the game.’ So it was something we practiced all the time. I didn’t want to call a timeout because we knew what we were going to do.

“But I will admit, later on in my career, sometimes I didn’t call a timeout just to piss the media off. Or the fans, too, you know. Coaches gotta have fun too!”

He then punctuated the funny story with a coda from his heart.

“I will tell you, I coached for 48 years, and nobody had more fun than I did,” he said. “And I mean that sincerely.”