North Carolina head coach Roy Williams is making it up to Tar Heel fans upset about his rooting his former team - y’know, the one that beat them in the Final Four - by forgoing his vacation in Europe with his family to attend a recruiting event, TARHEELBLUE.COM reveals.
The younger Williams moved to London last year, and until the Final Four the father and son hadn’t seen each other since Christmas. For Roy Williams, going over three months without seeing his son qualifies as an eternity.
“Telling my wife I had to cancel our trip to Europe is probably the second-closest I’ve ever been to divorce,” the head coach said on Wednesday. “But I missed three days of recruiting last week because our team was preparing to go to the Final Four. I didn’t feel like I could miss three days next week, too. I need to be out recruiting that Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.”
The RALEIGH NEWS OBSERVER learns thats the Louisvile coach disagrees with Williams’ assessment, as Pitino spoke with the media on Friday before his Cardinals go head-to-head with the Heels on Saturday.
The RALEIGH NEWS & OBSERVER reports today on the one thing that can apparently slow down the top-ranked North Carolina Tarheels on their way to the NCAA basketball title: Floor decals.
(Home court until San Antonio still feels good though!)
During the Heels’ blowout of Arkansas at Raleigh’s RBC Center last Sunday, UNC’s Tyler Hansbrough and Marcus Ginyard slipped on the gigantic center court NCAA decal. Coach Roy Williams opened his postgame news conference by first referring to the humungous stickers: “Pull the dadgum things off.”
It now appears that was the rest of the field of 64’s last chance to catch Carolina, at least if the floor decoration has anything to do with it. Read more…
• PRO FOOTBALL TALK finds out that everyone’s favorite inventor of neologisms, Emmitt Smith, may be back next season. (My personal favorite Emmitt-ism: “debacled”.)
The BALTIMORE SUN reports that Maryland’s Gary Williams clinched his 600th career win with a 70-65 victory over Boston College. He becomes the 8th active college coach to reach the 600-win milestone. (He would have been 9th, if a certain Knight hadn’t called it a day.)
Meanwhile, Roy Williams saw his Tar Heels go down to Duke 89-78 - in the Dean Dome, no less - giving North Carolina only its 2nd loss of the season. The Dookies were undoubtedly inspired by the return of one of their biggest fans. Awesome, baby!
The FT. WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM follows up on Michael Byars-Dawson, an American basketball player who’s currently making his living in Iran.
The former Texas high school star talks about the culture shock of playing professionally in the Middle Eastern country. One surprise is how manic Iranian basketball fans can get.
Byars-Dawson remembers one road game where he got into some verbal sparring with the crowd. The fired-up folks responded by throwing coins & water bottles on the court. Even after he was taken out of the game, an angry group gathered behind Byars-Dawson’s bench threatening to kill him.
