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North Carolina

Roy Williams excerpt: Why basketball was his release

Nov 5, 2009

From Hard Work: A Life On and Off the Court, by Roy Williams with Tim Crothers. Copyright Roy Williams and Tim Crothers. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Available for purchase wherever books are sold.

Editor's note: Roy Williams grew up in Asheville. Here, he talks about his relationship with his father, mother and sister and why basketball was so important to him in those early years.

Author Tim Crothers, who wrote the book with Williams, will take your questions live on WRALSportsFan TODAY at noon.

From Chapter 2: Angels and Demons

Between my mother and father there was a lot of physical abuse. He would come home drunk and push her around, and Frances and I would try to stop it. I’d try to separate them, but I was too small and my dad would just push me away.

My mother and father split for the first time just after I’d finished first grade. My mother took us away and the three of us lived all summer in a single room at the Shamrock Court Motel, which my aunt Doris owned. My mother would go off to work and Frances was off doing odd jobs for somebody, so I would go around with another of my aunts, Leona, who was a maid at the motel. She paid me 25 cents a day to take off the dirty pillowcases and put on clean ones. At lunch Aunt Doris would fix me a sandwich, and then I’d go and work some more in the afternoon. That was it. There was no ballplaying. Nothing that kids do. It was just survival.

When the school year started, we moved in with another aunt. We lived in her trailer because she had an empty bedroom. I slept on the couch and my mother and sister shared the back bedroom. We lived there for four or five months, and then Dad started coming by and my parents got back together again. That lasted a little while before they broke up again. We left again and lived with another aunt. All of these aunts that put us up were my dad’s sisters. They were all mad at Babe because they knew that his drinking and carousing was ruining my family. It was difficult for me to understand why my father was doing this to us. My mom and dad got together and broke up, got together and broke up, and the last time we moved out I was 11 years old.

Frances was four years older than me. ... I know Frances was also upset by our family situation, but she didn’t seem to be as bothered by it as I was. She was older, more mature, and just handled it better. During the tough times, she was keeping an eye on me more than I knew she was, but I just wasn’t willing to talk about our mom and dad splitting up. I never really talked to anybody about it. I pretended it wasn’t there.

During one of the times when my mother and dad got back together, we lived in a house on Warren Avenue. That was the first and only house we ever owned. My mother, Frances, and I left and came back, and left and came back, and then one day when we were staying with one of my aunts, my dad said, “Why don’t you guys come back and stay at the house, and I’ll leave and let you guys live there?”

We’d only been back living in that house for two weeks when these two guys pulled up in the driveway. They were wearing dark sportcoats, white shirts, and ties. I was on the porch, but I ran in the house to tell my mom as they came walking up the steps. I remember latching the screen door, and I wouldn’t unlatch it to let them in. It turned out that during that seven-month time period that we’d been gone, my dad hadn’t paid the mortgage. So they came and foreclosed on the house. They told us we had three days to get out. I went and packed up my stuff, and we moved back to the motel. To this day I still have a negative feeling about people in dark sportcoats, white shirts, and ties.

Every time my parents got back together, there was a lot of fighting. My dad never hit my mother with his fist, but he went as far as he could go without doing that. I tried to run away from home one time because I just wanted to get away. I didn’t get very far; I don’t know if I wanted to get very far. I just wanted to shock my dad into stopping. I was always feeling like I needed to escape.

One of our neighbors at that house on Warren Avenue had a basketball goal in the backyard. I never had a basketball, but they had one, and when I wanted to get away from what was going on at home, I would just go over there and shoot. The goal was a pole with a plywood backboard, and there was no net, just a bent rim. I’d go over there for hours. If it was raining or snowing, I’d get filthy on the dirt court, but I didn’t mind. It was something I could do by myself. All I needed was a basketball and a goal and some sweat and I could lose myself in the game. I was in heaven, like a kid left all night in a candy store. That court was my refuge, the one place where it felt like there were no problems in the world.

When I was 11, we moved to a place on Reed Street. We were 100 yards from Biltmore Elementary School, where there were some asphalt courts. Every day after school, I’d go home, change clothes, and head straight to the courts to play basketball until 6 o’clock.

When I was in the seventh grade, a few other boys and I started sneaking into the Biltmore gym to play. I always played with older guys. One of them had the idea of hiding someone in the bathroom, and then when the head of the physical education department would go home at 4 o’clock, our guy would come out of the bathroom and pop the gym door open and we’d play on the court inside.

One time we were in there playing and one of the guys started clowning around with a fire extinguisher, and it sprayed all over the girls’ locker room. That just infuriated me, and that’s when I started sneaking in by myself, because I didn’t want to be responsible for anybody else. On one outside wall there were some uneven bricks I could climb to get to a second-floor window. I opened the window and dropped down to the balcony inside the gym. I never turned on the lights. There was just an exit sign lighting each end, and I would play in the half dark. I would just shoot and rebound and shoot again. It was peaceful, and at that point the peaceful part of it was more important than getting to be a better player. ...

I heard my mom cry herself to sleep sometimes. I know she worried about how she was going to pay the bills. There were a couple of times she had to ask our landlord’s secretary if she could pay the rent a few days late. Sometimes that lady was harsh to her. There were times when my mom didn’t know how she was going to get through the next day, but she always found a way. ...

After school my buddies and I used to go home past Ed’s Service Station, which had a vending machine where you could get a Coke for 10 cents. One day my sister said she saw us at Ed’s and asked what we were doing there. I told her and my mom that we liked to stop at Ed’s after playing basketball and get Coca-Colas to drink while we’d sit there on the sidewalk and talk.

Now my mom knew I loved nothing more than a cold Coca-Cola, but she also knew I didn’t have the money to buy one. “What do you do?” she asked me.

I told her, “Oh, they have a nice water fountain. I just get some water.”

The next morning I’d gotten myself ready to go to school as usual, because my mom always left earlier to go to work. I walked into the kitchen and sitting on the corner of the table was a dime. My mom didn’t have very much money, but she was too proud to allow her son not to have what other kids had. After that, when she cashed her paycheck at the grocery store, she’d get rolls of dimes so that she would be sure to have one there for me every morning.
She did that every day for years.

Growing up I always knew my dad was wrong. I hated the drinking. I wanted my mom and dad to be together, but I didn’t want them to be together if it was going to be that way.

The summer I turned 14, my parents had been apart for a couple of years. My dad hardly ever paid the child support. He’d pay one month and skip seven, then pay another month and skip nine. My mom talked to a lawyer and they served a warrant for my dad’s arrest and said he had to catch up on child support. My dad came by the house. He was drunk and angry. It was the worst time I can ever remember. He went after my mom. I pulled him off of her, pushed him down, and grabbed a bottle and put it under his chin. “Get out of here or I’ll bust this over your head,” I said. “I’ll kill you!”
The whole scene was very nasty, but I didn’t care. When he got up to leave, I said, “I never want to see you again. I never want you to set foot in my house again for the rest of my life.”

My dad never, ever came back to our house again. After that, I rarely saw him, only a couple of times when my sister made me go with her to visit him. Frances was more forgiving, but I was not. I was mad that he’d torn our family apart.

From Chapter 14: Look Homeward, Angel

Here is one other reason I came back to North Carolina in 2003 that hardly anybody knows. The failing health of my dad and my sister helped bring me back. They were part of why I needed to be home. ...

I lots my mom in 1992, and I have always regretted not being there for her when she died. My mom quit working at age 65. I had started a little fund for her to put some money aside. She quit because she wanted to spend some more time with her grandchildren. Nine months later she was diagnosed with cancer, and seven months after that, she was dead. ...

I flew to Asheville and went to my mom’s house. I got out of the car and just sort of stood there. I didn’t know if I wanted to walk in the house. My mom had never remarried, but she had a friend named Leonard King who would take her to play bingo or out to eat. The first person to come out of the house was Leonard. He said, “I wanted to give you something. Your mom gave me this and told me to hold it until she got back out of the hospital.”

He handed me two hundred-dollar bills, money my mom had won at bingo. I remember thinking that for my mom to have a hundred-dollar bill was like the craziest thing in the world.

Then Leonard said, “She would want you to have it.”

I took one of the bills and folded it up in my wallet and I gave the other one to my sister.

The next night we had the visitation at the funeral home and my dad walked in. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. “I’m not coming to the funeral tomorrow,” he said, “but I wanted to see you and Frances. I wanted to tell you something. I have never regretted one damn thing I’ve ever done in my whole life except one. And that’s the way I treated your mom. I loved her and I still do. All the rest of what those people say about me, I couldn’t care less. They can all kiss my ass. There’s nothing I can do to change what I did, but I’m sorry about everything that happened.”

I hugged him and told him I appreciated that. ...

My mom died on July 7, 1992, and in my wallet to this day I’ve still got that folded-up hundred-dollar bill. Whenever I see it there it reminds me that if there’s ever a really, really, really rainy day, I’ll be all right, because my mom will still be leaving me that dime.