DeCock: With heavy heart and no time to grieve, Roy Williams goes back to work
It was a brutal way to lose, his team not tough enough, its best player missing a potential game-tying shot on the final possession. Roy Williams sat stunned afterward, incredulous even. And yet it shrank in significance from what happened a day earlier.
The purple ribbon on Williams’ lapel gave that away, the color emblematic of pancreatic-cancer awareness, a cause near to the North Carolina coach’s heart ever since his close friend Ted Seagroves was diagnosed with the disease in the spring of 2012.
Wednesday night, the ribbon was a memorial. Seagroves died Tuesday morning. He was 68. Williams was disgusted with his team’s performance, but the mention of Seagroves’ name afterward brought tears to his eyes and a quiver to his voice.
“The guy’s one of my best friends in my entire life,” Williams said. “It shows that basketball’s not really that important. It’s important to me and my guys in the locker room right now, but Ted Seagroves was one of those wonderful human beings.”
In a world filled with Williams’ basketball friends – coaches, teammates, former players – Seagroves was just a regular guy with a 12-handicap, a prominent insurance broker who happened to live across the street from Williams in Chapel Hill. The October after Seagroves’ diagnosis, he was one of the speakers at Williams’ “Fast Break Against Cancer” breakfast at the Smith Center.
Seagroves’ fight ended Tuesday, not long after Williams returned from the Bahamas with the team. Seagroves hung on that long. So the Tar Heels wore purple shoelaces while Seagroves’ wife, Judi, sat with Williams’ wife, Wanda, to watch the Tar Heels lose to Iowa, 60-55. And Williams, once again, found no respite on the court from the turmoil in his life.
“It was heartbreaking for him,” North Carolina forward Brice Johnson said. “You could see it on his face. I wish we could have won this game for him, because that’s what we set out to do, to win this game for him and his best friend.”
The purple ribbon was a reminder of where Williams’ thoughts would otherwise be, and have been so often recently. The harried, visibly weary Williams that has surfaced in public from time to time over the past few years only hinted at the private struggle within.
While Seagroves battled cancer and Williams agonized over tumors on his kidneys that turned out to be benign in the fall of 2012, Wanda Williams has undergone several surgeries for a chronic medical condition, the most recent in early November.
Meanwhile, his mentors Dean Smith and Bill Guthridge both have health issues of their own, unable to help, Smith in particular. His decline into dementia has weighed upon Williams for a while now, as it has so many people around the program.
And now, beset by new and legitimate questions about what he did or didn’t know or should have known about the academic fraud in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies in the wake of the Wainstein Report, Williams can no longer find solace at work.
Love him or hate him, believe him or not, there’s something undeniably and ineffably human about what Williams has gone through over the past few years. The finality of losing Seagroves has now made this year the toughest of all.
“Life hands you a lot of things that you've got to be able to handle, and this is something Roy Williams has got to handle,” he said.
There was no time to grieve, only another game to play, another season relentlessly moving along, carrying Williams along with it.
This story was originally published December 4, 2014 at 12:32 AM.