Saturday, April 23, 2005
We miss Roy Williams. Admit it everybody. If you have been a Jayhawk fan for more than two years you know exactly what I am talking about. It is not that we have turned on coach Bill Self, which we should not do, or that we even lament his presence, which we do not. The matter of fact is that the Williams hangover has not quite worn off yet at the University of Kansas.
I don’t need to tell you how much Williams was loved by the Kansas community. The adoration for him was about more than basketball; it was about a person who represented an institution as a whole. Coach Williams was not only the face of an athletic team, he was the national spokesman for the Jayhawk nation. He was loyal and humble and didn’t give a you-know-what about North Carolina — neither did we until two years ago.
Who believed that coach Williams would stay at Kansas for the rest of his career? Who knew in their heart that he would be standing at center court when the next national championship banner was unfurled from the rafters at Allen Fieldhouse? I wish you could see me right now, because my hand is raised high. If coach Williams wanted a legacy, this was the institution to build it. He had the opportunity to have monuments made of himself in Kansas, and while coach Williams might have said that he wouldn’t want that, my guess is that he would not have fought it either. I had faith that our beloved coach could resist the charms of his alma mater and of the man who had once resisted his own, Dean Smith. In the end it was that former Jayhawk turned Tar Heel who prevailed and lured Williams back home.
If you were to tell me that you have not been following the Tar Heels during the last two seasons I would call you a liar. Kansas fans tried not to give a you-know-what about Williams after he left, but breakups are just not that easy. Our divorce with him did not end on good terms, no matter how hard you try to gloss it over. That rocky separation made it all the more excruciating to watch him win the big one with another program after failing to do so time and time again while he was here. We tried to be happy for Williams but our hearts were not in it, especially after his former Jayhawk recruits went down in the first round to a no-namer. That should have been us, many Jayhawk loyalists thought. That should have been Roy and Wayne cutting down the net in St. Louis together. Besides, could you see Simien taking off his jersey and flaunting it around the arena after the victory? Come on, where’s the class? I could almost hear The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” playing in the background.
We have one question to ask ourselves now: Is it right to try desperately to love someone when you still miss another? Sometimes in order to keep going that is all we can do. Maybe now that the main staple of Williams-generation students will soon graduate it will help us all to move on and give up the ghost. As long as Wayne, Keith, Aaron and Mike were on the floor, it was inevitable to catch ourselves glancing at the bench from time to time to see what Williams thought about a bad call or muffed play. Maybe the departure of those great players will help us to forgive and forget the departure of a great coach and embrace a new era of Kansas basketball more focused on the Self.
F Johnson is an Edmond, Okla., senior in journalism.
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