Gary Williams Walks Away a Winner

Great article on Jay Bilas' Blog on Gary Williams and his shocking step away from the game. I appreciate and admire Williams not because of the huge amount of wins, it was because he did it the right way. He coached with integrity, and he did it his way. He may have missed out on what consider some great local talent- Carmelo Anthony and Kevin Durant to name a couple. However, he recruited kids that fit his style and developed them into better players and people. He was a fierce competitor and winner. 


Since you need an ESPN account to read the article on their site, I have gone ahead and copied it for you:

It is difficult to quarrel with the Naismith Hall of Fame on its incredible collection of basketball icons. It has, however, made one glaring omission: Maryland's Gary Williams.


By any reasonable measure, Williams is a Hall of Famer, and most knowledgeable basketball observers agree it is just a matter of time before he is inducted. The truth is, he should already be in there.


Hopefully, Thursday's surprising news that Williams is retiring will prompt such an action. I can think of few active coaches as deserving of that honor and none more deserving.


Williams is a basketball lifer who got into coaching for all the right reasons. A New Jersey kid who played for Bud Millikan at Maryland, Williams started as a high school coach and teacher, and never sought out coaching for the money. He was a competitor first and came up through the coaching ranks the hard way. Heck, he started out coaching both basketball and soccer, just to make ends meet. My guess is he was just as competitive a soccer coach as he was a basketball coach.


I first knew Williams as a competitor when I played against his Boston College team in the 1985 NCAA tournament. He had a team of smaller, scrappy fighters, and Williams was as intense a coach as we had played against on the sidelines. But, after the game, he went from crazy-eyed competitor back to being his normal self. Williams burned to win but was always gracious in both victory and defeat.


At Boston College, Ohio State and Maryland, Williams was nothing but a winner, and he was a fine teacher as well. On the floor and in the locker room, Williams could X and O with the very best of them, and his teams took on his personality in their play. They would fight you and would not give in. They didn't lose very often; you had to beat them.


During his 22 years at Maryland, no other team in the ACC had a better record against Duke and North Carolina than Williams' Terrapins. Nobody. Williams retires with only Dean Smith and Mike Krzyzewski ahead of him in ACC wins. He has been an ACC champion in a league of entrenched power, and he has twice been to the Final Four and won the 2002 national championship. His record is remarkable, and he did it without ever once cheating.


I often would hear people complain about Williams and how he would act on the sidelines. When a player made a mistake on the floor, he would turn and get into an assistant coach or a bench player, and that didn't make sense to some people. "You have to know Gary and see him with his team in practice to truly understand it," I would say. Williams' players understood where he was coming from, and they respected what he was saying, despite how it might have looked to an outsider. And the officials respected Williams, despite how things might have looked from afar. Williams did not get many technical fouls precisely because he gave the officials a fair shake.


Once, after a questionable call during an NIT game, Williams told an official that his team was playing in the NIT because it wasn't very good. He then proceeded to tell the ref that he was officiating this game for precisely the same reason. No technical was awarded, and both had a good laugh over the jab. That is Gary Williams.


Unless you know him, you might not appreciate the quality of the person. Once you do know him, you cannot miss it. I went to the Middle East with Williams to coach U.S. Army teams in a tournament called Operation Hardwood. Williams coached a group of soldiers from Wisconsin, and in a short week of coaching these soldiers, he won supporters for life. In talking with the soldiers on Williams' team one day, I could tell they revered him. One went so far as to say, "I'd take a bullet for him." It was a remarkable statement from that Wisconsin soldier, and it was a remarkable statement about Gary Williams.


I didn't see Williams' retirement coming, at least not now. I thought he might retire after last year's crushing overtime loss to eventual Final Four participant Michigan State, but after the end of this season, I thought he would keep going in College Park. Perhaps it makes sense with Jordan Williams leaving early when most feel it was in his best interests to return. Perhaps Gary Williams felt it was just time.


Whatever the reasoning, it isn't important. What is important is that college basketball and the ACC are losing one of the all-time great coaches and one of the all-time great guys in Gary Williams. That makes this a sad day, indeed.


But I believe that we will still see Gary Williams remain close to the game. After all, he's a basketball lifer.


And a Hall of Famer.


http://insider.espn.go.com/ncb/insider/news/story?id=6488074