After receiving a compliment on the way he handled the 2000 controversy in choosing between Kansas and North Carolina, now-former Kansas men’s basketball coach Roy Williams said it was difficult. He said it was hard because coaching at North Carolina had always been a dream of his. “That’s the thing about life,” the other man said. “Dreams change.”
Apparently, Williams took this maxim about as seriously as we take Michael Jackson’s claims that he never had plastic surgery. Williams took an offer from UNC Monday.
Perhaps due to some cultural quirk, old dreams die hard, and the lure of the unknown touches us all. The grass is always greener on the other side for just about everyone, a theory that often brings career decisions that are great according to popular opinion (“How can you turn down an opportunity like that?!?”) but less so for the individual.
Roy Williams is Exhibit A.
Among his peers, the head-coaching job at UNC is the Garden of Eden. It has a storied past: Michael Jordan, James Worthy, Brad Daugherty, Phil Ford, Jerry Stackhouse and Antawn Jamison all played there. So did current Milwaukee Bucks coach George Karl and Philadelphia 76ers coach Larry Brown. Former coach and living legend Dean Smith tutored them all, and none of his students have anything but praise for him. To continue his legacy is the highest honor — one that Williams could not turn down this time.
Of course, he turned it down three years ago, amid great speculation that he would and should take it. What happened in those three years to change his mind? Doubt crept in. Every time he felt dissatisfied with his job, he had to wonder if he made the right choice. Every time he lost a recruit, he had to wonder if the Tar Heel shade of blue would have been a better lure than the Jayhawk one. Every time he questioned his own happiness, he had to wonder if he would feel more fulfilled in Chapel Hill, in leading the congregation at the Holy Shrine of College Basketball instead of preaching at a temple of somewhat less prestige.
I’m speculating, of course, based on my own personal experience. Four years ago, I had an offer from Harvard University; after two gut-wrenching months, I decided to be among the 15 percent or so of students who turned them down. I thought Wisconsin was the best choice for me, and after four years here, I still believe that it was. But doubt sometimes crept in when times got tough; once in awhile I’d wonder if I should have listened to friends who thought I was crazy for refusing to take “such a great opportunity.”
Prestige is an awfully big temptation, as much for the average college student as it is for Roy Williams.
Too many of us follow in Roy’s footsteps: we choose majors, take jobs and make major life decisions based on prestige — which is to say we take them because it is what others expect us to do. It will impress them more to take a job at the big company in the big city; it will impress them more to major in microbiology than creative writing or Scandinavian studies. Sometimes these are truly the best decisions for us; often they are the best decisions for us as interpreted through the eyes of others.
This week, I turned down another offer from Harvard, this time from their law school. It was another tough decision — as early as middle school, I had dreamed of going there. Friends, families and teachers implied that I owed it to myself (i.e. I owed it to them) to take another “great opportunity.” I believed them for awhile and felt guilty about it. Then I thought about Roy.
Williams had a terrific job at KU. The fans worshipped him, top recruits flocked to play for him, he won 400 games faster than any coach in NCAA history, the school even fired its athletic director amid a public rift between him and Williams. He always said he loved it there. Money, power, security, enjoyment, success, public love. It was a dream job.
Perhaps Williams took the job to be closer to his family, as he has claimed, but more likely he left Kansas because it lacked the prestige of “North Carolina.” Carolina was the job Williams was groomed for as an assistant under Dean Smith. It was the job everyone expected him to take three years ago. I’m sure the North Carolina athletic director told him it was “such a great opportunity.”
Maybe everything will turn out wonderfully and Williams will write his own legend in the North Carolina storybook. But he already had one in Kansas. Our culture is one that preaches that we should never be satisfied, that we should always strive for the best, the most prestigious. Ambition is honorable; complacency is wasteful.
But happiness does not come from meeting a laundry list of long-term goals. We all might be better off by learning to be satisfied in meeting our own shifting expectations, rather than those imposed by others. We might be better off in taking the advice that Roy Williams did not:
“That’s the thing about life. Dreams change.”
Matt Lynch ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English and political science.
