ShareThisFor a guy whose North Carolina basketball team just ran away with the NCAA championship and cranked out enough NBA draft picks to qualify for expansion franchise consideration, Roy Williams is getting zero respect these days.
The latest blow landed Wednesday, when The Sporting News revealed its 50 all-time greatest coaches and Ol' Roy was no more on the list than Patrick Roy.
It was only a few weeks back that an outfit somewhere released a sports public opinion poll of some sort that gave Williams a 75 percent or so popularity rating among Carolina basketball fans. That's North Carolina fans, now. Not Kansas or Duke fans.
The 2009 ESPN Sports Almanac includes a long chapter on "Who's Who in Sports."
More than 1,000 folks on that ESPN list. There are biographical reports on everyone from Amy Alcott (golfer) and Tenley Albright (figure skater) to Zinedine Zidane (French soccer player).
Work your way through ESPN's "Who's Who" list, and you can learn that Karch Kiraly was a whale of volleyball player at UCLA, that Tamara McKinney was the first American woman to win the overall Alpine World Cup ski championship and that Walter Ray Williams Jr. won six (count 'em) Bowler of the Year awards and six (count 'em again) world horseshoe pitching championships.
But -- as Roy might say -- you can flip through that flippin' rascal till your thumbprint disappears and still not find a Who's Who paragraph on the Tar Heels' folksy coach.
According to the The Sporting News, Williams finished No. 51 on the all-time list. How's that for a royal bite on the bubble? Just a few less votes for No. 50 Herb Brooks and Roy would have been in the field. Or if the Soviets had just won that Olympic hockey game in 1980.
Oh well. Roy's just going to have work a little harder or be happy with the NIT (Nearly In There) in this case. He had a vote on the dadgum thing, so maybe he just didn't network enough with other members of the Electoral College.
Better yet, let's start the rumor that Mike Krzyzewski (No. 19) and Pat Summitt (No. 11) led a conspiracy to keep Roy out of the club. Stranger things have happened, and we all know how protective coaches can be about their turf.
On the other hand, Roy can pass the barbecue and count his blessings. His mentor Dean Smith finished eighth on the list.
Poor old Maryland coach Gary Williams didn't even get a vote, not the first stinking one, according to The Sporting News.
Lefty Driesell got some voting support, but no one broke a sweat for Gary, who won a national championship.
Unless The Sporting News folks have the facts wrong about their own project that has to mean Roy didn't vote for Gary.
Hmmm.
(Contact Caulton Tudor at caulton.tudor(at)newsobserver.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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Must credit The News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C.
