It’s not even March yet and the coaches are getting REVVED up. During the UNC Tarheels and Duke games last night, the commentators kept referring to words being exchanged by the coaches. This baffled me because they weren’t even playing each other! I did some digging and got the background.
Tar Heels’ Roy Williams is miffed at comment by Coach K
By AARON BEARD
The Associated Press
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — North Carolina coach Roy Williams apparently doesn’t think too highly of Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski’s views on injury reports.
In a tiff that has added the latest spice to one of college basketball’s most intense rivalries, Williams took exception to a comment made by Krzyzewski on Sunday that the Blue Devils don’t discuss injuries “unlike other schools.”
While Coach K never mentioned the third-ranked Tar Heels specifically, Williams felt the statement was a subtle jab at his team, which has had a much-publicized run of injuries and ailments in the past two weeks.
It was enough to have Williams, in a comment on his weekly radio show Monday, telling an unspecified person to “coach their own damn team, I’ll coach my team.”
On Tuesday, Williams found himself discussing the comments again instead of focusing on the Tar Heels’ game at North Carolina State today.
“It’s not like I’m getting a dadgum plane and flying it around to say, ‘Roy fell against a wall and banged his nose’ or anything,” Williams said in a news conference. “We have to do those things [talk about injuries] and everybody’s hurt. But there’s different stages of being hurt.
“If you’re hurt and missing games, that’s not exactly like having a hangnail. And so we do have some people that are getting hurt and missing games. I don’t think that somebody should say we’re putting it in front of the public.”
When a reporter attempted to ask a follow-up question, Williams said he didn’t want to discuss the comments further and have “battles through the media.”
But when the news conference ended, Williams came back to the topic.
“I said before we played Duke it’s impossible to have any more respect than I do for Mike,” Williams said, “but I felt like that comment was aimed towards us.”
Duke spokesman Jon Jackson declined to comment.
Krzyzewski’s remark came in a radio interview after Duke’s loss at Wake Forest. While noting freshman Nolan Smith had been playing through a knee injury for a few weeks, Krzyzewski added, “unlike other schools, we don’t release our injuries,” according to the Web site for radio station WRBZ-AM in Raleigh.
The next day, Williams said on his weekly radio show: “Regardless of what somebody else says about they have injuries, too, which is a bunch of bunk, so I don’t give a crap what somebody else says, but coach their own damn team, I’ll coach my team — in case anybody has heard some statements about that.”
The comments between the Hall of Fame coaches adds to a history that includes a heated exchange during a 2000 NCAA tournament game between Duke and Williams’ Kansas squad in which the coaches had to be separated by officials. Last season, things got chilly after a flagrant foul by Duke’s Gerald Henderson broke the nose of North Carolina’s Tyler Hansbrough.
Recently, the coaches described a relationship that was respectful and cordial but not especially close.”
Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company
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