ARE THEY FANS?

I wanted UNC to win the national basketball championship as much as any Tar Heel fan, but I can live with accepting a great season without a championship. Obviously, some others can’t, and it appears that their inability to do so really drives them off the edge.

You have to have been living under a rock to be unaware of the hateful reaction directed towards Coach Williams for appearing at the championship game with a Kansas “Jayhawk” sticker on his shirt. His doing this brought out not only the hate speech types, but the conspiracy theorist clearly identified who they were.

It appears that wearing the sticker was a sign of disloyalty in their way of thinking. After all, their reasoning went, KU had just beat UNC so how could Coach Williams shift his loyalties like that. For the conspiracy types, they offered that Coach Williams must have told the team to throw the game because he wanted KU to win.

OK, we have never had a shortage of weird and convoluted thinking in sports, but what are these people thinking? I thought that maybe they have never had their hearts invested in different things and therefore they couldn’t understand someone who did. Then I thought that maybe their outlandish allegations on talk radio, the sports blogs and in letters to the editors were part of who they were and how they grieved and sought closure.

Naw, none of the above – these people just don’t understand that this is a game, this is a sport, and someone can love their team without hating all the other teams that they may have been associated with. Roy Williams should be proud of the Kansas team - he is part of who they are, and being proud is not a zero-sum game.

It’s interesting that when UNC beat a Williams coached team in the NCAA playoffs some years ago, Williams was at the UNC's next game cheering on his former institution. Did he tell the KU players to throw the game or hate his former team? Of course not, all he did was to show that he was a good sport.

I hope all of those who have impugned the integrity and character that so wonderfully defines Coach Williams will have some sort of enlightenment experience. Maybe they will somehow figure out what’s really defines a champion and a coach that produces winners.