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Gutheridge. You described it as, “wiping you off the face of the
earth.” When you left Kansas in 2003 a lot of people stopped
speaking to you. They wanted to keep you from coming back to
speak at the KU end-of-season banquet. You have got to have
some anxiety about retiring.
RW: No, I really don’t have any anxiety about that and I don’t
think that I have to. The anxiety that I have, about anything, is
getting back to good relationships with the people. After it hap-pened
in 2000 and so many people in North Carolina, quote,
slapped me off the face of the earth, it just crushed me. Not only
had I never, never experienced that, I never even thought that any-thing
could be like that. I never even perceived that anything could
hurt you like that. And in 2003 when I did leave Kansas it was the
same thing back in the other direction. And I got my kids, Scott
and Kimberly, and I told them — and I’ve even done it with
every team that I’ve had — that in life what you want, you want
to have some people that are with you regardless. The majority of
people are going to be with you only if you do what they want you
I’ve got millions of things I wish I’d said differently, but one more than anything else...
to do. And then you’re going to have some people that are never
going to be with you regardless. … Don’t worry about those. But
the whole thing for me is to have the foxhole buddies — to have
the group of friends that regardless of what you do, they care about
you as a person. Whether you leave one city and go to the other,
they’re still with you. That was a hard point in my life in 2000,
and just depressing in 2003. In 2003, I thought, you know, you
guys heard me talk about what happened in the other direction,
and it makes no difference. They’re not bad people. That’s what
it is. To be 100-percent accepted is unrealistic, because you’re not
going to have everybody with you. Regardless of how right you
think any decision is, they are not going to be with you because it
may not be what they think is right. That’s a lesson that somebody
like me, being so corny, you just think that’s not supposed to be
the way it’s supposed to be. I didn’t hurt anybody. I didn’t mali-ciously
www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com WBM
do anything.
WBM: Is it the emotion of basketball?
RW: It’s the passion. No question. I’ve got millions of things I
wish I’d said differently, but one more than anything else, when
I decided in 2000 to stay at Kansas, I said, “If we have this press
conference again, it’ll be because I’m retiring or dying,” but I
believed it. It wasn’t something that I knew was later on going
to be a lie. It was truly what I believed. And I believed that since
I said “no” to North Carolina that the opportunity would never
come back, and that was OK. I could’ve lived with that.
WBM: You have said, “Losing is a shock, devastating, dejec-tion
… disappointment, sticks with you forever.” You get upset
when you come in second. With the 1997 NCAA loss, you said
things changed, and that it was now, “all about enjoying the
ride.” What shifted? Do you still feel that way?
RW: It was a tremendous change for me. My dream, my focus,
my passion was to try to win a national championship. That year
we went 34-2. We had eight seniors, and all eight graduated. We
had two people first team All American, one of them Academic
All-American of the Year, and as I said, we lost two games. How
much more perfect could that season be when you really looked at
the big picture? And I felt such a sense of loss; I felt rejection … I
didn’t feel like I was worthy because I hadn’t gotten those kids to
the Final Four. It was a sadness that I’ve never gotten over to this
day. Because they were wonderful kids, they were never a problem.
It was just a fun, fun year. Every day at practice was fun, and then
all of a sudden — every kid dreams about going to a Final Four,
and hopefully win a national championship, and I wasn’t able to
get that to them. I said, “I can’t live like this” because the rejection,
the sadness, the hurt, probably more than those other two, was the
hurt in something I didn’t know if I could handle. That’s when I
made the decision that the most important thing was I wanted to
live long enough to coach my grandchildren little league baseball
and little league basketball.