CHAPEL HILL, N.C. ? Among the first people to know that Roy Williams would be the new basketball coach at North Carolina was Paul Lawing, class of ’83.
The Tar Heels needed a way to get Williams to campus quickly to announce the news the day his appointment became official. And Lawing has a private plane that he co-owns with William Jordan of Fayetteville, a former member of the university’s board of trustees.
The logistics of bringing Williams from Lawrence to Chapel Hill, while protecting the coach’s privacy as much as possible, involved cloak-and-dagger communication, an on-call corporate jet pilot and even a secret code word, The Herald-Sun of Durham reported Sunday.
Days before the announcement of Williams’ appointment on April 14, Lawing, a natural gas executive in Fayetteville, had given athletic director Dick Baddour the OK to use his plane. Baddour came calling Monday morning, and the plane was on the way to Lawrence within hours.
It was important that the plane, a Cessna Citation 550, arrive with as little fanfare as possible. Williams had been adamant that word of his decision should not trickle out until after he met with his players at Kansas.
“We had to move very quickly and confidentially,” Lawing said.
Spooked by the possibility of cell phone eavesdroppers, Lawing and pilot Billy Puryear created a code word — “Houston,” because Lawing often flies there for business.
Puryear knew that if he received a message about going to “Houston,” he was most likely headed to Kansas.
By 6 p.m. April 14, Puryear and a co-pilot were headed back to Chapel Hill with Williams, his wife, Wanda, and assistant coaches Joe Holladay and Steve Robinson aboard.
“When he first got up into the plane, he was obviously emotionally drained,” Puryear said, recalling Williams’ sentimental departure from the Lawrence airport. “He got teary-eyed when he saw the fans at the Kansas airport waving to him.”
The jet touched down in Chapel Hill around 9 p.m. And if not for a private jet, Williams may not have made it to Chapel Hill the day he was hired.
“In that situation, we would not have been able to do, in a single day, what we felt was very important to do,” Baddour said last week.
At any point in time, Baddour knows he has three or four athletics boosters with planes who can provide transportation for him or a coach in need of quick flight somewhere.
“I look at it as an asset to be used only in unique kinds of situations,” Baddour said. “It’s certainly not something that’s just sitting there, available to me.”
