Duke basketball: Blue Devil calls out UNC’s Roy Williams

A past Duke basketball star tells a comical UNC basketball recruiting tale.

Evidently, despite his rejection of a Tar Heel offer in 2005 and then the whole 2009 Tyler Hansbrough incident that forever left a bloody stain on his reputation in Chapel Hill, Duke basketball great Gerald Henderson is still chummy with 18th-year UNC basketball head coach Roy Williams all these years later.

But the lasting friendship did not stop Henderson, a longtime frequenter of the links, from spilling the beans about the apparently one-time overhyped golf game of the man who had hoped to lure him to the other end of Tobacco Road.

Henderson, who played eight seasons in the NBA after soaring in Durham for three years, spoke this week to fellow Blue Devil Andre Dawkins on The Field of 68 Dawkins on Duke podcast. During their chat, Henderson recounted to Dawkins the time he took a recruiting visit to UNC.

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First, though, Henderson made sure to speak kindly about his bond with the 70-year-old Williams:

“I loved Roy…I see him ’til this day…He’s a golfer.”

Another UNC basketball failure in front of Duke basketball eyes

Immediately after briefly singing the praises of Roy Williams and pointing out a shared interest, Gerald Henderson shifted his tone in his virtual call with Andre Dawkins and got to the meat of the joke:

“All through my recruitment, he had talked about how much golf he’d played, all these courses he’d been to, how low his handicap was, all these guys he’s played with. And so on my visit there…he takes us out to lunch, and they got this whole spread out on the driving range.”

Henderson then continued setting the stage for the joke by pounding his own chest as a golfer a teensy bit:

“I take a 7-iron and just start striping ’em. Take a 4-iron, the same thing. Pull out a driver, through the driving range. And from the back, you could hear [the golf coach], and he goes, ‘Hey, Roy, if you don’t want him, I’ll take him!'”

So how did the all-talk Williams perform when following the walk-the-walk feats of Henderson on the driving range that day? Well, if one is to believe the Dukie, it seems his face ultimately resembled a look he’d have following the countless blown moments across the past 10 years due to Duke basketball heroics: from the Austin Rivers dagger in 2012 to the Tre Jones magic in 2020.

Here’s how Henderson remembers it:

“All this bragging he did, he gets up there, and lie to you not, he shanked 10 balls in a row. Straight right, into the woods…I said, ‘Roy, come on now, you can’t gas up your whole golf career and then do that.’

“His face was getting red.”

If only smartphones were on hand to capture such a moment back then.

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