Williams, Anthony Both Fit in Puzzle

There’s something about Carmelo Anthony and Roy Williams. Something’s there. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, pieces scattered across a table, waiting to be put together, only then telling us what there is about Carmelo Anthony and Roy Williams.

One’s a cornrowed teenager, the other’s a gone-gray fifty-something. The kid moves with the cool swagger of the urban hip-hop nation, and the old man is so square he talks about his grandchildren not yet born. But something’s there.

If we didn’t know it before, we know it now. We’ve seen them with the national college basketball championship for the taking -- Anthony the Syracuse smoothie, Williams the dogged Kansas coach.

Where Carmelo Anthony grew up, you were lucky if you grew up.

“The Pharmacy,” they called it. Like a drugstore, only with automatic weapons. It’s a neighborhood in west Baltimore. Drive slowly at a street corner, window down, they’ll throw in the stuff.

“I’ve seen lots of things,” Carmelo Anthony says.

Like murder.

“Right outside my house.”

When was that?

“I was probably, like, 9, 10, 11.”

Geography their enemy, kids and dreams suffocate in this nation’s pharmacies.

What Carmelo Anthony survived, Roy Williams survived in another place. Not a dangerous place, but a place where few kids dare to dream and fewer make those dreams real. Life in the dark Carolina mountains promises hard times and small glory.

“The people that have criticized me,” Williams said in allusion to every coach’s critics, “have never been tough enough to stand up and criticize me to my face, because I don’t mind that kind of confrontation. I grew up in western North Carolina with the hillbillies. We don’t mind that kind of thing.”

Meaning, You want some of me? Better pack a lunch, ‘cause you’ll be here a while.

Only the strong make it out of the pharmacies, and they do it only with help, and if you ask Carmelo Anthony how he did it -- how he became the most joyous basketball player since Magic Johnson -- he’ll tell you about his mother.

Says she was a basketball player in South Carolina. Had four children, Carmelo the baby, 2 years old when his father died. Says she worked in housekeeping at the University of Baltimore. Always wanted college for her children, Carmelo the last hope, the baby now 18 and saying, “She wanted college for me as bad as I wanted it.”

Here a reporter said, “Tell us one experience in class that you’ve enjoyed.”

And Carmelo Anthony, a sweet child, with that soft smile, said, “I went to class one day and nobody asked me for my autograph.”

“What class was that?”

“Human sex.”

Fathers usually get the call in sports. Carmelo Anthony never knew his father. “My mom was my inspiration, she was my mom and my dad,” he says.

And if you ask Roy Williams the source of his values, where he learned that doing the right thing always was the right thing to do, he turns to his mother, who in the absence of a husband took in ironing to pay the bills.

“My mother was my hero,” Williams says. “She was a very intelligent, uneducated lady. Went through the 10th grade is all she did. She’s the one that always said, ‘Do what you think is right.’ I know that sounds corny, doesn’t make good copy, but that was a big deal to her. If somebody was her friend, she would do anything -- anything -- to help them.... I just appreciated at that time the loyalty that she felt to her friends and family, the sacrifices I saw her make.”

Basketball brought Roy Williams into the light, as basketball delivered Carmelo Anthony from the killing ground of his adolescence. For Williams, the game was a way to college, out of the hillbilly hollows to a master’s degree, to a job at Dean Smith’s knee, to his own coaching greatness and to a Final Four extravaganza so alien to a mountain kid that he was 18 years old before he knew such a thing existed.

Now 18, Carmelo Anthony knows, and has known for years in the way of our hurry-up times, the Final Four is a big deal, not the least because it leads to the next big deal, the NBA. So he was in New Orleans, becoming a national champion, showing inside/outside/everywhere that he has earned that deal, the millions of dollars that will come to the kid when (not if) he leaves school.

Goodbye, Human Sexuality 101. Hello, World.

For an old man, hurt by defeat, voice tight, saying he loved to coach this team, “and even though I’m in the wrong locker room, I feel like a really lucky person,” there’s a future too. Roy Williams came to New Orleans the week his alma mater fired its coach. Now what? Williams is always first on the only Tar Heel wish list that counts, Dean Smith’s. Goodbye, Lawrence? Hello, Chapel Hill?

We’ll see, and we’ll see Carmelo Anthony and Roy Williams again in good places, and when we see them, we’ll know what there is about them. There is this: When we finish putting together all those puzzle parts that look so different, they make not two pictures but one.

Amazing, Carmelo Anthony and Roy Williams are the same man, only one’s a lot taller.