In the annals of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, it's a perfect piece of symmetry. On a gorgeous spring night in May 1988, Kansas athletic director Bob Frederick attended the Hall of Fame induction ceremony for Clyde Lovellette and Ralph Miller, two men who'd played in the storied Jayhawks basketball program. But what Frederick recalls most clearly from that fateful evening in Springfield was something else: the non-stop chatter he heard about an unknown No. 2-assistant coach at North Carolina named Roy Williams.

Kansas had just won the NCAA title under Coach Larry Brown, and after a dalliance with UCLA, Brown appeared to be staying in Lawrence. But that didn't stop Frederick's table-mate that night: Dick Harp, the former Kansas coach who'd been working on Dean Smith's staff at Carolina. "All Dick could talk about was Roy Williams as a candidate for the next head coach at Kansas," recalls Frederick. "I said, 'Dick, Larry's staying! I'm not hiring a coach.' Well, two months later Larry announced he was going to the San Antonio Spurs, and suddenly Roy Williams was on my radar screen. But I had only had a passing knowledge of him until that night [in Springfield]."

Nearly two decades later, Williams himself is being inducted into the Hall of Fame, the result of a remarkable 19-year head-coaching career at Kansas and North Carolina that includes one national championship, five Final Fours, 11 regular-season conference titles and a winning percentage (.800) so far beyond any other active coach's that he could lose every game next season and still be on top.

All of which makes it hard to believe that Williams' hiring at Kansas in 1988 was met with indifference by many Jayhawks fans and downright scorn by others. But since when does the reigning national champion, one of the nation's most pedigreed programs, have to hire someone who had never even worked as a college head coach? "A prominent KU alum was quoted in the Dallas Morning News saying this was a worse hire than Notre Dame hiring Gerry Faust," Frederick says with a laugh.

But Dean Smith knew better. "I knew he could do the job and do it well," says Smith, who was the first person Frederick called when the Kansas job opened. During Williams' sophomore year at Carolina, the focused young man from Asheville, N.C., had asked Smith for permission to attend his practices. Williams treated them as academic lectures, sitting high in the bleachers scribbling notes on how the grand master taught the game. Williams also kept statistics for Smith at home games, and he worked his summer camps with a zeal that Smith had never seen before.

"In two days he knew every camper in his gym by name," says Smith, whose camps were organized into several gymnasiums. "After the first year he was the head of a gym, which was the quickest I had ever made somebody the head of a gym." In 1973, soon after earning a Master's degree in education at UNC, Williams took the head-coaching job at Owen High in Swannanoa, N.C., near Asheville. He and his new bride, Wanda, spent the next five years turning Owen High's basketball teams into an extended family, packing ham-and-cheese sandwiches for road trips, hosting cookouts at their house and exhorting the players to compete with the same floor-burning abandon that you see today in Chapel Hill. It was a reflection of the commitment to excellence that Williams had learned not just from Smith but from Buddy Baldwin, his coach at Asheville's T.C. Roberson High, who had become a father figure to Williams.

In 1978, not long after the NCAA began allowing teams to hire a fourth coach, Smith gave Williams a call. "He had done well in high school," says Smith, "and it was already in the back of my mind: This is a guy I want on my staff." But there was a catch. The Williamses had an infant son, Scott, and a mortgage on their new house. Combined with Wanda's job as a high school English teacher, they earned $30,000 a year. The North Carolina assistant's job would pay an annual salary of just $2,700.

Williams took the job anyway. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. Smith arranged a teaching job for Wanda (at $9,000 a year), and Roy earned extra money in any way possible. During football and basketball seasons he'd drive 500 miles a week delivering videotapes of the UNC coach's show to TV stations across the state. And when those seasons were over he would become a traveling salesman, selling calendars of the Tar Heels basketball team around the state. Between the summers of 1980 and '87, as Williams increased his web of connections, his profits from the calendars rose from $9,000 to $30,000.

At the same time, of course, he became intimately familiar with the Carolina Way, coaching legendary players (none more so than Michael Jordan) while serving on one of the college game's all-time great coaching staffs (with Smith, Bill Guthridge and Eddie Fogler) and winning the 1982 NCAA title. Williams' standard operating procedure shares thousands of similarities with Smith, both large and small, from their teams' unselfish playing styles to the way their written practice plans include a Thought for the Day and drills organized (literally) to the minute. "To this day he's the most organized person I've ever been around," says Frederick. "He'd talk about starting practice at 9:35 a.m. when everyone else talks about starting practice at 9:30 or 9:45. There were times I'd wonder if he'd want to talk with me at 4:33 p.m."

Williams' meteoric rise at Kansas was breathtaking. Despite being saddled with NCAA recruiting sanctions and a postseason ban in connection to the previous coaching staff, he led the rebuilding Jayhawks to 19 wins in his first season and landed point guard Adonis Jordan, the first of many prized recruits from California. Williams' second team stunned LSU (with Shaquille O'Neal and Chris Jackson) and won the Preseason NIT on its way to a 30-5 record, and his third team went all the way to the NCAA title game-beating Smith and North Carolina in the national semifinal-before falling to Duke. By the time Kansas made another Final Four run in 1993, Williams had already turned down a $1 million-a-year offer to coach the Los Angeles Lakers, one of several NBA teams that tried to lure him (without success) to the pro ranks.

For years Williams has argued that he and Smith are different in one big way. "He's much more innovative," Williams maintains. "I copy people." And it's certainly true that during his days as a Carolina assistant Williams would often counsel Smith to stay the course when he wanted to tinker instead. "Every year I'd want to change something we were trying to do," says Smith, "and he was the one of the three who would always say, 'Why are we changing?'" But here's the funny thing: over the past 15 years Williams has been one of the game's great innovators, cranking up Smith's classic secondary break and balancing breakneck speed and wise shot selection to create the most lethal attacking weapon in college basketball.

"Structured chaos," Williams calls his brainchild, and it came to life on his Kansas teams in the mid-1990s that were spearheaded by point guard Jacque Vaughn. Blindingly fast and skilled, KU's 1996-97 team-with Vaughn, Paul Pierce, Raef LaFrentz, Scot Pollard, and Jerod Haase-may have been Williams' best ever, going 34-2 despite suffering a heartbreaking loss in the NCAA regional semis to eventual champion Arizona. Two years later Williams welcomed a blue-chip freshman class (Drew Gooden, Nick Collison and Kirk Hinrich) that renewed his faith in the recruiting process and led the Jayhawks to two Final Fours, including the 2003 NCAA title game (where they lost to Syracuse).

Then came the most angst-ridden decision of Williams' life. North Carolina needed a new basketball coach. Williams had turned down the Tar Heels in 2000 after a similar gut-wrenching process, but the conditions in '03 were different. After enduring 36 losses in two years, proud former Tar Heels were begging Williams to come. And so, after seven days of self-torture, Williams decided to leave Lawrence for Chapel Hill, the only other destination he would have considered.

In almost no time Williams revived not just the struggling team but also the Carolina Family-the most storied clan in college basketball-which had been quaking at its very foundations. In Williams' first season the Tar Heels won 19 games, reappeared in the NCAA tournament and hosted their first full alumni reunion since 1986. But it was Williams' second season that was magical, the kind of tour de force that silenced any remaining skepticism that Ol' Roy couldn't win the big game. In the most anticipated national title game in years, the No. 2 Tar Heels beat No. 1 Illinois in St. Louis behind the majestic 26-point, 10-rebound performance of Sean May, the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four. The aftermath was classic Williams: yes, he climbed into the stands for a tearful embrace with Wanda and their children, Scott and Kimberly, but he also ducked into a tunnel to console Bruce Weber, the losing Fighting Illini coach. Always empathetic, Williams knew exactly how Weber was feeling. "I'm not really that much better a coach now than I was about three hours ago," he explained, echoing what Dean Smith himself had said after winning his first title in 1982.

Even though Williams lost his top seven scorers from the '05 champions-including four underclassmen-he somehow took a freshman-laden team to the second-round of the '06 NCAA tournament, and after a run to last season's regional finals North Carolina will be at the top of many polls before the start of the upcoming season. That's a testament, naturally, to Williams: a tireless recruiter, a master motivator, and (whether he'll admit or not) one of the greatest innovators in the game today.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Grant Wahl has covered 11 NCAA tournaments for the magazine.