Associated Press
DETROIT ó Ty Lawson wasn’t the only North Carolina guy to try his hand at craps this week.
Roy Williams went, too.
Which basically answered the question of whether the Tar Heels coach was upset that his point guard walked down the street to shoot dice at the casino Wednesday night.
“It’s strange, if we don’t want those kids doing it, don’t put the Final Four in a city where the casino is 500 yards from our front door,” Williams said Friday. “And they’ve got a great buffet in there. I mean, come on.”
Kidding aside, the NCAA has always disapproved of gambling ó it runs clinics and public-service announcements deriding it ó and this year’s Final Four has opened doors for some to chastise NCAA leaders as hypocrites.
Detroit is a city with three casinos downtown. Across the river is Windsor, Ontario, the home of Caesar’s Palace, which is the host resort for all the basketball coaches descending on the Final Four this week.
Of course, gambling is also what drives the popularity of the NCAA tournaments, with millions of brackets being filled out in office pools that cost $5 or $10 or $20 or more to enter. They are technically illegal. Meanwhile, Web sites like CBSSports.com, a key benefactor of the tournament, offer $10,000 prizes in their bracket contests.
And Lawson is 21 ó legal to gamble in Michigan.
“I feel like the media is blowing everything out of proportion,” Lawson said. “It’s crazy how one little thing has turned into a big deal.”
None of the two dozen-plus players asked by The Associated Press on Friday acknowledged going to the casino.
Coaches of the other three teams more or less dismissed the issue. “I just don’t really find it that problematic,” UConn’s Jim Calhoun said.
Williams didn’t duck the issue. He said his team arrived in Detroit on Wednesday, and “I’m not going to tell my guys to stay in the room and watch Bill Cosby reruns for four days, c’mon.”
He said he met with Lawson and Marc Campbell before they left for the casino and told them to get in touch with him if they felt like they were going to do something “questionable.”
Then the coach went himself, mainly out of superstition.
Earlier this season, he lost money playing craps in Detroit, then coached the Tar Heels to a 98-63 win over Michigan State in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge. He got a similar result on a trip to Reno to play Nevada.
“So you’ve got to be halfway an idiot if you think I’m not going to go gamble and lose money before this game, too,” Williams said.