CHAPEL HILL - North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams braced himself in April for a phone call informing him he was not Hall of Fame ready, while his mentor Dean Smith wondered what was taking so long for the Hall to recognize Williams' credentials.

Seated alongside his protege Wednesday, Smith beamed like a proud father. He did not need to bang the drum for Williams or his seven 30-win seasons, five trips to the Final Four, 2005 national championship and .800 career win percentage.

This weekend in Springfield, Mass., Smith will be among about 100 family, friends and former players traveling to view Williams' induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Chuckling over memories of Williams' 10 years as a UNC assistant under Smith, the two Hall of Fame coaches tried to put into context Williams' road from a scrappy, UNC junior varsity walk-on from the mountains of North Carolina to a peak of the basketball coaching community.

"You should have seen him with JVs one time," Smith said, pausing to laugh. "One time we brought him up to work against the varsity, and all of a sudden we couldn't score. He had them working defensively already."

Williams counts his Hall of Fame banquet speech as only the third one that he's ever written out in advance, and he described it as "three pages of thanking people." The other two speeches were high school graduation addresses at his alma mater, T.C. Roberson.

Friends have told Williams he has "no chance" of making it through Friday night's speech without choking up, he joked.

"I really don't know," Williams said when asked how he expects to handle the weekend. "I've had a lot of people tell me that it will really hit me probably when I get there. Right now when I think about it, which is not a lot, it's about a lot of great players who've made me look good.

"And I've asked them to continue doing that."

It's a mantra that Williams learned at the knee of Smith, who called Williams, "my tiger for basketball."

"He has it all," Smith said. "You go into a home with him, and he's just honest and straightforward. He teaches extremely well in practice, ... everything else is perfect. Except once in a while I see him look angry.

"He didn't used to do that, except at State."

Williams' return to North Carolina in 2003 has proven a happy homecoming, complete with a national championship two years ago. It came only three years after he had resisted a previous overture to lure him back to Chapel Hill from Kansas.

Smith made it clear in 2000 that he would have loved for Williams to return then, yet Williams' decision to stay at Kansas also came with Smith's blessing.

"Coach said from the beginning, the first time we ever talked about it, 'I want you to do whatever you want to do. I would love for you to be to back here, but it's got to be what you want to do,' and that part was always extremely important to me," Williams said. "In life you've got some people who are with you regardless of what you do. ... Coach Smith was in that first group, in that he was with me regardless.

"The two most difficult time periods of my life: saying no the first time and saying yes the second time to coach. Either way, I was going to disappoint some people, and I'm corny enough to not want to disappoint people."

For Williams, the perks of returning included seeing Smith slip into practice once a week or so to watch from the stands. Smith used to resist giving him notes or tips from watching practice, because he would hate to suggest something that didn't work, Williams said.

"I said, 'I think you know me well enough that if I'm not comfortable with it, I wouldn't do it,' " Williams said. "I love getting his notes from what he sees, because I think he's the best there has ever been."