UNC coach Roy Williams not worried about vertigo’s effects on his long-term health

If ever Roy Williams would have let his vertigo affect his future and lifestyle it would have happened during a golf trip to St. Andrews in Scotland.

He was nearing the conclusion of his round when vertigo struck him while he stood in a bunker. Williams, the North Carolina coach, recounted the story on Friday, days after he missed most of the second half of his team’s victory at Boston College amid a particularly crippling vertigo spell.

“I’ve puked in the bunker on the 18th hole at the New Course at St. Andrews,” Williams said, using the comparison to show his lack of long-term concern for what happened at Boston College. “So Terry Allen, who was our football coach at (Kansas) at that time, made up shirts, T-shirts, that say, ‘I saw coach Williams puke in the bunker at St. Andrews.’

“There’s been some bad things. If I was going to quit doing anything, I would have quit after that.”

Williams still plays plenty of golf, though, at least when his knees are healthy enough for it. He gets on planes even though turbulence once contributed to a vertigo attack that left a flight attendant worried that Williams had experienced a heart attack.

Williams, who has been diagnosed with benign positional vertigo, laughed at the memory of that one on Friday. He still remembers the date of the flight: July 30, 2005. He left his seat to use the restroom – he hasn’t done that on a plane since, he said – and then the turbulence struck.

“I sit down and sure enough it was bad,” Williams said. “So I use my (vomit) bag and the bag beside that and the bag beside that. Flight attendant got all nervous and she had had some nursing training and she came back and knew who I was and she tried to find my pulse. She couldn’t find one.

“I said, ‘Honey, I am alive – I am talking to you.’ ”

The plane landed in Kansas City, where Williams said, he “was still not a nice word in that part of the world with some people” given he’d left Kansas two years before to return to UNC. Paramedics got on the plane to examine Williams.

Williams, frustrated by now, tried arguing that he was merely suffering from vertigo and not a more serious medical condition. The paramedic insisted on taking Williams off on a stretcher and to an ambulance.

Before Williams laid down on the stretcher, he asked for a towel to cover his face. He didn’t want anyone at the Kansas City airport recognizing him. And so they took Williams off the plane, on the stretcher, with the towel over his face.

“I go out and I heard one guy say, ‘God, that guy died,’” Williams said.

He can laugh at the stories now but, in the moment, his experiences with vertigo have hardly been humorous. He has experienced attacks on golf courses, on a plane, during a practice.

And now during a game.

The one at Boston College earlier this week was the first time it had ever happened in a game, Williams said.

“It’s something that I’ve dealt with, that I’ll always deal with,” he said. “And hadn’t been too big a thing.”

Benign positional vertigo can occur when a piece of “bone-like calcium” floats inside the fluid-filled tubes in the inner ear, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s website. Symptoms include vomiting, a sense of spinning and loss of balance and can be triggered by head movements, according to the site.

During a timeout in the second half at Boston College, Williams took a few steps onto the court to address an official. He didn’t like the response he received – Williams described it on Friday as “arrogant” – and so Williams jerked his head around and stormed off.

The suddenness of the head movement caused the vertigo. He reached the UNC bench and collapsed slowly into a seated position.

“All of a sudden I was saying, ‘Justin, Joel, how’d I get down here?’ ” Williams said, referencing two of his players. “It was that kind of thing. But it is something that is not caused by anybody. It’s just my reaction to what I thought was not the proper response to a question.”

Williams spent most of the rest of game in the UNC locker room, where he took medication that Doug Halverson, the team’s head trainer, carries specifically in case Williams has a vertigo attack. Williams took more of the medication after the team returned from Boston.

The Tar Heels were off on Wednesday but after some rest Williams came into the office around 3:30 that afternoon. He was back on his normal schedule on Thursday.

“Did yoga yesterday morning, came in the office at the regular time, left here at 8:30 last night,” Williams said. “Came in this morning, did my, not that you can tell it, but did my weight workout this morning.”

Williams appeared in a jovial mood on Friday and went into detail about his experiences with vertigo. Since 1995, he said, he’d endured “17 or 18” vertigo spells that he could remember.

One of them came before UNC’s first game this season, during a practice at the Naval Academy.

“But it was Brice’s fault,” Williams said, poking run at his relationship with senior forward Brice Johnson. “Which is normal, right? He had a chance to dodge me or run over me and he decided to run over me during practice. No, that’s not true, either. But we bumped into each other.”

Before Tuesday, that had been Williams’ most recent vertigo attack. He told a story on Friday of one of his first, which he said happened on The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island in South Carolina.

Williams was playing golf in a group that included Dean Smith, who was then still coaching at UNC. On the sixth hole, Williams said he hit a shot out of a bunker and received a face full of sand. He spun his head around, instinctively.

“Next thing I know I’m crawling out of the bunker,” Williams said. “And it usually involves throwing up and that day I threw up on the seventh tee, eighth tee, ninth tee and quit. And they played the last nine holes at The Ocean Course without me, so I was really mad about that.”

Theo Pinson, the sophomore forward, said Friday that he and his teammates were “definitely concerned” about Williams on Tuesday. Even though they’d seen him experience one before, this was new – Williams leaving a game because of it.

By Thursday, though, Williams was back to normal in practice.

“Same old thing,” Pinson said. “Same guy, joking around with us. He was like, ‘Theo, I only had one attack when Sean May was here.’ … Something like that.

“And he was like, ‘First time I start you in a while, I have a vertigo attack.’ I was like, ‘Well, I mean – my fault.’ So I thought that was pretty funny.”

This story was originally published February 12, 2016 at 4:45 PM with the headline "UNC coach Roy Williams not worried about vertigo’s effects on his long-term health."