The scene was as noticeable as anything that has happened during the 10 seasons Gary Williams has spent as basketball coach at the University of Maryland. It took place late in Maryland's blowout victory over Florida State during the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament.

On the bench was All-American Steve Francis, joking with a middle-age guy who looked amazingly like Williams except for one detail: On his face was the silliest of grins.

"I screwed up," Williams said of last weekend's lapse in his usual intensity.

By the next afternoon, the smile was gone. As the Terrapins were being dismantled during a disappointing semifinal defeat to North Carolina, Williams had once again become the vein-busting, referee-baiting maniac who has roamed sidelines across America for more than 20 years.

Those two displays of the coach's personality demonstrate where he and his team find themselves these days. Williams -- just as competitive but maybe a shade less combative -- has put Maryland among the nation's basketball elite. Yet he and the Terps are only on the verge of the greatness some had predicted early this season.

There's little chance Williams will allow himself to relax once the Terps open play today in the NCAA tournament against Valparaiso in Orlando, Fla. As the No. 2 seed in the South Regional, Maryland (26-5) is expected to advance further than at any time since 1975. That year, Lefty Driesell's team reached the round of eight, one victory short of the Final Four.

As a coach, Williams has never made it past the Sweet 16, let alone to a championship.

"You can do a pretty good job and if it doesn't work out, there will be people saying you didn't go far enough," Williams said last week, a couple of days before celebrating his 54th birthday. "I judge myself on putting together a team for a whole season. But I'll be a lot nicer on myself if we do well."

Some of the expectations surrounding this season's talented team have been tempered by the loss to the Tar Heels, a late-season injury to senior center Obinna Ekezie and the two crushing defeats to No. 1 Duke. Nonetheless, the pressure on Williams is at a peak.

In a coaching career that has produced 397 victories in 21 seasons, Williams is all too familiar with pressure.

It is the reason that he sweats a lot more than he smiles.

Working hard

The amount of sweat that seeps through his monogrammed white shirts and mats his gray hair during games leaves the impression he works as hard as, if not harder than, his players. The big difference between Williams now and as a Maryland point guard in the '60s is the suit he wears instead of a uniform.

"He was one of the fiercest players a coach could have," recalled Bud Millikan, who coached 17 years at Maryland. "You would have to sit him down in practice because he would overwork. He's extremely competitive."

Despite his teams' dramatic improvement over the past decade, Williams rants at officials and rails at his players. He sometimes shouts at his assistant coaches for not being vocal enough and at players -- even if they're not in the game -- for not being intense enough.

Williams' tendency to drive himself too hard helped lead to a hospitalization for pneumonia four years ago. His friends worry about the effects of his intensity, but Williams said he received a clean bill of health in January.

He took a physical as part of an insurance policy connected with his latest contract. Williams signed an extension in November that -- with three rollover clauses -- could keep him at Maryland through May 2008 and that reportedly could be worth as much as $900,000 a year. The medical exam came shortly after Duke routed Maryland on national television.

"My blood pressure was 118 over 72," bragged Williams of the favorable reading. "Enough said."

He has adjusted his off-court regimen to include a treadmill that he uses as more than a high-tech coat hanger in his Potomac townhouse. He also bought a beach house in Rehoboth a couple of years ago, though a mentor, former college coach Tom Young, has said: "I have a hard time picturing Gary sitting on the beach reading a book."

Competitive nature

The coaches and ex-coaches who go with Williams on an annual summer golf trip to Great Britain call him "Wacko," befitting someone who yells at his golf ball for hooking into the woods.

"That's his golf nickname," said P.J. Carlesimo, Golden State Warriors coach and former Seton Hall coach. "Is Gary intense? Yes. Is he very competitive? Yes. That's the essence of Gary."

Williams said his histrionics during games aren't typical in other parts of his life. Yet he acknowledges, "That's all they [fans] have to judge me by."

Williams, who was divorced in 1988 from his college sweetheart, Diane, and has not remarried, is an extremely private person, slow to trust outsiders.

"I still have a private side where I don't let a lot of people close," he said. "I think I've changed some with my players. I'm sure some guys feel closer to me than others."

One is senior point guard Terrell Stokes, who found common ground in his aspirations of becoming a coach. Despite having problems with Stokes on and off the court until the middle of last season, Williams stuck by him. He didn't bow to public sentiment this season to replace Stokes at point guard with Francis. Stokes responded with his best season as a Terp, and the team won the greatest number of regular-season games in Maryland history.

"It took me awhile to adapt to Gary," said Stokes. "But I think we're very similar. He wants to win, and I want to win. Sometimes, it takes a different approach. We had to put that together. He's a lot like I am. He didn't have anything spoon-fed to him."

The few with whom he has shared his past say Williams' tightly wrapped personality may have been formed during his youth in Collingswood, N.J.

"It was horrendous," said one longtime friend.

Escaping to the gym

It was, by Williams' account, not a very happy childhood, either before or after his parents divorced when he was in the ninth grade. Williams took out his frustration in the gym.

"That's where basketball became the biggest thing in my life," he said. "I was good at it. Back then, when your parents got divorced, it was a big event. Basketball was an escape for me."

The fractured family barely healed, if at all. His mother moved to California, remarried and died of cancer years ago. His father, William, 83, had a distant relationship with Gary, although the two speak occasionally.

Williams has also been estranged at times from his two brothers, though his older brother, Douglas, who works for a check-cashing company in Greensboro, N.C., started coming to games a couple of years ago when Maryland was on Tobacco Road. His younger brother, David, is a mechanic in Bakersfield, Calif.

The one constant for Williams is his closeness with his 28-year-old daughter, Kristin Scott. Married and working as a teacher in Columbus, Ohio, Scott said the divorce of her parents was difficult. At the time, she was a sophomore at Miami of Ohio.

"Both my parents did a great job of seeing that I was a big part of their lives," said Scott. "My mother did a lot of work with my dad in that area, and he's done that in making me feel a part of his success at Maryland."

Williams has had a number of relationships since his divorce and is dating a woman he began seeing last season. He was engaged during his first season at Maryland, but that relationship broke off shortly after Williams was charged with drunken driving in spring 1990.

It came at a time when the basketball program, after making the National Invitation Tournament, was about to go on NCAA probation for violations committed before he arrived.

"It was a really difficult time for him," said his daughter. "What got him through the first year was the way the team played. I think he was in a state of shock when they got the probation they did. He questioned whether he had made the right move. It was definitely a dark period."

Because of the probation and sanctions -- two seasons without postseason play and one without television appearances -- things deteriorated on the court. The Terps won 12 ACC games total in the next three seasons.

"I had been in tough situations in other places," said Williams, alluding to the rebuilding jobs he had at American University and Ohio State and arriving at Boston College a few years after a point-shaving scandal there. "But not anything came close to this."

Those bleak years are long gone. This will be Maryland's sixth straight NCAA tournament appearance, extending the school record set last year.

"Putting this year aside, most basketball observers will say that Gary has gotten the most out of the teams he has coached," said former Maryland All-American Len Elmore, a basketball analyst for ESPN. "Even Joe Smith's teams [which lost to Michigan and Connecticut in the Sweet 16]. The only time I think Maryland under-achieved was when it lost to College of Charleston [in 1997]."

Elmore has noticed a difference in the way Williams has handled his players this season, one that could help the Terps should they advance deep into the tournament, and perhaps to the school's first Final Four.

"I've seen a marked change in him," said Elmore. "From the outside, he still might look like he's browbeating his players. But he's been so positive and so upbeat this year no matter what the situation. I don't know if it's a question of soul-searching or a 'eureka' type situation, but he's on to something."

Those close to Williams say his happiness -- and that's always a relative term for him -- grows out of more than his team's performance and his contract.

At peace

It stems from the fact that Williams seems at peace with himself at this stage of his life.

"He likes what he does, he likes the kids he is coaching and he likes where the program is at," said John Brown, chairman of the Maryland Stadium Authority, ex-Terrapin Club president and owner of a College Park restaurant Williams frequents after games. "He likes being appreciated."

Said his daughter: "He's very proud of what he's accomplished. He used to say that he needed to drink three cups of coffee every day to keep the program going. Now, he only needs to drink one."

For years, the students at Maryland have been calling Cole Field House "Garyland," and rumors of Williams' leaving for another college job, or for the NBA, have quieted. Perhaps for good.

Though some might wonder how long into the millennium Williams will last, he is intent on fulfilling the contract. "I say that now, but seven years down the road, who knows?" he said.

"To coach at that point, hopefully I'll be the best judge of that situation. You'd like to get out when you're still young enough to enjoy something else, but I don't see anything else I'd like to do.

"It's nice to be at a place where you have a chance to win. But if you stay long enough, there will come a time when people will not be satisfied.

"You try not to think about it, but you do think about it," he said. "You want to coach as long as you want, but that's not always going to happen."

Which is why Williams sweats more often than he smiles.

Pub Date: 3/11/99