Few and Williams: Poker Buddies and Road Trippers

The 2017 NCAAbasketball championship game between the North Carolina Tar Heels and Gonzaga Bulldogs has a poker connection that not many people may be aware of.

Gonzaga head coach Mark Few and his counterpart at North Carolina, Roy Williams, have hung out together with other college basketball coaches on Nike-sponsored road trips during offseasons. Not the least bit surprising, poker games have a tendency to break out on such trips, transitioning talk of fast breaks and zone defenses to that of starting hand selection and bluffs.

Apparently, the poker-playing coaches are not satisfied with your typical Hold'em, Pot Limit Omaha, and stud games. The great basketball minds have developed some game variants of their own, one of which is called "Roy Williams."

(Photo: AP)

Basketball and Poker Mentor

It's a variation of Seven-Card Stud, and how it differs from the regular version isn't precisely known unless you happen to be one of the coaches in attendance on the road trips. However, Few has introduced the game to his kids, even calling Roy on the telephone so that the North Carolina coach can better explain to his children the "Roy Williams" stud variant while on speaker phone.

While Few and his kids are learning poker games from Williams, that isn't all that the Gonzaga coach has learned from the 66-year-old. Few admitted to copying some of Williams' basketball strategies over the years, telling USA Today that he considers the Tar Heels' head coach "a mentor, somebody that I looked up to when I was first getting in."

(Photo: AP)

That mentor-protege relationship has turned into a friendship that will find both men on opposite sides of the basketball court at the University of Phoenix Stadium for the NCAA championship. And while poker games will have to wait until the offseason, there may be some poker-like strategy going on as the coaches try to outwit and stay one step ahead of each other.