Former NBA player and current NBA assistant coach Monty Williams has shown an incredible amount of strength over the course of the last few months. His wife Ingrid died in a car accident in Oklahoma City in February, and after delivering an amazing eulogy at her memorial service, Williams took some time off from coaching to focus on his family. He’s returned to work this summer by serving as an assistant coach for Team USA under Mike Krzyzewski, but he’s obviously still working through the pain and grief that has come along with losing his wife so suddenly.
ESPN’s Hannah Storm caught up with Williams this week to talk about how he’s dealing with everything that’s going on in his life at the moment. And while it’s obviously a heartbreaking situation, Williams seems to be managing everything life has thrown at him with an astounding amount of grace and resilience. While speaking with Storm, he admitted that he still texts his late wife from time to time just to stay connected to her, but he also stressed that he's pushing himself forward. He said "quitting is not an option" for him or any of the couple’s five kids.
"I still text her," Williams told Storm. "Yeah, I still text her. It’s not like I know she’s going to answer—I know she’s not going to answer—but it’s just part of what I do. I’ll go outside at night and I’ll just look up in the sky and start talking to her. When you’ve been with somebody for 26 years and married for 20, you would just have to be around us to know what we were like. So I find myself doing everything that I can that I knew she would do, especially with the kids. Because she was the one who I could bounce my life off of, and she wasn’t afraid to tell me the truth. The reality is we live in a world that’s filled with stuff, but quitting is not an option. It’s just life. You have to be able to get up, face your flaws, and just, whatever it is, a step, an inch, you just got to keep moving forward."
You can watch Williams’ interview with Storm in the clip above.
