OPINION:
Lefty Driesell is a big man, with a big heart, a big ego and a big legacy.
A big man like him belongs in a place where they honor big legacies.
Finally, the University of Maryland’s larger-than-life basketball coach from 1969 to 1986 will take his place where he belongs — the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
The official announcement will come Saturday, and the reaction, once everyone is reminded of the greatness of Driesell, should be twofold — why did it take so long and do we have enough room in the building for the man everyone knew as Lefty?
The why is in the tragic tale of Len Bias, one of Driesell’s greatest players who died of a drug overdose in 1986. The perception that Driesell had some kind of role in trying to cover up the details likely stood in the way of him taking his rightful place earlier. Finally, though, voters were either convinced the perception was not reality, or simply, given the shame of some coaches already in the Hall, felt foolish keeping Driesell out.
Washington Post columnist John Feinstein, who broke the news of Dreisell’s long-overdue selection Wednesday night, wrote that the legendary coach “made basketball matter in the Washington area when he came to Maryland in 1969.”
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Buy Driesell created success wherever he went — four different college programs, starting with Davidson College and, after Maryland, building winning programs at James Madison and Georgia State University. He was the first coach to win more than 100 games at four different Division I schools, a 786-394 record, which is a Hall of Fame coaching legacy by any standards.
“The first game I coached at Davidson we beat Wake Forest,” Driesell told me in an interview several years ago. “Back then in the Final Four you had a consolation game. They had won that consolation game the year before and were third in the country. And we beat them in my first game at Davidson. Billy Packer played on that team. Bones McKinney was the coach. That was my first college game. I came home and told my wife, ’I ought to quit now.’”
He didn’t. He would go on to turn small Davidson into a basketball power starting in 1960, winning three Southern Conference tournament championships and five regular-season championships. He was named conference Coach of the Year four consecutive seasons, from 1963 to 1966. He had taken them to the Elite Eight in 1969 when he was offered the job at College Park by athletic director Jim Kehoe, who understood what appealed to Driesell. He sold the coach on being part of the Washington sports scene’s new triangle of greatness — joining new Redskins head coach Vince Lombardi and new Senators manager Ted Williams.
If Driesell didn’t take the job, Kehoe was going to offer it to DeMatha High School basketball coach Morgan Wooten.
“Jim Kehoe said, ’Look, you’re going to be in the nation’s capital. We got Vince Lombardi in the fall, you in the winter as the basketball coach and Ted Williams in the spring. This is a great situation for you.’ He said you stay the night but in the morning you better have a decision or I am giving the job to Morgan. You’ll be the highest paid coach in the ACC — I was making $14,000 — and you’ll have Ted Williams and Vince Lombardi as your buddies. So I decided to come.”
Driesell almost took a different career path, though, one that might have changed the history of college basketball.
“I could have gone to Duke while I was there (at Davidson),” he said. “Carl James (Duke athletic director) called me up and asked me to come to Duke. I had played at Duke. I told him no. As a matter of fact, he offered me the job when I had already accepted the Maryland job … I said, ’Carl I just took the Maryland job. If you called me a week ago or so I might have taken it.’”
Fortunately for local basketball fans, he came to Maryland, and college basketball was never the same. Driesell did everything in a big way — he was the creator of what is now known as Midnight Madness to kick off the college basketball season. When he first arrived, as a recruiting tool, he used the local newspaper — with an advertisement.
“I put an ad in The Washington Post, with a picture of the four best players in the area,” he said. “The Louisville team in the ABA was going after Wes Unseld that way after he got out of Louisville. They took out an ad that said, ’Warning — Wes Unseld. Wanted by the Kentucky Colonels.’ So I said let’s put an ad in the paper that said, wanted — Maryland, to start a new era or something like that, with a picture of all four of them. Someone wondered if that was legal, so we called in the university lawyers and they read over the rules and said there was nothing illegal about it. I said, ’Are you positive because I know the NCAA will jump on it.’ So we put it in the paper. All the coaches said, ’This is awful, this is like the pros, not college basketball. It’s against the rules.’
“There was a copy of that ad in the New York Times, the Los Angeles paper, every paper in the country just about because everyone wrote stories about it — look what Lefty’s doing in recruiting now,” he said. “He’s got this ad for these four players in D.C. I don’t know what we paid for the ad, about $500, but we got about $5 million worth of advertising. It was everywhere. It helped us in recruiting.”
Driesell was a legendary recruiter. At Davidson, he drove the school station wagon on recruiting trips. “Sometimes at night I would pull up at a service station with a mattress in the back,” said. “I kept a gun under my pillow in case anyone would mess with me. I would get up in the morning, go in the bathroom and shave and get ready.”
But he is sensitive about the notion that he wasn’t a great coach as well — despite his remarkable coaching record, despite building Maryland teams that competed for national championships, despite coaching in perhaps the greatest college basketball game of all time — the epic 1974 ACC tournament 103-100 loss to North Carolina State.
“How many players did (North Carolina coach) Dean (Smith) wind up having in the top 50 in the NBA?” he once asked me. “How many did I have? He had better players than I did. But Dean was smart, he was slick. He would talk about his run and jump and all that bull crap. I talked about my players. I built my players up. I could recruit. But he was a better recruiter than I was. I was just as good a coach as he was.”
Yes, Driesell’s insecurities are big as well. He spent the last few years trying to figure out exactly why he wasn’t getting elected to the Hall. He can stop now.
⦁ Thom Loverro hosts his weekly podcast “Cigars & Curveballs” Wednesdays available on iTunes, Google Play and the reVolver podcast network.
• Thom Loverro can be reached at tloverro@washingtontimes.com.
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