Requiem For The 'Hander

Summing up the life of Lefty Driesell is a fool’s errand. Words fail. Descriptions are inadequate. Even the stories about him, which are endless and endlessly entertaining, provide incomplete snapshots of a man who wouldn’t be believable if he were made up. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. 

Start with this: Charles Grice Driesell, who passed away over the weekend at age 92, was one of the most colorful, successful, influential figures in the history of college basketball. Again, accurate but insufficient. Try this: Lefty helped change the sport. Or this: He won and made basketball matter in places where it previously did neither. 

It hardly seems fathomable, when you look at the multi-billion dollar behemoth that college basketball has become, that a man who never won a national championship, who never came close to a national title, would have exerted the influence he did. But it’s true. Lefty never set out to make history or become a seminal figure. He just wanted to coach young men and win games. He was a larger-than-life character, a bear of a man with a southeastern Virginia drawl – he was born in Norfolk, Va. – who mixed southern charm and grace with a competitive streak that manifested in many a sideline foot-stomping exhibition. 

He possessed the gift of gab along with a tendency to muddle the language. The drawl and the malaprops made him an easy foil and often cast him as a rube or un-intelligent, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. He could have sold sand to beachgoers – he was a primo encyclopedia salesman as a side hustle while he coached high school ball in the 1950s – but instead chose to sell himself and his programs to recruits, and especially to their mamas. 

Lefty built programs practically from scratch at Davidson and Maryland, challenging the hegemony of the North Carolina schools at both stops. He coached at James Madison after his tenure at Maryland went sour following the death of Len Bias, and then at Georgia State in downtown Atlanta. When he retired in 2003, he had 786 wins, then fourth-most all time. His teams won two of every three games they played, and advanced to 13 NCAA tournaments and eight NIT berths. He is one of only a handful of coaches to take four different schools to the NCAA Tournament. 

When he arrived at Maryland in 1969, he famously said that the school “has the potential to be the UCLA of the East.” He never pulled that off, but he quickly made the Terps destination viewing and Cole Field House, Maryland’s old barn of a building, rocked under his spell and inspired a generation of fans. 

JMU’s Convocation Center similarly rocked in his early years in Harrisonburg when the Dukes were routinely among the top two or three teams in the league. He created Midnight Madness, the custom of starting drills at 12:01 a.m., on the first day of practice that became an all-inclusive party for fans. The NCAA expanded its tournament to permit multiple teams from the same conference to compete in 1975, due in large part to the fourth-ranked Terps’ loss to No. 1-ranked and eventual national champ North Carolina State in the 1974 ACC Tournament final the previous spring, a 103-100 overtime affair that some still call the greatest game in college hoops history. 

Yet for all that, Lefty often never received his due. He was a great recruiter, one of the best ever, and because of that many people thought he should have won more than he did. Critics banged away at him, said he wasn’t the tactician of his ACC nemesis Dean Smith, or later and to a lesser degree, Richmond’s Dick Tarrant. The notion that Lefty had good players and simply rolled out the balls and let ‘em play frequently stuck. 

The fact that Lefty didn’t make the Naismith Hall of Fame until 2018, fifteen years after he retired, was perplexing. I periodically wrote columns stumping for Lefty when another HOF class came and went without him. Terry Holland, his former player, assistant coach and later rival at Virginia, told me that of course his mentor merited inclusion at Springfield, Mass. ‘There are coaches with better credentials who are in the Hall,’ Holland said, ‘but there’s no one with his credentials who isn’t.’ 

Mike Krzyzewski once said that Lefty would have eclipsed the career wins record if Maryland hadn’t “scapegoated” him for Bias’s death. Though to be fair, an internal investigation claimed that Driesell instructed staff and players to clean up Bias’s room in the immediate aftermath, and academic deficiencies discovered related to Bias and other players tarnished his reputation. I suspect that reasons for Lefty’s omission at Springfield for so long included the lack of a national championship on his resume’ and tainted exits in general and frequently being cited for who and what he wasn’t rather than what he was. 

The Bias episode was jarring for the man who was synonymous with Maryland basketball and where he likely would have coached another 10-15 years. At JMU, his teams slipped in his final years, and he was fired one day after announcing that the upcoming season would be his last. At Georgia State, he quietly stepped down in December of his sixth season when he said he was unable to shake a cold that had sapped his energy. That subdued exit from yet another program he resurrected didn’t jibe with a man capable of commanding rooms and entire arenas, who put his stamp on the sport like few others. He was an original, one whose likes we will not see again.