The Best American Sports Writing 2018

by Glenn Stout

  For $14,000, two courtesy cars (one for his wife, Joyce), a summer camp, and TV-radio pocket change, Maryland hired a man who made no small plans. Driesell intended to make Maryland “the UCLA of the East.” That got people’s attention, considering that the Terps had been to the NCAA tournament once in 46 years. Lefty started selling. He sold the idea of Lefty, a coach unlike any Maryland had known or would know. He sold players on a school they had never considered. He sold those players on strategies and tactics that let them be improvisational and thus unpredictable. Soon enough, it became apparent that Lefty could sell stoves at a shipwreck.

  He brought in seven players who would become NBA draft picks, one of them also a Rhodes Scholar, another headed to Harvard Law School. In his third season, 1971–1972, Maryland went 27-5 and won the National Invitation Tournament when winning it meant you’d done something good. That NIT matched the 16 best teams that didn’t make the 25-team NCAA field, then limited to conference champions and a handful of independents.

  Once a silent cavern, Cole Field House became bedlam as Driesell upgraded his team and his stagecraft. Almost by accident, he invented Midnight Madness. He put his players through a one-mile run at 12:03 a.m. on October 15, 1971, the first legal day of NCAA practice. Two years later the event morphed into an open practice drawing thousands. Only Lefty would enter a basketball arena to the operatic thunder of Jesus Christ Superstar. His finest moment came on nights when Lefty sent his players out of the locker room first. Then, from the darkness of a tunnel, with the school pep band raising the roof, here came Lefty strolling in to an amped-up version of “Hail to the Chief.” A January 1972 newspaper story reported the scene: “As the 14,000 madmen in the stands cheer wildly, Driesell parades solemnly to midcourt, bows his head, and raises both arms, his fingers extended in a Churchillian V-for-Victory sign.”

  At Davidson for 10 seasons and Maryland for 17—places where nobody had won anything—Lefty created programs that won big games at the highest levels. Twice at each school his teams reached the Elite Eight. After Maryland went 46 years with one NCAA appearance, Lefty took eight teams to the tournament. Eight times his Davidson and Maryland teams finished a season in the top 10 in the polls, three times in the top five. From 1960 to 1986, his teams won 524 games and lost 224, a .700 winning percentage.

  That body of work across a quarter of a century should get a man elected to the Naismith Hall of Fame, basketball’s ultimate honor.

  Somehow, Lefty is not in.

  We talked long and happily. We talked about a long-ago column in which I explained ACC stereotypes. Dean Smith, I wrote, was beloved in North Carolina but elsewhere considered a blackguard who would burn orphanages for the insurance money. I wrote that Lefty Driesell was a giant among the nation’s statesmen, but critics along Tobacco Road believed he couldn’t coach a fish to swim.

  “You, you’re that sumbitch who said I couldn’t coach a fish to swim,” he said at the time, by way of explaining he wouldn’t answer my press-conference question.

  Five minutes later, he stopped me in the hallway. My colleague, John Feinstein, had scolded Lefty. “Feinstein says I owe you an apology,” he said. As Lefty turned to leave, he said, “Didn’t read it, somebody told me. Sorry.”

  On this day in November, the conversation had moved so lightly that I said, “So, the Hall of Fame doesn’t bother you that much?”

  “Oh yeah, it bothers me,” he said. “It’s eatin’ at me. Everybody who doesn’t get into the Hall of Fame has some demon. I have a demon. It’s the Len Bias situation.”

  Life has been good to the grandson of a German immigrant who opened a mom-and-pop jewelry store in Norfolk 134 years ago. Still married to his high school sweetheart, Lefty has four children and 11 grandchildren, four of them basketball coaches. The Lefty museum has Hall of Fame plaques (15 of them) and Coach of the Year plaques (from each of the four D-I conferences he worked in). There’s a file drawer to the left of his chair.

  From that drawer he took a folder stuffed with photocopies of dozens of newspaper stories.

  “Every one of these stories,” he said, handing me the folder, “says it’s because of Len Bias.”

  Actually, the stories don’t say that. They suggest it. They guess it because they can think of no other reason.

  In those newspaper stories, I noticed one coach on Lefty’s side.

  So I called Mike Krzyzewski and left a number.

  Put aside Lefty the salesman and showman. Forget the sport coats of many colors, the foot-stompin’ outrage at courtside, the syntactically challenged press conferences. Forget how he picked fights with the biggest names: “Dean Smith’s the only coach in history to win more than 800 games and be the underdog in every one of them.” Cast it all out of mind, for the important takeaway from those 27 seasons at Davidson and Maryland is that Lefty was a master coach.

  The sportswriter Mark Whicker was an astute chronicler of ACC basketball through the 1970s and ’80s. “A couple times you could flip a coin as to who was better,” he said, “the national champion or Maryland.”

  With a break here and there, Whicker suggested, Lefty could have won two or three NCAA championships. When I passed along Whicker’s line, Lefty did what Lefty does. He began a story, this one about Moses Malone.

  “With Moses,” he said, “we mighta won four or five.”

  Malone is a name from the 1970s. He was a great player, a three-time NBA MVP. He loved Lefty. His mother loved Lefty. In 1974 he agreed, mostly to make Lefty happy, to accept a scholarship offer from Maryland. But even as a child Moses had chosen a different path. Lefty had seen what Moses wrote in his Bible. He wanted to be “the first high school player to go pro.” So he jumped past Lefty to the pros. Lefty loved Moses even after losing him.

  I listened to more Lefty on Moses.

  “Pritchett wanted to sleep in the car, at the curb, outside Moses’s house,” he said.

  Dave Pritchett was a basketball zealot, an assistant coach maniacal in his devotion to the game and obsessive in recruiting players. He was called Pit Stop. He earned the nickname with audacious rental-car behavior. Forever speeding toward the next prospect, his habit was to skid his rental to a stop on a sidewalk outside an airport and sprint to a plane. He told me his personal best was seven rental cars in one day.

  Of course Pritchett would want to sleep outside Moses’s house. It was his job to find players who would make Maryland the UCLA of the East. The zealotry was fired by one unwavering belief. “You can find a wife on any street corner in America,” he said, “but it’s rare to find a 6-foot-10 man who can play.”

  Malone was such a rarity. Pritchett had seen him embarrass an NBA star at a summer camp. Everyone wanted Moses, but not everyone was infected with an obsessive recruiter’s paranoia.

  “We were supposed to be there at 7 a.m., and Pritchett was sure somebody was gonna sneak in ahead of us,” Driesell said. “I said no, we’re sleeping in a bed.”

  They arrived at the Malone house at 6:30 a.m. to the sight of VCU coach Chuck Noe walking in the front door.

  “I told you,” Pritchett said. “I told you.”

  “We’ll be okay,” Lefty said.

  The coach had made friends with Mary Malone. “She was sweet, she was smart, and she liked me,” he said. Mary had promised Lefty that if her son played college ball, it would be with Maryland.

  Noe came out of the house, defeated.

  Lefty and Pit Stop hustled in, smiling.

  Lefty remembered the place as a rowhouse “in a terrible neighborhood,” one room down, one up. Mary Malone worked for $25 a week as an orderly at a retirement home. “Moses never had a father around,” Lefty said. “Mary told me once, ‘You know who called me last night? Moses’s father! I slammed down the phone so hard I might’ve broken it.’”

  At 7:15 a.m., the coaches went upstairs. Moses was asleep, his bed against a wall with a basketball-size hole to the outside.

  “He signed for us that morning,” Lefty said, and i
n the Lefty museum hangs a framed copy of the scholarship offer signed by Moses Eugene Malone on June 20, 1974.

  By then, Lefty already had seen what Malone had written in his Bible. It was no surprise, then, that on the first day of classes at Maryland that fall, Malone signed with the Utah Stars of the new American Basketball Association. Nevertheless, the coach and the prospect stayed in touch. Lefty even included Malone on his media guide’s page touting “Maryland Players in the Pros.” In retirement from the NBA, Malone came to Norfolk for charity golf tournaments and renewed his friendship with Driesell. Then, in September 2015, Malone died in his sleep of heart disease. He was 60 years old.

  Malone’s family asked Lefty to speak at a memorial in Moses’s hometown of Petersburg, Virginia. The old coach doesn’t remember what he said that day, “just what a great person he was.”

  Lefty’s stories come with backstories, and the backstories come with digressions and detours, all delightful and some with the added virtue that parts of them may be true. Take a deep breath, there’s a long sentence coming. It’s a summary of a Lefty tale two days in the telling:

  Lefty was an eight-year-old barefoot waterboy for the high school football team who grew up to be the school’s basketball star and might have signed with the University of Tennessee instead of Duke except he couldn’t be married at Tennessee and he wanted to marry his high school sweetheart, Joyce Gunter, a cheerleader who liked both him and his 1933 Ford convertible that once was owned by John D. Rockefeller, who gave it to Lefty’s uncle, John D’s neurosurgeon, who sold it for $300 to Lefty’s half-brother, who sold it to Lefty for $900, and Lefty souped it up with a 1950 Ford engine and dressed it up with whitewall tires. It had a rumble seat.

  I’ll wait while you read that again.

  Ready?

  Okay, let’s go back to John D. Rockefeller’s snazzy convertible.

  “The ’33 Ford,” Lefty said, “is the only reason Joyce dated me.”

  Joyce Driesell has heard this stuff before.

  “That car had nothing to do with it,” she said. “On our second date, I knew that was the man I would marry. He was just a nice guy.”

  By the door to his office, Lefty put an arm around his bride.

  “They call me a good recruiter,” he said. “Best recruiting job I ever did, signing up Joyce.”

  They went to a justice of the peace on December 14, 1951.

  “Lefty kept trying to kiss me before we even got to the I do part,” Joyce said. “At the end, Lefty asked how much he owed. The justice said, ‘Whatever you think it’s worth.’”

  Here, Joyce laughed.

  “So Lefty gave him $2.”

  I had gone to Virginia Beach to talk with Lefty about basketball. We wound up talking about other important things—such as his marriage to Joyce in its 66th year—and about how a Southerner, born and raised in coastal Virginia, was so good at recruiting athletes that most Southern coaches wouldn’t, or couldn’t, recruit people like Moses Malone.

  The answer begins with a backstory about trolley cars in Norfolk.

  Lefty was 12 when he first took a trolley across town. He saw black people, mostly women on their way to work, at the back of the car. He saw no reason for that when there were empty seats up front. Nor did he understand why a black woman had to give up her seat if a white man wanted it. Lefty didn’t need fancy sociological, civil-rights-activist language to express the truth.

  “Making her get up,” he said, “was stupid.”

  So young Lefty would sit in the back of the trolley. When an African American woman got on, he gave her his seat.

  It bothered him in those days to call people black. Negro sounded strange too. Years later, John Lucas Sr., the father of one of Lefty’s best players, John Jr., gave the coach a way to talk about race. “John Sr. said, ‘We’re just more sun-burned,’” Lefty recalled. From that point, he never coached an African American or a black. “But I had a lot of sun-burned players.”

  In 1965, long before he walked into the Malones’ house, Lefty wanted a sun-burned player named Charlie Scott. A 6-foot-5 guard who could do anything any guard ever did, Scott would be a two-time All-America. He would be a pro basketball star for a decade.

  I count Scott as one of Lefty’s players because he counts himself as one of Lefty’s players despite never playing for Lefty.

  “Lefty’s vivacious and infectious,” Scott said. “If you don’t like Lefty, there’s something wrong with you. He was my friend from the start. Lefty believed in me when nobody else did. Lefty’s still my coach. Lefty and Coach Smith.”

  Coach Smith was Dean Smith, the North Carolina coach, elected to the Naismith Hall of Fame in 1983. Some people think of Smith as a civil rights advocate who integrated the ACC by bringing Scott to Carolina in 1966. Some people forget that Scott was the ACC’s fourth black player, arriving after Billy Jones and Julius Johnson at Maryland and Claudius Claiborne at Duke.

  People also forget, or never knew, that Lefty had Charlie Scott before Dean had him. “There’d be no Charlie Scott,” Scott told me, “if there’d been no Lefty Driesell.”

  Lefty said, “Dean didn’t even know who Charlie Scott was until I got him.”

  Lefty was coaching at Davidson College, a small, private liberal arts school a couple of hours southwest of Chapel Hill. He had moved directly from Newport News High to the Division I job in 1960. He quickly turned Davidson into one of the nation’s best programs. Lefty said he had a $500 recruiting budget. He said he spent the occasional night sleeping in the school station wagon with a pistol under his head.

  By the spring of 1965, Lefty’s Davidson teams had won 67 of their last 80 games, and the Wildcats were No. 6 in the final AP poll. Then he went after Scott, a New York City kid living in Laurinburg, North Carolina, 120 miles southeast of the Davidson campus.

  “Lefty told me I could choose the other four players I wanted to come to Davidson with me,” Scott said.

  Scott and his high school coach, an African American named Frank McDuffie, liked everything about Davidson. And then they met Lefty at a restaurant.

  “Lefty was eating black-eyed peas and rice.” Scott said. The coach asked the player and the coach to sit down and order. “After a while,” Scott said, “the owner of the restaurant came to our table and said, ‘My wife and I don’t serve (n-word, plural) on this side of the restaurant.’ It didn’t bother me as much as it did Coach McDuffie.”

  Not much later, on a recruiting visit to Chapel Hill, Scott was treated to a fancy dinner (without insult), given concert tickets (The Temptations, Smokey Robinson), and shown around campus (by VIPs).

  Today, a half-century later, Scott’s decision would seem clear-cut. Not so much in 1966. Davidson and Lefty had become something big, while Carolina with Dean was an ACC also-ran. (This wasn’t long after Smith, replacing the legendary Frank McGuire, had been hung in effigy in Chapel Hill.) Lefty’s last two teams had gone 45-9, Dean’s 31-20.

  But McDuffie lobbied for North Carolina. In the end, Scott said, “I decided the importance of being the first black athlete at the University of North Carolina was greater than the significance of being the first black at Davidson.”

  Lefty’s summary: “Dean stole him from me.”

  Bad enough for Lefty, it got worse. Scott led North Carolina to NCAA East Regional final victories over Davidson in 1968 (with 18 points) and 1969 (with 32, the last two points a dagger from 30 feet at the buzzer to make it 87–85).

  Twice, then, Scott took Smith to the Final Four at Lefty’s expense. Twice he denied Lefty Driesell a distinction that would elude him the rest of his career.

  Scott is 68. He says he owes Driesell so much that he will do whatever he can to get the coach into the Naismith.

  “He deserves to be there,” Scott said. “I played for Hall of Fame coaches. I played for Coach Smith, Hank Iba, John McClendon, Ray Meyer, Larry Brown, Red Auerbach. Lefty belongs with them.”

  I was listening to a story when Krzyzewski called.r />
  “Hi, Mike,” I said. “So tell me about Lefty.”

  Driesell sat still, listening.

  “I love Lefty,” Krzyzewski said.

  He waited a beat. “I love Lefty.”

  And: “Look what he’s done for basketball. Besides the number of wins, which are astronomical, his personality brought people into the college game.”

  And: “The year he lost to North Carolina State and only the winner could go to the NCAA—that was one of the epic games ever.”

  In January 1974, North Carolina State was ranked No. 1, Maryland No. 4. Each team used seven players, and eight of the 14 would be NBA draft picks. State’s stars were David Thompson and Tom Burleson; Maryland’s were Len Elmore, John Lucas, and Tom McMillen. The game is a landmark in ACC history for its breathtaking pace of high-quality play and its effect on college basketball. A year later, a conference could send two teams to the NCAA tournament; two years later, there was no limit.

  “Lefty’s team that year,” Krzyzewski said, “was probably as good as 20 national champions.”

  After North Carolina State won 103–100 in overtime, Driesell made his way onto the winners’ team bus to congratulate them. A week later, Maryland’s proud, dejected players turned down an invitation to the NIT that they’d won two years earlier. North Carolina State went on to win the national championship.

  I asked Krzyzewski about the theory that Bias’s 1986 death is a reason why Lefty is not in the Hall.

  “If that had not happened, or if it happened and Lefty was not made a scapegoat . . .”

  Hold that thought. Scapegoat.

  “. . . and if he was around for the 20 years after that, imagine what he could have done at Maryland. Imagine the total number of wins. Imagine what could have happened for him and Maryland. What should have happened.”

  Krzyzewski’s take: “For everything he did in college basketball, Lefty is definitely worthy of being in the Naismith Hall of Fame.”