Cover Story: Lefty’s longest shot

The coach has seen this before. The ecstatic fans. The microphones. The endless interviews with the same insipid questions. Hell, yes, he plans on going far in the NCAA tournament. How’s the Final Four sound? Of course his team would have made the tournament even if they lost the conference championship. We were 25 and 4! How they gonna keep us out?
Doesn’t matter, though; they won anyway. And handily, too. Got off to a cold shooting start but warmed up quick from there. Took advantage of Troy State’s tired defense and turned up their own. Three players — Kevin Morris, Shernard Long and Thomas Terrell — together made 58 of Georgia State’s 79 points. And afterward, after kissing his wife and signing some autographs and dodging the slaps that make him wince (spinal surgery was just two months ago), he steps onto a stool under the rim. Somebody hands him the net and he drapes it around his neck. He raises his arm and gives the victory sign. He smiles.
Downstairs in the press room, 20 reporters and cameramen wait. The coach is ushered in with his two seniors, Morris and Long. Morris, who had never heard of Georgia State when he played for Georgia Tech as a freshman, is wearing the net now. The coach is still grinning.
“This,” he says, “is a very satisfying year.”
Lefty Driesell is 69, an age when other men are playing golf, settling accounts, taking stock. The coach will have none of this. He lives just off a golf course, but he doesn’t golf. Books fill shelf space in his office — including one with a yellowed dust jacket that’s titled How to Coach Fast Break Basketball — but, Driesell says, “I don’t read.” Pictures of every college team he’s coached line the wall — nine from Davidson, 17 from Maryland, nine from James Madison, four (and counting) from Georgia State — but Driesell will not say what 40 years of coaching college hoops have taught him. All he’ll say is that he’s better.
“I would hope I’m a better coach than I was when I first started,” he says, the logic so obvious to him he can’t quite hide his irritation.
This week, Lefty will lead the Georgia State Panthers against Wisconsin in Round 1 of the NCAA tournament. And if they beat the Badgers, a team that has lost five of its last 10 games, they’ll likely face Maryland in Round 2.
The University of Maryland, of course, was the program Driesell rescued from obscurity, the one he built into a powerhouse that still never made it to the Final Four, the one from which he was summarily ousted in 1986. During his 17 years at Maryland, Driesell would stride onto the floor of Cole Field House, raise two fingers to the sky in a V, and 14,500 faithful would yell the roof off the place.
But that was a long time ago. In fact, Driesell has brought a team to the NCAA tournament only once in the last 14 years. That was at James Madison in 1994, and just long enough to get beat in the first round. But this team — this team could be different. If Lefty Driesell goes anywhere in this year’s tournament, he should send a bouquet of flowers to JMU, thanking them for firing him.
Four years ago, Dr. Carl V. Patton, the president of Georgia State University, was losing patience with his men’s basketball program. GSU, after all, had the losingest Division I basketball program in the country.
“We’d only gone to the NCAA once,” Patton says. “I was just getting fed up with losing. I feel that sports isn’t everything, but if you put a team out on the floor, they ought to have a chance at winning.”
As Patton and his crew mulled over their options, they heard on ESPN that Lefty had just been canned at James Madison. They put their first call into Driesell while he and his wife were driving to their beach house in Delaware.
“I said, ‘Where’s Georgia State?’ ” Joyce Driesell remembers. “He said, ‘I don’t know.’ ”
But there it was — a chance to turn around another program. No, it wasn’t Maryland, but James Madison hadn’t been either. It was a team, and that was enough.
Sportswriter John Feinstein recalls what Ralph Willard of Holy Cross told him once: “If you’re a coach, you need a gym, you need a ball and you need kids. And if that’s what you love doing, that’s all you need.”
“Lefty,” Feinstein says, “is that way.”
There was an added draw: One of the Driesells’ daughters and her family lived outside Atlanta. It was settled. Mr. and Mrs. Driesell bought a house in Duluth. And on March 26, 1997, he accepted the head coaching position at GSU, a school that in 34 years had had just four winning seasons. Lefty Driesell had faced some challenges before, but nothing like this.
The gym was on the third floor of the school’s sports arena, in the congested heart of downtown. Attendance was anemic — a few hundred here, maybe a thousand on a good day. The largely part-time, commuter student body barely knew there was a men’s hoops team at all. Media coverage of the team was practically non-existent.
One of Driesell’s first moves was to call The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to make a case that his team deserved a beat writer. But the priority was to get good players. The man David Halberstam once described as a “joyous, old-fashioned huckster” now had to call upon all his recruiting skills. Talent would attract talent, he knew, but you had to prime the pump.
Driesell zeroed in on Kevin Morris, then a disgruntled freshman playing for Bobby Cremins’ Yellow Jackets. Like Driesell, Morris hadn’t even heard of Georgia State, although he went to school a mile away.
“Lefty told me a bunch of stuff, how we’d get to the NCAA tournament, this and that,” Morris says. “It was really hard to believe at the time. He told me if I decided to come, he’d be able to get other players to buy into it.”
Morris talked with Anton Reese, a potential transfer from Alabama.
“I signed, he signed,” Morris says. “It all started happening. Then after that, Shernard Long transferred [from Georgetown], then Darryl Cooper [from LSU], everybody started coming. After that, we had a pretty good team. We just needed some inside people, and that’s what we finally got this year.”
The buzz started right away. In their first game of the season, the Panthers upset Georgia in Athens. By season’s end, they had solidified a reputation as a deadly three-point shooting team (ninth in the nation) and a defensive tiger (averaging 10.5 steals).
“That’s why I like him so much,” Morris says. “If you’re not making your shot, as long as you play defense, he’s not gonna take you out of the game. I found out that by playing tough defense, you create easy offense. That’s how we averaged 81 points a game. We create a lot of easy baskets. The transition buckets come from our defense.”
Driesell’s coaching style fits the talents of the team, Morris says.
“He’s more free with you. He doesn’t try to hold you back to run this structured offense that you can’t deviate from. He lets you play a motion game and create your own offense out of it.”
The team finished the regular season at 25-4, winning every home game. They added three more victories on their way to winning the TAAC title. On Sunday night, they learned their first-round opponent in the NCAA tournament would be Wisconsin. The Badgers’ coach — Brad Soderberg, who took over in November — told the Wisconsin State Journal: “I could be the most inexperienced coach going against the most experienced coach in the whole field.”
It is Lefty Driesell’s curse that, when he passes, the first name listed after his in the obituary will likely be that of Len Bias.
Fifteen years ago, Bias was the star in Maryland’s basketball firmament, the No. 1 draft pick for the Boston Celtics — Larry Bird’s heir apparent. And Lefty Driesell was his coach.
“Len Bias was a mama’s boy until his junior year,” says Feinstein, who covered Maryland basketball for the Washington Post in the 1980s. “He used to go home every weekend to get his laundry done. When it became clear that he was a superstar and was going to be a high pick in the draft, all of the sudden he had a lot of boys hanging around.”
On a June morning in 1986, Bias died of a cocaine overdose. At a news conference later that day, a distraught Driesell said Bias had been the “greatest player that ever played in the Atlantic Coast Conference.” Stung by the tragedy, and embarrassed by the academic performance of other basketball players, school officials demanded Driesell’s resignation four months later.
Feinstein says Driesell was forced to take the fall.
“Lefty, if you look back in the records, suspended [Bias] for a game his senior year because he stayed out late partying after a game at N.C. State. And Lefty challenged him and said, ‘What are you doing? What’s the matter with you?’ ... And Bias didn’t want to hear it. ‘Cause he had all these guys telling him he was the greatest, and he didn’t have to listen to Lefty. So in a lot of ways it was unfair [what happened to Driesell]. It could have happened to any coach. Maryland needed a scapegoat and Lefty was a very logical scapegoat.”
Driesell went to James Madison, where his son, Chuck, worked alongside him as an assistant. From the high-profile Atlantic Coast Conference, Driesell brought his foot-stomping coaching style to the Colonial Athletic Association. But with only one NCAA appearance — and a first-round loss — he found himself without a job again after nine seasons. As they had at Maryland, administrators grumbled about poor academic performance and declining fan and alumni support. But Feinstein says it was Driesell’s lackluster win-loss record that did him in.
“Usually, when presidents say they’re not satisfied with the academic performance, it means, ‘I need to get rid of you so I can use this as an excuse.’ The national graduation rate in Division I college basketball is 42 percent. Lefty’s graduation rate at both Maryland and JMU was higher than that. ... Lefty’s not hired to increase the graduation rate at the schools where he goes. Nor is any coach. If Mike Krzyzewski had a 100 percent graduation rate at Duke and was 12-15 every year, he’d be fired.”
“The main gripe I have with Lefty over the years is that he talks before he thinks. He just shoots his mouth off and the next morning he probably says, ‘Oh my God, why’d I say that?’”
Dick Heller is on the phone from Washington, where he’s a sports columnist for The Washington Times. Heller covered Maryland for the now-defunct Washington Star back in 1973. In those days, Driesell wouldn’t hesitate to tear a reporter a new one if the coach didn’t agree with a column or a story.
“We certainly had our battles,” Feinstein recalls. “I was this fiery young reporter, and I would write stuff he didn’t like. But the thing about Lefty was, he could never hold a grudge.”
Feinstein remembers an enraged Driesell calling him up once and vowing never to talk to him again. Later that day at the Terrapins’ practice, Driesell would be all smiles.
“What’s up, Feiny? You got a scoop?”
“I thought you weren’t talking to me,” Feinstein said.
“You know son, I get over things.” More like, Ah gidovuh thangs.
Greg Manning, a record-setting point guard who played for Driesell at Maryland 20 years ago, says his old coach has mellowed. “He may disagree with me.”
Actually, Manning, as GSU’s athletic director, is in the peculiar position of being the boss of his old coach. But, he says, it hasn’t been awkward.
“When I played for him, we had that player-coach relationship. That was it. That’s all it was. He was the coach and I respected that. We weren’t overly close. And I think that’s helped in this situation. We’re all in this together. We’re trying to get the kids through school, to graduate them.”
Patton, GSU’s president, is well aware of Driesell’s fiery reputation. But he insists his marquis coach has been well-behaved.
“He really hasn’t come up against me on any issue. Our rules required him to hold out a player [due to low grades]. It was a tenth of a percentage point and we don’t round up. And he didn’t give me any grief about that.”
In December and January, Driesell missed seven games while he recuperated from surgery to have two vertebrae fused together. When he returned, he coached in a neck brace. The neck brace is off now, but his absence was a reminder that Coach D., despite all his energy, is still 69. When will his age start affecting recruiting efforts?
“It’ll get tougher,” Morris says. “Not from a lack of enthusiasm, but kids thinking he won’t be there for their entire four years. That might be the point where he finally calls it quits — when he feels a kid’s not gonna come because of his age.”
Last December, Driesell inked a deal to keep him at GSU through the 2003-04 season. Could he go longer?
“I’ll coach as long as my health holds up and we’re winning,” he says.
He’s still undergoing physical therapy after the surgery. It’s his legs more than his back, though. “That’s why I went to the doctor, ‘cause my walkin’ was funny. It’s still funny,” he complains.
And the winning? Well, in 39 seasons, he’s had only two losing teams — one at Davidson, one at JMU. “Knock on wood,” he says.
“He shows no signs of wanting to retire,” says Chuck Driesell, who now is head coach at Marymount University in Virginia.
But does Lefty want to end his career at Georgia State? Or would he like one more big-name program? Denny Crum just stepped down at Louisville, after all.
“If Louisville offered me a job that paid a lot more than this, I’d certainly consider it, yeah. I coach for money. I enjoy it but I’m not doing it for nothing. So somebody offered me more money, and I liked the situation ... ”
His voice trails off.
So money is a factor?
“You work for money, don’t you?”
Yeah, but not as much as you.
Driesell smiles. “Well,” he says (“Wail”), “I don’t get that much.”
The coach makes $155,000 a year, with a few incentives. One of those incentives would double his salary if, somehow, he won the national championship. Barring an act of God, that probably won’t happen. But if he can beat Wisconsin, and the Terrapins beat George Mason, Lefty Driesell’s present will come face to face with his past. Round 2 would pit Georgia State against Maryland. Sure, it’ll be in Boise, not Cole Field House. (Despite rumors that GSU will travel to Maryland next year before Cole Field House comes down, Driesell says he won’t do it unless Maryland promises to play the Panthers the next year in Atlanta.) And the coach himself will tell you it’s just a stepping stone to the Final Four, that each win means more to his players than to him.
Still. Imagine if the Panthers won, if Lefty Driesell beat the school that hung him out to dry 15 years ago.
“Why not?” says Marty Blake, the NBA’s chief scout, who’s known Driesell since the 1960s. “They’ve got some loosey-goosey guys. They’ve got Thomas Terrell who can play with any junior in the country. They’ve got Shernard Long. They run and gun and they press and they have no fear. That’s the important thing you have to say about Georgia State — they have no fear.”
These days, Joyce Driesell has given up trying to convince her husband to retire. “I said, what about having some fun? He said, I am having fun. Well, OK, I said, if you’re having fun, I’m having fun.”