Joyce Driesell left her Wednesday Bible study at 11:30 a.m. She had a hair appointment at noon. She thought about keeping it. She thought again and canceled. She arrived at her Virginia Beach home a jot ahead of noon, the appointed hour when finalists for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame would learn if they were indeed Hall of Famers.
She walked through the door. The phone rang. Her husband – his given name is Charles Grice Driesell, but he has been known forever as Lefty – answered. When the call ended, he told his wife, “We’re in.”
The 2018 Hall of Fame class, announced here Saturday before the Final Four semis, numbers 13 inductees. Three are famous point guards – Steve Nash, Jason Kidd, Maurice Cheeks. The latter spent his penultimate NBA season with the Hawks, whose vice chairman – Grant Hill – is also among the enshrined. Everyone who ever receives a Hall call always describes it as a crowning honor. There is no one among this group to whom the call meant more than Lefty Driesell.
He won 786 college games. He took four schools – Davidson, Maryland, James Madison and Georgia State – to the NCAA tournament. He won the 1984 ACC tournament. In 2001, he led the GSU Panthers to their first victory in the Big Dance, an upset of Wisconsin. He should have been in the Hall a decade ago, but this was his fourth time as a finalist. He’d gotten a thumbs-down three times, most recently in 2016.
Ty Anderson is Lefty’s grandson. He played at Oconee County High and for Paul Hewitt at Georgia Tech. Today he coaches South Gwinnett. He and his brother Walker had planned to drive from Atlanta to the 2016 Final Four in Houston for Lefty’s big moment. When they heard their granddad hadn’t made it, they scrapped that plan and headed instead for Virginia Beach to be with their grandparents.
Not to get ghoulish, but Lefty Driesell is 86. He entered the Alamodome in a wheelchair pushed by grandson Walker Anderson. Lefty held a wooden cane. Had the call not come this year, how many more chances would there be, and would the man himself be around to answer the phone?
Said Ty Anderson: “It would have been a tragedy for him to have been elected posthumously.”
Moot point now. After years of waiting and wondering, the Driesell family had its moment of deliverance. He was gracious in his remarks – when you’re in, being magnanimous comes easy – saying, “A lot of things in life, I’ve learned you have to wait for. You don’t come and build a program in the first week. It takes time. I know I was very, very excited to get in.”
He mentioned “my players and my coaching staff and my trainers and the athletic directors that hired me,” saying, “I want them to enjoy it. I won’t be around too long to enjoy it.”
Joyce Driesell had steeled herself for whatever came. “I wasn’t hysterical,” she said. “I stayed medium. I didn’t get my hopes up.”
There was, Lefty Driesell said, a reason his call came at the stroke of noon. John Doleva, the Hall president, told him, “I’m calling you first.”
Driesell’s reaction? “Maybe tears, but not a lot. We were very happy.”
The newly minted Hall of Famer on the far end of the dais was Charlie Scott, the great North Carolina guard and the first African-American at that proud program. When Driesell was coaching Davidson, he went hard after the teenager from Harlem. Said Scott: “If it wasn’t for Lefty, there would be no Charlie Scott. He was the guy who first recruited me, and he put my name in the paper. That was when coach (Dean) Smith saw it and started recruiting me.”
Sure enough, Scott signed to play in Chapel Hill. Sure enough, North Carolina and Davidson met in the 1968 and 1969 East Regional finals. Sure enough, Carolina won both times, the latter on Scott’s 20-footer at the buzzer.
Driesell: “I probably would have been here a lot earlier if he had come to Davidson. He knocked us out of the Final Four twice. … Charlie and I have always been great friends. Even when he was at North Carolina, he came to work my camps.”
As glittering as Driesell’s won-lost record was, it was dotted with epic “almosts.” At Davidson, he had the Elite Eight losses to Carolina. At Maryland – which he promised to make “the UCLA of the East,” a line he borrowed from AD Jim Kehoe – there were the games that bookended his 1973-74 season: First a two-point loss to Bill Walton’s Bruins in Pauley Pavilion, then the classic ACC final that saw No. 1 North Carolina State prevail 103-100 in triple overtime. Then he signed Moses Malone, the No. 1 recruit in the land, only to see him skip college to play for the ABA’s Utah Stars.
Anderson wasn’t around to see those days – his mother, Pam Driesell, is the pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Atlanta – but he has done his homework. “He was a giant,” Anderson said, and that’s no embellishment. If you followed college basketball in the ’60s/’70s/’80s, you knew Lefty. No, he didn’t quite make the Final Four. But he’s the best coach never to make the Final Four, and heck, he invented Midnight Madness. (“Should have gotten a patent on it,” Driesell said.)
Said Joyce Driesell: “All things happen for a purpose.”
On his day of days, Lefty recalled the byzantine recruitment of Tom McMillen, who was the nation’s No. 1 recruit in 1970, another face-off between Driesell and his nemesis Dean Smith. Dr. Jim McMillen had never flown, and he told Driesell, “I ain’t flying to North Carolina.” (He figured he could drive to College Park, Md., from Mansfield, Pa.) Even after his son signed with Maryland, McMillen’s dad would slip notes under his door that read, “Anywhere but Carolina.”
Long story short: Tom McMillen showed up at Maryland on the first day of class and enrolled. He played four years under Driesell, making All-American. Two days before his father died, McMillen learned he’d been named a Rhodes Scholar. Recounting this story, Driesell’s eyes misted over.
When he looked out from the stage Saturday, Lefty Driesell saw a familiar figure in the back of the room – Tom McMillen, who remains the only man ever to be both an Atlanta Hawk and a U.S. Congressman. He came for his old coach. He came for Lefty Driesell, a Hall of Famer at last.
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