For years, many have wondered why Lefty Driesell hasn't been elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. We may finally have the answer: The Hall of Fame has him confused with his son Chuck, currently the boys' basketball coach at Maret.
Seriously.
In 2005, Driesell received a letter from the Hall of Fame inviting him to St. Louis, the site of that year's Final Four, to "be the first in the world to know who will be enshrined on September 9, 2005 in Springfield, Massachusetts."
The letter was sent to, "Mr. Charles Driesell, Head Coach, Marymount University."
Charles Driesell Junior had been the head coach at Marymount - two years earlier. Charles Driesell Sr. had been there only to watch his son coach.
Fast-forward 11 years to March. Driesell, as in Lefty, was again a Hall of Fame finalist. This time, he was sent a letter that included a form to fill out for a flight to Houston in case he was selected so he could be there for the formal announcement on the morning of the national championship game.
The letter was sent to: "Mr. Lefty Driesell, The Citadal."
Again, a Driesell had coached the Citadel (a school that spells its name with an "e"), but it was Charles Jr. And not only had the Citadel let him go a year earlier, he had a record of 42-113 in his five seasons there - not exactly Hall of Fame numbers.
"It was a problem with our database," John Doleva, chief executive of the Hall of Fame, said Wednesday. "We had two Charles Driesells in our database in 2005, and the letter got sent to the wrong one."
What about this year?
"A mistake was made," Doleva conceded. "We didn't have an up-to-date address on Coach Driesell, and that's where the problem occurred."
Driesell lives at the same address in Virginia Beach that he did in 2010, when the Hall successfully wrote to him.
"It was a letter offering me the chance to buy a ticket for the induction ceremony that year," Driesell said Thursday. "Guess they could find me when they were asking me for money."
This year, the Hall apparently didn't even have an up-to-date address for Chuck, much less Lefty.
"It took us hours and hours to track him down," Doleva said.
Hours and hours?
"I apologized to Coach Driesell for the mistake," Doleva said.
"Honestly, when I finally got the letter with the form to fill out, I thought I was getting in," Driesell said. "They'd never sent it to me before. Then, when Doleva called me and said, 'You didn't get enough votes,' I couldn't believe it. . . .
"I was shocked. I mean, I wish I knew what's keeping me out. At this point, I'd almost rather know that then actually get in."
It is hard to know the reasons why because the Naismith Hall of Fame is perhaps the least transparent organization in sports. It is the only one among the major sports shrines that doesn't reveal the names of its voters. Once someone is nominated, his name is sent to a nine-member subcommittee. This year, Driesell was nominated, and the North American subcommittee met in New York and, according to people with knowledge of the process, voted unanimously to recommend him to the 24-member honors committee that has the final say. A finalist needs 18 of 24 votes to be elected.
"We reaffirmed our system this spring," Doleva said. "I think our board is very comfortable with the fact that confidentiality allows for honest conversation."
Except there is no conversation: Doleva said the honors committee does not actually meet before taking votes. He also said the confidentiality is taken so seriously that the ballots are burned after the vote is taken.
"I think the results we've had justifies what we're doing," he said.
Really? Then please explain Driesell's absence - Lefty's, that is, not Chuck's.
Some have speculated it is because he never reached a Final Four, though he reached the region finals four times. But other coaches in the Hall - Temple's John Chaney among them - never made the Final Four.
The only coach with more career victories than Driesell's 786 who isn't in the Hall of Fame is Eddie Sutton, who was the coach at Kentucky when the Wildcats landed on probation for two years.
One of the charges given to the Hall's board of governors is to exclude anyone who has "damaged the integrity of the game." Yet four of the seven active college coaches who have been elected to the Hall of Fame have been sanctioned by the NCAA at least once: Larry Brown (three times); Jim Boeheim (twice); John Calipari (twice) and Rick Pitino - whose school sanctioned itself this past season. Roy Williams's school, North Carolina, is currently being investigated.
Then there is Len Bias's cocaine-related death a day after the 1986 NBA draft. To this day some hold Driesell responsible. It seems possible, even likely, that some who vote for the Hall do not have accurate information on the details.
Or perhaps they've been looking at Chuck Driesell's record.
Driesell's absence from the Hall of Fame is embarrassing. The Hall's remarkable sloppiness in their dealings with him is not surprising, though.
The Hall consistently makes mistakes in things as simple as news releases. When I was selected as the print journalism winner of the Curt Gowdy Award in 2013, the press release included the following sentence, "In his spare time Feinstein does color for Navy football and works for Sports Illustrated; The National Sports Daily and makes regular appearances on Sporting News Radio; PTI and NPR."
None of that was true at the time. No one ever bothered to fact check the release with me. A year later, when John Andariese won the broadcast award, the news release said he had hosted an ESPN show beginning in 1977. ESPN was launched in 1979. That same year, the release announcing that year's finalists referred to "Mitch Rechmond."
At some level, these kinds of errors are relatively insignificant. But for an organization that has been both inconsistent and secretive in its decision-making for years, such mistakes speak to a wider incompetence.
At least Doleva apologized to Driesell.
"No, he didn't," Driesell said Thursday. "The subject never came up."
Another mistake, no doubt.
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