Competitive and innovative, Lefty Driesell built a foundation for a successful men’s basketball program in his 17 seasons as the head coach at Maryland, touching the lives of many along the way.
A 2018 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductee and a two-time ACC champion at Maryland, Driesell died on Feb. 17 at the age of 92. Legendary Terps John Lucas and Tom McMillen joined Glenn Clark Radio Feb. 19 to share stories about Driesell.
“He could be tough as hell,” McMillen said. “He was an enormous salesman, superstitious, hard-working, family man, religious. He was enigmatic in a lot of ways.”
Driesell’s unwavering confidence and his charming southern drawl helped him sell the idea of Maryland basketball. Maryland had been to just one NCAA Tournament in 46 years prior to his arrival, stuck behind the likes of Duke and North Carolina in the ACC.
Lucas grew up in Durham, N.C., home to Duke’s campus. McMillen, who grew up in Mansfield, Pa., originally committed to North Carolina. And yet they both ended up at Maryland, where they would lead the Terps to a No. 4 finish in the AP poll in 1974.
Both men were sold on Driesell’s vision to make Maryland a basketball powerhouse.
“[Driesell] came right in the house, walked into the kitchen and got him a soda and sat down and was telling me about all the opportunities of how he wanted to make Maryland the UCLA of the East,” Lucas said. “And from that point on, I was sold to play for him.”
Although he never won a national championship at Maryland, Lucas said the Terps’ 2002 title behind coach Gary Williams was one of the happiest moments of Driesell’s life.
But as McMillen pointed out, Driesell might be a national champion if not for the NCAA Tournament structure at the time. Maryland’s 103-100 overtime loss to eventual national champion NC State in the 1974 ACC Tournament championship game kept the Terps out of the Big Dance at a time when only conference champions were invited. That game triggered the expansion of the tournament, allowing at-large bids.
“[In 1973] we didn’t win the conference but we whizzed through the NIT, which really was equivalent to a national title,” McMillen said. “Then our senior year we get kind of boxed out again because of North Carolina State.”
Driesell won 786 games and remains the only coach in men’s basketball history to record 100 or more wins with four different schools. He was very superstitious, and there was nothing he hated more than losing to one of the North Carolina schools.
“I remember we’d go down to Tobacco Road and if we lost a game down there, we never stayed in that hotel again or ate in that restaurant,” McMillen said.
Driesell was a fiery competitor. His friendships were put to the side on the basketball court — including his relationship with Dean Smith, who won two national championships as the head coach of North Carolina.
“He made me think him and Dean Smith weren’t friends,” Lucas said. “I wouldn’t even talk to Dean Smith. They were best of friends. … When we used to play them, it was all-out war.”
Driesell and Smith were such good friends that when Smith fell ill with dementia, Driesell called him every day until he died in 2015, according to McMillen. When McMillen’s father passed during his senior season, it was Driesell who woke him up at 4 a.m. to break the news and flew the whole team out to his funeral.
“He had a very human side to him that you often didn’t see with his pounding and his raging and all that,” McMillen said. “But he had a real strong dose of humanity.”
Driesell played a strong role in integrating college basketball, too. At Davidson, Mike Maloy became the school’s first black athlete under Driesell in 1967. In his first year at Maryland in 1969, Driesell made George Raveling the first black coach in the ACC when he hired him as an assistant.
“He impacted the civil rights for the South in basketball because [having black players and coaches] was just unheard of,” Lucas said.
With all of his accomplishments, Driesell’s resume was more than worthy of the Hall of Fame. But his tenure at Maryland ended in 1986 after Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose just two days after the Boston Celtics made him the second overall pick in the 1986 NBA Draft. Many believe the Bias incident unfairly stained Driesell’s reputation and is the reason he wasn’t inducted into the Hall of Fame until 2018, when he was 86 years old.
“I’m glad it all came back and that he was able to be inducted into the Hall of Fame and that his reputation has been restored,” McMillen said. “But it was really rough times for him for a few years.”
Much of Maryland basketball’s success has Driesell’s fingerprints all over it. In 1971, Driesell held a one-mile run at the old track at then-Byrd Stadium just after midnight on the first day players were permitted to practice. Fans learned about it and more than 1,000 people gathered at the stadium. “Midnight Madness” became an annual tradition around college basketball.
Cole Field House was once an afterthought. Under Driesell, it became iconic — the “mecca” of basketball, according to McMillen.
“He took personal responsibility to make sure that Cole Field House was filled to the brim, and it was,” McMillen said. “… He took command of the whole program.”
Maryland plays its home games in a different building now, with Cole Field House serving as the football team’s practice facility after sweeping renovations. But Driesell’s name hangs on a banner in the rafters of Xfinity Center, serving as a constant reminder of his legacy.
For more from Lucas, listen to the full interview here:
For more from McMillen, listen to the full interview here:
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Maryland Athletics