A Season Inside (29 page)

At the same time, Driesell was putting his life back together. He was hired by Jefferson-Pilot Sports to do TV commentary on their weekly ACC telecasts and he was in great demand as a speaker. That, combined with his camp and a little work at Maryland, kept him busy.

Now, in his second year of exile, Driesell had grown quite comfortable. He still chafed when he read what great work Wade was doing, now winning a respectable number of games with a team made up largely of Driesell-recruited players. But he was learning, slowly, to put that behind him and enjoy his current role. At fifty-six, he was getting to spend time with his wife and family for the first time since he had gotten into coaching. And, everywhere he traveled, he had folk-hero status. Once, he had been the man in the ACC everyone loved to hate. Now, they just loved him.

Why? Driesell is Everyman. He is big and bald and blunt and funny and charming and self-deprecating. He is vulnerable. People feel they can touch him in some way. He makes them comfortable. He is always friendly and never intimidating.

What’s more, it has always been hard for Lefty. He built two programs,
Davidson and Maryland, from ground zero to a spot just below the top. Somehow, he never quite got to the top. He won 524 games, but never made the Final Four. He made the ACC Tournament final six times before he finally won one. People identify with The Struggle Clearly, Lefty has struggled. In fact, he’s never
stopped
struggling.

Being a television commentator doesn’t come naturally to him either. With his cornpone southern accent, Driesell is bound to strangle some words. For example, he cannot say the word “statistics.” Always, when he says it, the word comes out “sastistics.” Point this out to him and he will say, “Aah say it right. Sastistics. See, aah said it.”

But he works at the job. He studies the teams he is going to be covering, calls the coaches to talk to them, and spends hours looking at tape. “I tried to get my wife to look with me,” he said. “But she just gets bored and leaves the room.”

Lefty’s biggest problem as a commentator is a tendency to coach on the air. He says things, like, “Now Sam, don’t you put the ball on the floor. You do that, you gonna get stripped.” And, “Grayson, son, you gotta take that shot when you’re open.”

But he can be funny, too: “Jerry, if you keep takin’ shots like that, Coach Ellis is gonna pull out all his hair and end up lookin’ like me.” And he can be insightful. Early in January, working a Clemson-Virginia game, he predicted that Virginia’s John Johnson would try to go the length of the floor with the ball for a winning basket with the score tied and five seconds left. Johnson did exactly that. Clemson Coach Cliff Ellis had figured Virginia would go to Mel Kennedy. He was wrong. Driesell was right. He could coach … Still.

Now, on a balmy January weekend, Driesell was bound for Clemson. He was doing double-duty on this Saturday, working the Clemson–Wake Forest game Saturday afternoon, then being whisked by private plane to Chapel Hill to do Virginia–North Carolina that night.

“I ain’t crazy about those little planes,” he said, settling into his seat en route to Clemson. “They say they’re safer than jets but when you’re bouncin’ around in one of ’em, it sure don’t feel safe.”

Driesell is a nervous flyer anyway. It is an interesting phenomenon that many coaches, who have to fly all the time, are nervous flyers. Driesell can still remember a flight to New York on a recruiting trip years ago when all of a sudden the oxygen masks in the plane came down. The cabin was losing pressure.

“I thought to myself, ‘My God, I’m gonna die and it ain’t even goin’
to see a good player.’ If it had been Moses, it would have been different. Moses was worth dyin’ for.”

Moses Malone was the best player Driesell had ever signed at Maryland. But before he ever enrolled, he was enticed by agent Donald Dell and the Utah Stars of the old ABA into becoming the first high school player ever to turn pro. For years after that, Driesell would say at least several times a week, “You know, if I just had Moses …” He was still saying it long after Malone would have used up his eligibility.

This flight, even with a change of planes in Charlotte, is routine, although the stewardess does insist on an autograph for her boyfriend. “You know,” she says, “you’re a whole lot cuter in person than you are on television.”

“Oh really?” Lefty answers. “You might want to get your eyes checked.”

Tell Lefty anything and the first two words out of his mouth are always, “Oh really?” They are his trademark. That and answering almost any question he is asked by saying, “Aah dunno, you know.”

Once, when someone told Driesell he did this, he denied it categorically. A few minutes later, responding to the first question of a press conference, Lefty said, “Aah dunno, you know.”

“Lefty,” someone said, “you said it.”

“Oh really?” Lefty answered.

When the plane lands in Greenville, Lefty isn’t quite sure what to do. He knows he is supposed to rent a car and drive the sixty miles to Clemson. “I don’t know how to get there,” he says. “Usually, I just get on the team bus and tell the driver to follow the tiger paws.”

When one drives into Clemson, there are tiger paws on the road for the last several miles. Lefty finds the tiger paws and Clemson and pulls up to Littlejohn Coliseum just as the Tigers are about to start practice.

“Lefthander!”
Coach Cliff Ellis screeches, greeting Lefty. It is this way almost everywhere Lefty goes. He sits through practice, then Ellis invites him to the house for dinner. Lefty would like to go but he is committed to eating with his TV brethren. “I’m a member of the media now,” he says with a laugh. “I got to eat with my own.”

Before dinner, Lefty goes for a walk. This is a daily routine with him, a thirty-minute walk. He turned fifty-six on Christmas Day. He isn’t so committed to exercise that he is willing to run, but he does walk every day. Walking through the dark back streets of Clemson, kicking at patches of snow, he talks quietly about his family.

“I got lucky with Joyce,” he says of his wife. “We’ve been married thirty-six years. I don’t know how she’s put up with me that long. Her patience is amazing. The best thing about all this is that we’ve had more time together. If I went back into coaching, I would miss that.”

His son, Chuck, is a coach now after having played for his father at Maryland. He is coaching the Navy Prep team and, after two good seasons, he is struggling this year. “I called him the other day and said, ‘Son, you better start winnin’ some games or they’ll ship your ass to the Persian Gulf.’ ”

Talking about the Navy reminds him of his favorite movie:
Patton
. “I used to show it to my team to get ’em fired up sometimes,” he says. “My favorite part is when Patton comes on and says, ‘We ain’t never lost a war and we ain’t never
gonna
lose a war.’ ”

Patton’s diction was no doubt a little different, and it is pointed out to Lefty that we have lost a war: Vietnam.

“We didn’t lose, we just pulled out.”

“No, we lost. The communists took over the country.”

“Oh really? Well, maybe we should send Patton over there. Except he’s dead so maybe we should send Bobby Knight.”

After a huge dinner of catfish and fried chicken, Driesell stops in to see Ellis. They talk about the coaching business and Driesell’s ouster at Maryland. Ellis is like most coaches. He thinks Lefty got screwed.

By eleven o’clock, Lefty is back at the hotel. “One beer and I’m going upstairs to study my game notes,” he says. In the bar, he runs into Art Eckman, his broadcast partner. As the two of them sit at a corner table, they are approached by several of the Clemson locals.

“It
is
him, I told you it was him,” one woman says to another. “Lefty, can we have your autograph?”

Lefty signs and the group insists on buying a round of drinks. Lefty would really rather go study his notes but he is too polite to say no. Midway through the drink, one of the locals says, “Come on, we’re going to show you the
real
Clemson. You can’t find it in a hotel bar.”

“I got to go to bed,” Lefty says. But they are insistent. One drink, they say. So Lefty, Eckman, and the group pile into two cars and head out. They pull into a place called Whirl’s. The only way to describe Whirl’s is to say it is next to the Christian Book Store and behind the Exxon station. It is also packed with humanity from wall to wall.

Lefty’s arrival causes no more of a stir than, say, the arrival of the President and Gorbachev might cause. Actually, the President and
Gorbachev would not be recognized as quickly. People start screaming his name as soon as he walks in, unmistakable at 6–5 with that bald head. Everyone wants an autograph. Or a handshake.

Somehow, it is now almost midnight. That means it is time for the nightly Whirl’s sing-along. Everyone is given a shot of schnapps and the bartender, using a yardstick to point at the words that are printed on an easel, leads everyone in a song.

This is a special night at Whirl’s, though. So special, it calls for a guest pointer. Yes, it is the man who can coach, proving he can also point, The
Lefthander!

“I ain’t doin’ it,” Lefty says. “Aah got to get back to the
mo
-tel.” (Lefty calls all hotels
mo
-tels.) But Lefty is outnumbered. Reluctantly, he walks behind the bar and takes up the yardstick.

The song is “La Bamba.” Sure enough, the Lefthander
can
point. He leads the crowd in the song, pointing the yardstick at those he catches sloughing off. He finishes to a thunderous ovation and walks off, saying, “I think I point better in English than Spanish.”

The local tour guides aren’t quite finished yet. Once the sing-along is over and everyone in Whirl’s has an autograph, it is time to go to Crazy Zack’s. Lefty has given up fighting it by now. Sure enough, the minute they walk into Crazy Zack’s, which is much more a college hangout with a huge dance floor, Lefty is spotted. The DJ starts screaming into his microphone, “Ladies and gentlemen, look who has joined us, yes, it’s
Lefty Driesell!
” He will repeat himself at least a dozen times.

Lefty is standing as close to the door as he can manage but he is still being besieged. Teenage boys keep coming up and asking Lefty if he will dance with their girlfriends, who are too shy to ask themselves.

“No, I can’t,” Lefty says. “I can’t dance.” Actually, he is a pretty good dancer. “I know that,” he whispers, “but Joyce would kill me.”

Joyce would probably understand—she has already understood a lot in thirty-six years—but Lefty is taking no chances. He takes several bows, waves to the crowd, drinks a Perrier and, finally, at 2
A.M.
escapes.

“I am too damn old for this,” he says, walking out of Crazy Zack’s. “Now, I got to get up at seven to read those notes.”

Sure enough, he is up at seven. The notes, by the way, are in English, not Spanish.

The games go fine. Lefty is funny at times, coaches at others, and mangles a couple of words. But, in all, he ain’t bad. The four-seat plane
lands safely in Chapel Hill without incident and Lefty gets home Sunday in plenty of time for the Redskins-Vikings playoff game. Just another weekend. But Whirl’s and Crazy Zack’s will never be quite the same again.

Don DeVoe saw the flashing light in his rearview mirror just after he had started across the bridge. “Uh-oh,” he said, “I’ll bet it’s that damn registration tag the guy hasn’t sent me yet.”

He pulled the car over and got out. The police officer recognized him right away. “Coach, you got a dead tag there on your license plate.”

DeVoe nodded. “I know, I know. The guy who supplies me with this car is supposed to be coming to the game tonight to give me a new one. I know that sounds like a weak excuse …”

The cop waved his hand to stop DeVoe. “Look, Coach, I don’t want to give you a hard time. But if the state police stop you, they have to give you a ticket. I’m surprised you haven’t been stopped before this. I’d make sure that guy gets you the tag tonight because so far, you’ve been lucky.”

DeVoe thanked him and got back in the car shaking his head. “He thinks I’ve been lucky,” he said with a laugh. “He hasn’t seen my team lately.”

It was a joke … sort of. Lately, DeVoe’s team had been, in a word, horrid. “Shows you how times have changed,” he said. “A few years ago I was racing out of my house on the morning we were going to play Kentucky and I was just so fired up I was flying. A cop pulled me over. I told him I was sorry, I knew I was speeding but if he let me go, I promised that we’d beat Kentucky that night. He let me go and we won.

“I don’t know that I’d make that kind of promise now.”

It had been a tough seven days for DeVoe. The Volunteers had played well through most of December, finishing the month with a 7–1 record. The only loss had been a bad one—at home to Ohio University. But there had been some solid victories too, over decent teams like Florida State and Pepperdine.

Then they had started Southeast Conference play with victories at home over Mississippi and Vanderbilt. The Vandy victory was especially
encouraging because the Commodores were a Top Twenty-type team (as they would prove in March by reaching the round of sixteen in the NCAA Tournament).

That win had put Tennessee at 9–1. For a coach fighting to save his job, that was exactly the kind of beginning that was needed. Then, Louisiana State came to town. There is probably no one in coaching DeVoe enjoys beating more than Dale Brown. They are complete opposites: one the consummate salesman, the other a no-nonsense farm boy. One coaches every trick defense he can think of, the other hates playing anything but man-to-man.

And, over the years, they have clashed. Most recently, they had exchanged angry words during the SEC media day in November. DeVoe, angered by Brown’s hiring of Stanley Roberts’s high school coach as part of the 6–10 center’s recruitment, ripped Brown during his time with the writers. “I think what he did was unethical,” DeVoe said. “I just think it’s wrong.”

When Brown’s turn came he was asked to respond to DeVoe’s comment. “I think divorce is unethical,” he responded.