Back in the late 1960s, when Jim Kehoe was trying to sell Lefty Driesell on the basketball job in College Park, the Maryland athletic director appealed to the coach’s ego.
“You can be in the middle of all of it here in the nation’s capital,” Kehoe told Driesell. “We got Ted Williams managing the Washington Senators. We got Vince Lombardi coaching the Redskins. We want you to coach basketball at Maryland. There would be three great coaches in D.C.
“He said you’ve had great teams at Davidson, but nobody really knows about it.”
Kehoe was right about that. In 1969, Driesell’s name certainly didn’t belong alongside Lombardi and Williams. Lombardi was a five-time NFL championship coach with the Green Bay Packers who came to Washington that year to coach the NFL franchise. Williams was a Hall of Fame baseball legend and war hero who came to the nation’s capital to manage the Washington Senators.
But Lombardi coached one year before dying of cancer. Williams managed the baseball team out of town three years later in Arlington, Texas. It would be Driesell, the least known of the trio, who would create the greatest legacy in the Washington area, turning Maryland basketball into an elite national program and raising the profile of college basketball in the region.
Lefty the Showman passed away Saturday at the age of 92 and the DMV sports community — marked these days by dullness and depression — mourned not just the man, but the excitement he created that still resonates to this day.
He carried that excitement wherever he went — at Davidson before he came to Maryland; at James Madison after he was fired from Maryland, and finally, Georgia State. He won more than 100 games at all four schools — 786 career victories in a Hall of Fame career — and took all of them to the NCAA tournament.
But he shined brightest at College Park from 1969 to 1986, with 348 wins, eight NCAA tournament appearances and consistent top 10 rankings.
“I saw that Maryland had an opportunity to be so much more than it was,” Driesell told me in an interview. “Cole Field House was a great building, and the school was much closer to the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania recruiting areas, where there were so many great players, so we would be able to get more of those kids.”
When he was introduced as the Maryland coach, Driesell let everyone know expectations were about to change.
“I think I can build Maryland into the UCLA of the East Coast,” he said. “Maybe even better than UCLA.”
This was Driesell’s style.
“I’ve never been the kind to shy away from talking about greatness,” he told me, explaining the UCLA boast. “I’ve always embraced the challenge of letting everyone know what we were shooting for. I always wanted my players to believe they were capable of greatness. I wanted them to think they were better than they were.”
When Driesell got to Cole Field House, he changed the seating in the arena.
“Cole Field House was the biggest field house in America,” he told me. “But it was built for boxing, primarily, not basketball. They’ve got a whole bunch of lights in the ceiling right in the middle that came down on a boxing ring. During a boxing match, they would put seats all around. When you played basketball, those seats weren’t there. The court was about 20 to 25 feet away from the first row of bleachers. I said that’s no good, the students are not down on the court. We don’t have the home-court advantage. The fans weren’t close to the court.
“I found out where the risers for boxing were stored, which brought you right up to the court,” he said. “I went to Kehoe and I said, ‘Coach, we’ve got to put some of those risers close to the floor to get the fans closer. He said, ‘I can’t do that, we’ll have to a hire a crew, it’s not feasible, we’ve never done it before.’ I said, ‘Maybe that’s why you haven’t won. I’ll put them in, me, my staff and the players. You just let me have access to them. We put them down for a few games, and everybody liked it, so he said, ‘OK, I’ll pay to have them put in and he did. But to get it started, we had to do it ourselves.”
He also put an advertisement in the local newspaper to try to lure some of the top young players in the area to his program.
“I put an ad in The Washington Post, with pictures of the four best players in the area. The Louisville team in the ABA was going after Wes Unseld that way after he got out of Louisville. They took out an ad that said, ‘Warning – Wes Unseld. Wanted by the Kentucky Colonels.’ So I said let’s put an ad in the paper that said, Wanted – Maryland, to start a new era or something like that, with a picture of all four of them.
“There was a copy of that ad in the New York Times, the Los Angeles paper, every paper in the country just about because everyone wrote stories about it — look what Lefty’s doing in recruiting now,” Driesell said. “He’s got this ad for these four players in D.C. I don’t know what we paid for the ad, about $500, but we got about $5 million worth of advertising. It was everywhere. It helped us in recruiting.”
Driesell brought some great players to Maryland — Tom McMillen, Len Elmore, John Lucas, Buck Williams, Albert King and Len Bias, whose tragic death from a cocaine overdose two days after he was drafted by the Boston Celtics in 1986 led to an investigation of the program and Driesell being fired.
“Leonard was a wonderful young man,” Driesell said. “He would mess up my practices because he could score any time he wanted to, get every rebound any time he wanted to. I used to sit him down in practice next to me and say, ‘Leonard, you sit down here next to me because I have to teach those guys how to play.’
• You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.
• Thom Loverro can be reached at tloverro@washingtontimes.com.
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