Posted by Bill Leffler on 1/30/2008, 7:07 am
76.2.112.145
Charles "Lefty" Driesell has many fond memories of playing and coaching basketball on multiple visits to Portsmouth - that is except one.
Driesell, 76, the January speaker at the Portsmouth Sports Club and one of only three coaches to take four different college teams to the NCAA basketball tournament, recalled a 1959 high school game at Wilson.
"I was coaching Newport News and we had won 36 games in a row," he said. "The game was tied at 32-32 and we went into overtime. The contest was played as the Presidents hosted the Typhoon at the J. Leon Codd Memorial Gymnasium on the Wilson High campus. There was a standing room-only crowd making so much noise that nobody could hear the buzzer that ended the extra period in the overtime game. We were up a point and Wilson made a goal. The officials had to check with the clock operator to see whether it was good or not.
"I knew it was after the buzzer but the clock operator was a math teacher at Wilson so we lost. I still claim we won that game nearly 50 years ago." Of course, all these years later, very few in the overflow crowd of 3000+ remembers it that way.
It was difficult to separate fact from fiction as Driesell, a high school star at Granby and a college standout at Duke, spun his tales.
"Before the pros got involved, I was the best player ever in the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament," he boasted. "If you look up the records, you'll see I made the all-tournament teams three times. And they left me off another time."
Driesell also asserted that he is " the only college coach born in Virginia who ever had a team ranked in the top 10."
And he jabbed at former University of North Carolina coach Dean Smith. Said Driesell: "I coached two Rhodes scholars. Dean Smith ain't ever had a Rhodes scholar. And Dean never had a graduate of Harvard Law School. I did."
The fifth winningest coach in Division 1 basketball, Driesell had stints at Davidson, Maryland, James Madison and Georgia State. He set a record with 57 consecutive wins as a high school coach. "I loved coaching," he said. "I didn't like the 35 speeches you had to make before the games, at halftime and after the games.
Other Leftyisms:
- "I hear all those stories about me. Half of them are lies."
- "I get two tickets every year to the NCAA tournament. The seats get worse every year."
- "I'm not a big fan of the 3-point shot or the shot clock. The 3-point shot has turned the game into a shooting contest."
- "Coaches nowadays like to get on television. That's why a lot of them argue with the officials so much."
- "David Thompson was a better player in college than Michael Jordan."
- "One time, (Old Dominion University athletic director) Jim Jarrett tried to talk me into coaching at ODU. I wish I had known they were going to build that beautiful fieldhouse."
