A Season Inside

by John Feinstein

  “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.

  January 20 … Knoxville, Tennessee

  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. Th
e 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.

  This was a cheap shot. DeVoe had been divorced and was remarried. But that certainly had nothing to do with basketball or recruiting. Before the game on January 13th, DeVoe and Brown talked. “I should have called to apologize,” Brown said.

  DeVoe shrugged him off. “Dale, I just think you’re wrong recruiting this way. You make us all look like prostitutes. It’s bad for the whole profession. And you know what else? You don’t need to do it. You’re a damn good coach.”

  Brown was certainly a good coach that night. With Tennessee leading 51–44 and a little more than two minutes left, it looked like the Vols had a victory wrapped up. But the Tigers held them scoreless the rest of the game and pulled out a 52–51 victory that left twenty thousand Tennessee fans in shock. DeVoe too. He tossed and turned all night, replaying the last two minutes in his mind over and over again.

  “That’s exactly the kind of game we’ve been losing the last few years,” he said, pulling his car safely into a restaurant parking lot without any further trouble with the law. “We had a big game won and then, somehow, we find a way to lose it. We go from being on top of the world to somewhere underneath it. You just can’t lose games like that.”

  The timing hurt too. Tennessee had its roughest weekend of the season coming up right after LSU; a trip Saturday to Kentucky followed by a game Sunday at Illinois. It would take a Herculean effort just to stay in those games and now the team was going into them depressed.

  It showed. Kentucky, pressuring Tennessee’s guards every step of the way blew to a big first-half lead and cruised to an easy victory. The next day at Illinois, things didn’t get any better. The Illini overpowered the Volunteers, DeVoe, frustrated, drew two technical fouls in the second half.

  “We were never in either game,” DeVoe said. “I just didn’t do a very good job of getting the team ready to play over the weekend. The LSU thing definitely lingered with all of us. At our very best it would have been hard for us to win either one of those games. But we weren’t even close to our best. When we aren’t near our best, teams like that are going to make us look bad.”

  So now, Tennessee stood 9–4 with Auburn, a team that had just beaten Florida and Kentucky, coming to town that evening. DeVoe is a man who does not get down very easily. He is almost always upbeat and gets excited talking about his basketball team. But as he sat eating a club sandwich for a game-day lunch, he sounded like a man searching for a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

  “It just boggles my mind to think that I can’t get this team playing well enough to get the wolves off my doorstep,” he said. “A week ago, we were the big men in this town, sitting at 9–1. Now, we’re a bunch of dogs. LSU was a killer. We sent twenty thousand people home angry. Tonight, the boo-birds will be out. I always say that’s just fine, let ’em boo just so long as they keep coming out. But it is frustrating when you have a team that does some things well, then does some other things so poorly. There’s just no consistency.”

  The only consistency at Tennessee seemed to be in the luck department—all of it bad. The latest mishap, hardly a minor one, had occurred the night after the victory in the SEC opener over Mississippi. Rickey Clark, a freshman whose play had prompted DeVoe to seriously consider moving him into the starting lineup, had gone out with a group of friends and ended up out late in a Knoxville bar.

  Clark and his friends were drinking and they weren’t alone. An argument started. Clark ended up in the men’s room with a couple of antagonists. Outnumbered, he reached for what he thought was a beer bottle sitting on a wall. It was a broken beer bottle, the jagged edges hanging loose. Clark put his hand practically through the jagged edges, ripping it open.

  “He was lucky he didn’t hurt himself worse than he did,” DeVoe said. “As it was, he tore tendons in the hand, lost a huge amount of blood. And it still could have been worse than it was.”

  It was bad enough that Clark was through for the season. DeVoe, in need of every break he could get, was only getting bad ones.

  There was also the continuing problem of Doug Roth, the one-time prodigy center. DeVoe had come to understand that, because of his vision problem and a lack of quickness, Roth was never going to be a great player. But there were things Roth could be doing, DeVoe thought, that he wasn’t. Like taking the ball aggressively to the basket.

  “We throw the ball in to Doug, he catches it, but instead of going to the basket, he just throws it back out,” DeVoe said. “We’ve played thirteen games and he’s shot ten free throws. That just shouldn’t be with a guy his size who also has good hands.

  “I still look at our guys and think we can win eighteen or twenty games, get this thing turned back around. But other times, I wonder. It’s a battle just getting them to battle.”

  DeVoe had talked to his wife, Ana, about the possibility of having to leave Tennessee. Since she was from Knoxville, she was not thrilled about the possibility. But Ana DeVoe is a religious woman. When her husband talked about getting fired, she would often tell him that, either way, it was God’s will and he should accept it.

  DeVoe laughed when his wife said this. “I wish,” he said, “God would will us some wins.”

  It was ironic that Auburn was in town at such a crucial time. Years ago, Auburn Coach Sonny Smith had been DeVoe’s top assistant at Virginia Tech. Now, with DeVoe in trouble, one name being mentioned as a possible replacement was Sonny Smith, who had been born and raised in East Tennessee. DeVoe heard the same rumors everyone else heard. But he wasn’t about to lose his sense of humor. In fact, he clung to it like a life raft.

  Shortly before tip-off that night, Smith walked up behind DeVoe. He put his arm around him and said, “I’d like to wish you luck tonight, but the hell with you.”

  DeVoe laughed. “You better be nice to me,” he said. “You may need a job someday.”

  “Would you take me back?” Smith asked.

  “Hell no,” said DeVoe.

  If he was tight, it didn’t show. His prediction about the boo-birds was half right. Many of the 20,380 who had bought tickets for the game didn’t show up. The actual turnstile count was 14,771—almost six thousand people had paid not to see the game. Those who came didn’t do much booing, but they didn’t do much cheering either. Thompson-Boling Arena had the atmosphere of a bright orange mausoleum.

  If it bothered the Volunteers, they didn’t show it. They raced to an early 13–4 lead with Roth nailed to the bench. DeVoe had decided that it was time to be aggressive with Roth in order to try to get him to be aggressive. The first eighteen minutes could not have gone much better for the home team. With the exception of 6–11 freshman Andy Geiger, Auburn was cold. When Dyron Nix hit a fall-away baseline jumper with 1:58 left
to make it 40–29, the once-silent crowd was suddenly alive and noisy.

  But careless basketball the last two minutes allowed the Tigers to close the margin to 40–33 at halftime. Given that impetus, they came out of the locker room and promptly scored the first six points of the second half to cut the margin to 40–39. Nix hit two foul shots to stop the 10–0 run, but Geiger made a gorgeous spinning lay-up, was fouled, and tied the game at 42–42 with his free throw.

  Tennessee was in trouble. With the score tied at 44, Derrick Dennison hit a jumper after a Nix miss to make it 46–44. A moment later Travis Henry, one of the favorite targets of the boo-birds—his nickname among many fans is Travesty Henry—turned the ball over. When Chris Morris of the Tigers swished a three-pointer, it was 49–44 with 11:37 left.

  Silence would have sounded golden to DeVoe at this moment. The boos were coming from all over. The Auburn run was 20–4, going back to the first half. If the Volunteers folded here, the season could become a very long one for everyone.

  They didn’t fold. Down 54–51, Nix made a steal for a lay-up to cut the lead to 54–53. Ian Lockhart, who had been as far down the bench as Roth during the first half, hit a jumper in the lane and Tennessee had the lead back, 55–54. He hit again thirty seconds later to make it 57–54.

  DeVoe had tried some zone defense to sag on Geiger earlier in the half. But now he had his team playing man-to-man, and the players were playing it for dear life. Chris Morris missed with Nix in his face, then Nix came down and drilled one to make it 59–54. When Lockhart scored his third basket in ninety seconds, it was 61–54 and Smith took a time-out. The crowd had changed direction once again and, as Tennessee set up on defense, DeVoe turned and waved his arms to the crowd. They responded.

  A few seconds later, Roth actually caught the ball in the low post, turned and shot—and was fouled. DeVoe was jumping up and down with excitement now. Down the stretch, Roth suddenly wanted the ball inside. He went to the line seven times during the last five minutes and helped ice the 75–64 victory.