Charlie Scott and Lefty Driesell have finally come full circle.
Colleague D.G. Martin did a Look Who’s Talking feature this week on his former coach at Davidson College, Charles “Lefty” Driesell. Veteran ACC fans know Lefty as the coach at Maryland, where he vowed to make that program “the UCLA of the East.” He didn’t quite do that, failing to reach a Final Four, but Driesell did win 786 career games at four different schools and will be inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame this fall.
In Driesell’s Hall of Fame class is Charlie Scott, the former Carolina All-American who originally committed to playing for Lefty at Davidson. The two have remained close over the years and Scott likes to say, “Without Lefty, there would be no Charlie Scott.” While that may not be true, Driesell befriended Scott before any other college coach.
Driesell never beat a Tar Heel team with Scott on it, losing two NCAA Eastern Regional championship games to Dean Smith’s 1968 and ’69 clubs. Scott won the latter on a buzzer beater at College Park, Maryland, where Driesell would move after that loss. In his first season coaching the Terrapins, Lefty lost two ACC games to UNC Scott’s senior year.
Especially, after Smith passed away in 2015, Charlie now regards Driesell as his second father. Lefty found Scott at Laurinburg Institute and formed what has turned out to be a lifelong relationship. When Charlie changed his mind and went to Carolina instead of Davidson, he said, “Lefty, I love you the most, but Chapel Hill is just a better place for me to go to school.”
That was a 17-year-old African-American kid, UNC’s first black scholarship athlete, knowing that UNC was probably a more accepting environment than Davidson. Even though Chapel Hill wasn’t exactly liberal back then, Scott made a wise decision and found a way to make it through as a Tar Heel.
Whether the Hall of Fame selection committee purposely elected Scott and Driesell in the same class, it is poetic justice that the two will be enshrined together. Each has played a big part in the history of basketball, and they have been tied at the hip since they met more than 50 years ago.
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