March Madness 2001.(Georgia State University basketball coach Lefty Driesell)(Brief Article)

The details of when and where are irrelevant because Lefty Driesell's scorn was aroused dozens of times, always memorably. This time I had asked the coach why he'd done a certain thing in a University of Maryland basketball game. "I'm not talking to you," Driesell said, and the way he said it made it dear it wasn't my question he didn't like, it was me.

The coach didn't like something in that morning's newspaper. Attempting to commit humor in a column about Atlantic Coast Conference coaches, I'd said Driesell's reputation was that "he couldn't coach a fish to swim."

After all, in a league owned by the gods Dean Smith and Mike Krzyzewski, a mere mortal such as Charles Grice Driesell inevitably paled in comparison, however successful his teams, however endearing his bumbling ways.

Hoping to bring peace, my sportswriting friend John Feinstein explained to Driesell the shades of meanings in the offending words: "Lefty, Kindred didn't say you couldn't coach a fish to swim, he said your reputation is you couldn't coach a fish to swim."

So Driesell sought me out and said, "Feinstein says I owe you an apology."

And walked away.

It was 15 years before we talked again, not because of any enmity but because life's events separated us until an April day in 1997 when I found his windowless/no-pictures/ no-secretary/concrete-block-walls office inside a faceless downtown Atlanta building that could have passed for a warehouse.