BOB RASKIN: A COLORFUL AND COMPLEX LIFE By Bob Howitt ([email protected]) As youngsters, probably most of us have those mixed feelings about parental attendance at our sporting events. Do we want them there to see us make an error or miss the free throw or fail to make the tackle--not really, but if they are never at the game, how will they see our base hit, clutch jumper, or crucial play at the goal line. In maybe 300 games of high school baseball and basketball, Bob’s father Max was there so few times that Bob can remember the details clearly almost a half-century later. (He can also recall that, among other things, his father tried to scare Bob by saying he would be bald by 17 and that he would never do well at algebra.) “I struck out my first two times at the plate in one game, and my father left. Then I had two doubles. At a basketball game, I had two points at halftime, and Max left, which meant he missed a second half in which I scored 17 points.” The lost opportunities of his cold and distant father to create a close parental relationship in a way foretold a series of missed chances for the golden ring for Bob in his adult life. Nonetheless, as the bumper sticker says, and accurately for articulate, intelligent, energetic, personable people like Bob, when a window closes, somewhere a door opens. Bob was born in Brooklyn in 1941. At the time, Max ran a stand which sold sausage and root beer (6 cents for the combination) at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, a location which represented challenges to life, liberty, and the pursuit of profit. He soon switched to homebuilding, which became his single-minded interest to the exclusion of family and most things outside of his vocation. Ruth, Bob’s Mom, was a homemaker. Years later, in a moment of weakness no doubt, Max consented to attend a New York Knicks-Los Angeles Lakers basketball game at the invitation of son Bob (note that this was a very hot ticket at Madison Square Garden, given to Bob as a result of his relationship with the legendary Knick coach, Red Holzman). Max was even introduced to Red and to Willis Reed. The next day Bob saw that Max was neglecting to mention the game or the introductions to his friends, who were stunned when they heard whom Max had met. Bob asked about this oversight, whereupon he was requested by Max to not invite him again to such a boring activity. Then, with almost classic obliviousness, his father inquired as to whether Bob would like to attend an exciting homebuilding dinner meeting where talk of 2x4s would fill the air. Not! Bob’s brother, Michael, was born in 1945 with a debilitating leg injury that helped steer him from any interest in sports to an interest in psychology, and he is the author of several books on the subject. Michael once told Bob they had learned two things in the household of Max and Ruth: “never ask for anything and never expect anything.” Max lived to the ripe old age of 99 and Bob’s mom just recently passed away, after a mercifully short bout with cancer at the age of 93. When Bob was six months old, the family moved to North Bergen, New Jersey. At seven, they moved to Chatham; by age 10, they were living in Morristown. Perhaps these multiple moves created a sense of instability; more likely, they conveyed the impression that change in life was the only constant. Like many kids since before the first textbook was created, Bob was an indifferent student, often buried in a class of 30 pupils without any clear accountability for his actions. One Raskin story tells it all. “I had been asked by the teacher to read a section from the history book. I did so. Then the teacher asked if anybody in the class could explain the passage. Nobody volunteered, so the teacher asked me if I could explain the material. I said, ‘no.’ The teacher naturally asked, ‘why not?’ And I replied, “because I was not paying attention.” Sports basically kept Bob in school, that and a brain which could be switched on to just the level needed to pass the tests. Thoughts of college did not intrude on his basketball/baseball activities; guidance counseling was such an after-thought that it literally did not take place until he graduated from high school. The idea of community college or prep school was put on the table, only to be met with a sneer from Max, who regarded such transitional education experiences as useless. Without a map to guide him, or an educational passion to frame his thinking, Bob was here and there in his path to higher education. For example, he placed third out of 43 aspirants taking the English and Math entrance exam at Rider College and briefly contemplated the pursuit of an accounting major. However, after a few months of gaining weight and hating the whole scene, he left, taking a job at Greystone Hospital. Then a friend moved to Georgia, and Bob went along for the ride, getting a chance to play basketball and baseball and put in time toward an associates degree at a school in that state. After this fish-out-of-water episode for a garrulous metropolitan type, Bob returned to SUNY at New Paltz in New York State and, for the first time, got truly serious about education, in time receiving both a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Education and Sociology, which meant permanent teacher certification in New York. Bob taught for a while in Paterson, New Jersey, at the elementary level under principal Frank Napier, who later was the superintendent when the high school was made famous by Principal Joe Clark. After this, Bob was a long-term substitute teacher at an equally challenging school on Bergen Avenue in Newark, where a tough-minded African- American teacher (later a well-known reading consultant) named George Cureton (no relation to Earl Cureton, who played in the NBA) watched Bob’s back when the inevitable disputes bubbled to the surface. As a teacher, Bob preached what Bob the student had paid no attention to, do your homework and do it well, and then play your sports. The lessons must have sunk in because nearly 20 years later, when Bob was looking at cars at a Route 22 dealership, the salesman, a former student, recognized him and thanked Bob for his diligence as a teacher. Unconvinced that the teaching profession was his life calling, in early 1968, Bob raised $600,000 in Miami in an attempt to get an ABA franchise for the prospective “Beachcombers.” He fed his information to the ABA Commissioner, George Mikan, the bespectacled center who was voted the best basketball player of the first fifty years of the 20th century. Unfortunately, in one of those deals which were typical back in the frontier days of pro basketball, this information was used by Mikan to facilitate the move of the Minnesota Muskies ABA team to Miami, ending Bob’s quest for an ABA presence there. The whole situation was a vivid indication of Bob’s excellent promotional capability, but also the first instance of what became a pattern of falling a bit short in reaching for the home run connection which would have a meant a bigger and/or more continuous public spotlight on his life. Bob’s financial group shifted its interest to an ABA franchise in the Tri-Cities of North Carolina. Famed Tarheel Billy Cunningham, then a sixth man with the Philadelphia 76ers in the NBA, reached out to Bob; Larry Brown and Doug Moe, then playing for the Oakland Oaks, were interested in being involved. Instead, James Garner, a local politician and part owner of the Hardee’s restaurant chain, swooped in, paid the overdue bills of the Dallas ABA franchise and moved it to become the Carolina Cougars. In 1969, with basketball star and lawyer Walter Dukes as his associate, Bob approached the ABA’s New York Nets, then owned by trucking executive Arthur Brown. Brown was totally impressed and named Bob the Nets Director of Player Personnel and Promotion, with the General Manager’s job to follow in a year, which would make Raskin the youngest GM ever. The projected coach was to be Hall of Famer Bob Cousy. Separately, Roy Boe and various investment bankers were to buy 40% of the Nets, but Boe got more enthusiastic and they purchased the whole team--and unfortunately went in a totally different personnel direction. Then, burdened by greater debt than anticipated, Boe reacted by getting rid of a young player named Julius Erving, who as Doctor J would only become one of the greatest players in history. It took decades for the Nets franchise, later moved to New Jersey, to recover from this disastrous deal; even when Bob’s friend, the great Knick, Willis Reed, came into management (and Raskin became a Nets fan), there was no sustainable improvement. It took the acquisition of Jason Kidd, the drafting of Kenyon Martin and the draft day trade (a steal actually) by Rod Thorn which brought in Richard Jefferson and Jason Collins to bury the Nets status as the laughing stock of the NBA. In 1970, Bob moved to the Eastern Basketball League’s Allentown Jets, as its Director of Player Personnel and Promotion, and promptly spurred a 62% gain in attendance.