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Home , Allentown Jets, Bob Cousy, Carolina Cougars, Eddie Donovan, Johnny McCarthy, Minnesota Muskies

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 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 and , 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 - basketball game at the invitation of son Bob (note that this was a very hot ticket at , given to Bob as a result of his relationship with the legendary Knick coach, ). Max was even introduced to Red and to . 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, , the bespectacled 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 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 . Famed Tarheel , then a with the in the NBA, reached out to Bob; and , 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 . 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 . 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 , 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 , the drafting of Kenyon Martin and the draft day trade (a actually) by 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 , as its Director of Player Personnel and Promotion, and promptly spurred a 62% gain in attendance. With 20 games left in the season, and the team mired in 6th place in an 8-team league, Bob’s constant carping about the decisions being made by the coach finally prompted the 18-person ownership group to fire that coach, to be replaced by Bob. Raskin won 17 of the remaining contests and stormed through the playoffs to win the championship; he was voted Coach of the Year, at 28 becoming the youngest ever to win that honor in the EBL. His reward was to be fired early in the next season, when he began with a 4-4 record, his team adversely affected by the loss of players to the ABA and NBA, and to injury.

At Allentown, Raskin also discovered the joy of having a well-written contract (done by Bob) as a management dispute forced him to win his compensation in court, the legal type that is, not where hoops are shot.

Clearly not hearing the message that professional basketball was not exactly a sustainable job environment, Bob moved on to Trenton (EBL), where he replaced an unsuccessful coach who previously had been scheduled to testify against Bob in the Allentown contract dispute. Coming on at the end of the year, Bob won 7 of 10 to make the playoffs, but then got swept by Allentown. A remarkable outcome of his Trenton episode was a thank you from Joe Heiser (an all Ivy-Leaguer from Princeton), whose scoring average had dropped from 20+ to about six per game, but who was nonetheless appreciative of finally playing winning basketball, totally different from the years he was an EBL All-Star but also on a losing team. Bob was rewarded for his leadership of Trenton by being fired; the owner objected to having eight blacks and only two whites on the team.

As a lifelong keen judge of basketball talent, Bob befriended a young John Williamson, later to be known as “Supe” for his scoring exploits at New Mexico State and the New Jersey Nets. He was introduced to Williamson by Supe’s coach at Wilber Cross High School in New Haven, Connecticut, who knew Bob could be trusted. Bob brought him to the right try-out, where Dr. J could see that Williamson had professional basketball talent. Williamson, like many inner-city black players at that time (and still) was not trusting of white people, but had developed a good relationship with Raskin, to the of having dinner and staying overnight with Bob and his wife. But he was no more sophisticated in his understanding of contractual matters than most of his peers, and he also lacked any feeling of obligation, not having known any coming his way as a child or high schooler. Thus, when Erving’s agent swooped in for the kill, attempting to ink Williamson to a contract which should have been with Bob, Williamson obliged without so much as a glance in Bob’s direction. The same raw deal for Bob transpired with respect to Hawthorne Wingo, the New Yorker who was pushing garment center racks before being signed by the Knicks.

Did I mention that when the were created as an NBA expansion team, Bob sought the head scout job, and GM narrowed a large field of candidates to only Bob and Johnny McCarthy, who had been a teammate of the Buffalo coach with the Syracuse Nationals; McCarthy was chosen. Schayes was a great player, but like many “greats,”a poor coach. Did I relate the situation with Lancaster, when Bob returned from a road trip to Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine, packed up his wife and child for a Christmas dinner with Max and Ruth—and got a phone call saying he was fired. Or how about Mozambique, where a country uprising prevented Bob from becoming the coach of the national team, or the aborted chance for coaching a team in Barcelona. And then there was the New Jersey Gems, a woman’s professional team; Bob lost in the finals to the female candidate. Perhaps most dramatic in terms of long-term potential was the chance to become an assistant to an NBA coach if a certain individual had received the latter job; alas, said individual did not get the position, so it was not to be for Bob.

Returning to a coaching situation which garnered publicity for the EBL and Bob in different sports publications, in 1978, in what one of his players, Seton Hall’s Glen Mosley (an early first round pick by the NBA 76ers), described as his most exciting series ever, Bob’s team won the fifth and deciding semifinals game 115-113, versus the Northern Knights, in a series played in Anchorage, Alaska. In the final game of the emotionally anticlimactic championship round versus the Wilkes-Barre Barons, two key players arrived at halftime after driving in the wrong direction, and two more showed up as the national anthem was played. Can anyone say “lost opportunity?”

Bob has had numerous other basketball involvements, e.g., benefit games and one-time coaching situations. Photos of Bob’s colorful and complex life are everywhere in his home: with his championship Eastern Basketball League team, with Bob Cousy, with Willis Reed, with of Harlem Globetrotter fame. There is a telegram from the two-sport star to in which Conley recommends Bob’s talents as the “best player evaluator he knows” (as demonstrated by his recommendation of George Lehmann to , the former Celtic great who was coaching of the Los Angeles Stars). There were years when Auerbach, arguably the greatest basketball coach in NBA history, and the incomparable player/later GM received NBA draft inputs from Raskin.

In 1972, while Bob was living his nomadic life as a basketball junkie, he married Michele (usually called Shelley). His wife taught school in Bayonne, providing the steady income which could offset the roller coaster of cash flow from basketball. That she loved the game herself probably goes without saying, for she must have had innumerable meals alone at home and contact with Bob which was limited to the telephone. After seven years in Elizabeth, Bob and Shelley moved to Union, where daughter Robin was born in 1979. In time, Bob began to change his life, gradually evolving into a Mr. Mom, at least for a few years. In addition, plagued by a collapsed disc since age 24, Bob stopped his own sport activities for over twenty years, eventually returning to play softball in the over 50-league.

During this period, after a suitable hiatus, Bob became intrigued with another form of spectator entertainment, professional wrestling. A wrestling referee friend of his, knowing of Bob’s innate restlessness and love of promotion, invited him to take a look, and Bob got the bug; before that, he would switch the channel if wrestling were on. For a period of about ten years, under the name “United States Wrestling Alliance,” Bob packaged, produced, and promoted professional wrestling in 19 different states. His daughter Robin played with the kids of the star Sargeant Slaughter and he became a close friend of Bruno Sammartino, one of the best known wrestlers in the country. Most importantly perhaps in terms of being successful in a new field, he had a reputation for being honest—when he promised that Bruiser Brody or Dangerous Linda Dallas was going to be at your local arena, those stars were sure to show up. The result was a good promotion, with attendance figures rising and crowds of all ages enjoying the spectacle. Honest, gentleman, and promoter are words not usually found in the same sentence, but with Bob they were, and are.

Bob’s first wife passed away on New Year’s Eve of 1985. Later, after dating for eight years—Myrna naturally was introduced to Bob by a sports writer (even though she is not basketball savvy), he married for the second time, in 2002, and moved to a beautiful condo in Long Branch, New Jersey, directly across the street from the beach. His two stepdaughters, Shana and Becky, like daughter Robin, have Master’s degrees and are about to find out that Bob and Myrna have purchased the condo below their own for the daughters use when visiting. Bob’s wife is a Learning Disabilities Teaching Consultant and a member of the Child Study Team for the Marlboro, New Jersey elementary school system. She has been an LDTC for four years, following a long period as a classroom teacher.

Bless her heart, she did not object, at least not strenuously, when Bob--after a happenstance meeting at a basketball court in Union in 2002, where he heard of the Chatham Senior Center and its availability for basketball for guys of advanced age and undiluted passion--decided to venture northwest. It is a 90-minute drive from Bob’s condo; after hoops and maybe a quick sandwich at a nearby deli, he heads to Union, where an owned-house serves as a business office as well (Bob has interests, as a passive investor, in a few office buildings, the highest grossing restaurant in Monmouth County, and a private investment which has quadrupled in value). A few hours later, he makes the return trip to Long Branch, his legs stiff and his eyes fighting the urge to close for a night’s sleep.

Basketball, in case there is any misunderstanding, is a contact sport, as contrasted to football, which is a deliberate collision sport, or dance, which in many forms is a non-contact activity. This truism was reinforced for Bob when, two years ago, inadvertent, but excessive bodily contact at the Senior Center resulted in Bob incurring a severe ankle injury. As often happens, an injury in one part of the body became associated with other difficulties, in Bob’s case, substantial weakness in his knees. The outcome has been a necessity to wear cumbersome knee supports and an associated inability to cut quickly or jump for a . Concern over becoming further injured is not far from his mind, and in this, he has the same thought as a majority of the people at the Senior Center, but when you know that your passion leaves you with difficulty walking at the end of the day, the concern is more than casual.

Not lost to injury, however, has been Bob’s ability to see the floor, make the right pass, set the pick which frees a teammate for an open look, and shoot a high-arching shot (no for him) with good accuracy (it seems like close to 50%), particularly in the clutch. At that shooting rate, with 40 years less age and good knees and a healthy disc, maybe the Chatham Senior Center player named Bob Raskin could be a multimillion dollar star in today’s NBA! .