Bill Raftery's oft-forgotten coaching career

The longtime broadcaster known for his colorful catchphrases was once a promising Big East coach. Then he chose another path life offered him

A quick note before we get going: the idea for this piece was submitted to me last summer when I asked for any subjects readers might want to see me delve into. Loyal subscriber Aileen Bowers came forward with this most excellent topic. I figured there would be no better time than Final Four weekend to put it together.

Big thanks to Aileen and a reminder to all readers and subscribers (paid or free) that if there’s ever something you’d like to see examined in greater detail, please, please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email at bycraigmeyer@gmail.com or just send me a DM on Twitter. Y’all (and inadvisable amounts of Red Bull) are what truly make this newsletter go and I always want you to feel like you have a voice in what appears on these digital pages.

Somewhere in the spectacle of 74,000 people packed into a football stadium to watch a basketball game Monday night will be a familiar face with a familiar voice shouting familiar phrases courtside.

If a player gently banks the ball off the backboard and through the hoop, it’ll be “with a little kiss!” If a ball-handler manages to shake their defender, there will be “a little lingerie on the deck!” And if someone drains a timely shot in a pressurized situation? A large circular vegetable will serve as a suitable, TV-friendly stand-in for the male genitalia.

For college basketball fans across multiple generations, Bill Raftery has provided a wildly entertaining soundtrack to the sport they love. He’s ideally what you want out of a color commentator. He has a deep and obvious understanding of the game. He clearly prepares for his calls, with that research coming through over the course of a contest. He loves the sport while not taking it too seriously. Perhaps most impressively, he has repeated those famous slogans countless times over decades without becoming some kind of crude caricature that takes away from the game he’s there to chronicle.

Though he’s been a fixture of the sport throughout my life, the 80-year-old Raftery will be calling just his ninth NCAA championship game on Monday night, when UConn takes on Purdue. The fact it feels like more, though, speaks to Raftery’s standing in the sport.

For fans my age and even some of those in the generation before me, the man commonly known as “Raf” has always been this, the silver-haired and quick-witted basketball jokester whose famous calls and catchphrases occupy a hallowed place in our sports memories.

For others, though, his identity and larger career path isn’t quite so simplistic. “Basketball TV analyst” is a profession, both in the NBA and in college, that’s overrun with former coaches and, surely enough, Raftery is one of them, even as he hasn’t paced up and down a sideline for more than 40 years.

Back then, Raftery was a promising, young (albeit prematurely gray) coach whose respectable program was a part of an emerging basketball behemoth. Until, one day, he wasn’t.

A coach with onions

Though he’s known as a kindly, occasionally raunchy grandfather today, Raftery got into basketball the way that many analysts do – he was really good at playing it.

Growing up in Kearny, N.J., an industrial and working class town only about 10 miles west of lower Manhattan, Raftery was an all-state baseball and soccer player, but it was basketball where he shined the brightest. He finished his career at since-closed St. Cecilia High School with 2,193 points, 113 more than Kyrie Irving would record in the same state 50 years later.

He went on to an accomplished college career at La Salle, which was just five years removed from a national championship when Raftery enrolled at the Philadelphia school in 1959. He was a co-captain his senior year on an Explorers team that went to the NIT and, after graduating with a degree in English, was selected by the New York Knicks with the No. 83 overall pick of the 84-player 1963 NBA Draft.

Raftery never suited up for the Knicks, though, so he did what many recent college graduates do – return home and see what life has to offer them there. Later that year, he was named the head basketball coach at Fairleigh Dickinson-Madison, where he would later also serve as golf coach and associate athletic director.

“A lot of guys get the opportunity to coach under somebody that taught them and brought them along, but I had to do it on my own, which was great,” Raftery said in “With a Kiss,” a 2016 documentary produced by his son, Billy. “The first year or two, you did everything your high school coach and your college coach did, but you sort of develop a style that’s yours.”

That style worked. After going 18-22 in his first two seasons, the Devils gradually improved and finished with a winning record in each of the final three seasons of his five-year tenure, including a 33-15 mark in his last two seasons there.

In 1969, he left the school for what was described in the newspapers at the time as a “more lucrative offer” as a field representative for the Converse Rubber Company.

He wouldn’t be away from the game long.