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| Charley Rosen | |
Charley Rosen, "a fiery former basketball player and minor-league coach who became a bestselling author of nearly 30 books, most of them about basketball," died September 13, the New York Times reported. He was 84. In 2007, Chronogram, a Hudson Valley media website, described him as an "odd mix of street fighter and Bodhisattva, with a dash of vintage Deadhead."
As a player, Rosen was a star center at Hunter College in New York, played semipro basketball, and coached four teams in the Continental Basketball Association. He fictionalized his CBA experience in a novel, The Cockroach Basketball League (1992). After coaching the Bard College men's basketball team to a 1-16 record in the 1979-80 season, Rosen chronicled the experience in Players and Pretenders: The Basketball Team That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1981).
His other books include the novel Have Jump Shot, Will Travel (1975); the memoir Crazy Basketball: A Life In and Out of Bounds (2011); and The First Tip-Off: The Incredible Story of the Birth of the NBA (2008). He also collaborated with NBA player and coach Phil Jackson on two books: Maverick: More Than a Game (1975), an autobiography, and More Than a Game (2001), which was a memoir by both men, told in alternating chapters, with coaching philosophy.
Two of Rosen's novels were bestsellers: The House of Moses All-Stars, (1996), about a touring Jewish basketball team in 1936 that barnstorms the country in a hearse with a Star of David painted on the side; and Barney Polan's Game: A Novel of the 1951 College Basketball Scandals (1998), a fictionalized version of a subject that he had tackled as history in Scandals of '51: How the Gamblers Almost Killed College Basketball (1978).
In 1994, the Wall Street Journal called Rosen the "foremost literary chronicler" of basketball. In 2005, Jackson told the Middletown, N.Y., Times Herald-Record: "Writing is Charley's gift to basketball."
The two first met in 1973, when Rosen, on assignment for Sport magazine, attended a postgame party at a loft above an auto repair shop in Manhattan where Jackson, who was then playing for the Knicks, was living, the Times noted. In More Than a Game, Rosen wrote that beneath Jackson's "peaceful hippie smile," he was a relentless competitor. They developed a quick friendship that eventually led to Jackson hiring Rosen as his assistant coach with the CBA's Albany Patroons in 1983.
Rosen also wrote The Wizard of Odds: How Jack Molinas Almost Destroyed the Game of Basketball (2001), about a former college and NBA player who fixed college games between 1957 and 1961.