Charley Rosen lives high on a hillside in Accord, at the top of a quarter-mile driveway so quiet, deer stroll across at midmorning. As his two dogs bound toward a visitor, frisking and scrimmaging, the 6′ 8″ former basketball coach appears on the deck, shouting “No jumping!” in a Bronx-tinged growl that both dogs obey at once. Moments later, he’s gushing at them in affectionate babytalk.
Rosen wears old shorts and a T-shirt with a graphic of a gramophone. A self-described “goon,” he’s strikingly more comfortable seated than standing. At full height, he appears stiff and furtive, abashed by his bulk. Kicked back in a chair with his bare feet sprawled out, waving long arms as he talks, he seems richly at peace.
Rosen’s persona is an odd mix of streetfighter and Boddhisatva, with a dash of vintage Deadhead. A Wall Street Journal reviewer called him “the game’s foremost literary chronicler,” and he’s generated a steady stream of hoop lore, including two books coauthored with eight-time championship coach Phil Jackson, Maverick and More Than a Game. Rosen was Jackson’s assistant coach with the Albany Patroons; 22 years ago, they launched an Omega Institute course called Beyond Basketball.
Bison Books just reissued Players and Pretenders: The Basketball Team That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, a freewheeling account of coaching Bard College’s 1979-80 Running Red Devils through a season in which they won one lone ballgame (against younger players at Simon’s Rock) and numerous personal victories. The coach’s CV included two graduate degrees in Medieval Studies, four mismatched jobs teaching English at junior highs and community colleges, varsity basketball MVP at Hunter, and numerous publications. Not listed: a world-class collection of Grateful Dead bootlegs, an unraveling car named Foodini, and humor to burn.
Rosen’s application concluded, “Coaching basketball at Bard is a chance to participate in basketball in its purest form—no money, no pressure, no statistics, no concept of the ‘enemy.’ Free-form and spontaneous. Meditations. A zen exercise seeking the spiritual radiance of the game.” He was hired on the spot.
Bard is no jock school, and most of his players were under six feet. Some barely knew how to dribble and shoot; many were infrequent flyers, missing practice for math tests and Shakespeare rehearsals; all brought van-loads of emotional baggage for the coach to unpack. Still, on their own unique terms, they became a team.
Rosen grew up on the streets of the Bronx. His father was a chronic invalid, a volatile man who took out his frustrations on his hulking son. Always a big kid, Charley reached 6′ 5″ at 14. “People expect more of you-—they think you’re older, so you should be more mature,” he reflects. “Everyone notices you; you can’t get away with anything.”
Both parents were Communists, though their son was more aware of the social aspect of meetings held at their house than politics. In fifth grade, he researched a social studies report on a political party by visiting Party headquarters on Tremont Avenue. “There was this old man sleeping. I woke him up and he gave me a couple of pamphlets.” This being the height of the McCarthy era, Rosen’s parents were called into school; he was nearly expelled.
Sports were his refuge. He spent every free minute playing sandlot baseball and street games: kick-the-can, punchball, stickball, and a basketball knockoff played by shooting a pink spaldeen ball through fire escape ladders. He encountered his first real hoop at a camp for emotionally disturbed kids in New Hampshire: “Swimming was awful; we called it Leech Lake. I found this old hoop nailed onto a tree and would stand throwing rocks through it.”
Basketball was “a home for someone my size, the first time I didn’t feel like a freak.” At 13, he started playing indoor games at Bronx House and in the off-season locker room of a public pool with an alleged former Harlem Globetrotter. Clumsy and stiff, Rosen wasn’t a natural. But he’d seen how the game could be played, and longed to join those “joyful warriors.”
Rosen compares basketball to jazz. “It’s a quintet. You’re finding a balance, one guy supporting another, playing roles, creating enough structure so you can be creative without descending into chaos.” Asked to compare it with other sports, he blows the verbal equivalent of a Charlie Parker solo. “Unlike baseball and football, the play is continuous. Basketball players have to make decisions on the move, they don’t have time to gather into a huddle and plan. It takes a different kind of vision, instinct, reaction.” Unlike the specialized roles of, say, an offensive lineman and placekicker, “hoopsters need the same skills in all positions: run, dribble, shoot, rebound, handle. Everyone touches the ball, it’s more fluid, you’re constantly transitioning between offense and defense. You have to recognize it in action and do it before you think about it. It’s less intellectual, more here and now. Ten guys and one ball. You need to have respect for yourself, your teammates—everyone but the referees.”
Rosen’s contempt for zebra-shirts is a running theme in his books. He was once banned from a game for asking a ref what he terms “a pair of purely rhetorical questions: ‘What are you? Fucking blind?’”
After nine years coaching in the Continental Basketball Association, his volatility erupted, and he was arrested for assaulting a rival coach. His players gladly chipped in the $400 bail (some offering reminiscences of their own busts) but Rosen knew he’d crossed a line. In More Than a Game, he describes this turning point, “I finally had to face it—I was a writer. I needed to edit reality, over and over again, until I got it right.”
He’d started writing in the mid ’60s, as an escape from a dead-end teaching job and a dying marriage. After penning three novels (later used as notepaper and kindling), he divorced, moved back to New York, and wrote for Sport magazine, still dreaming about the Great American Basketball Novel.
Though the NBA is big business, basketball hasn’t penetrated our national culture quite as pervasively as other sports. The Horatio Alger mythology of baseball—the lone batter facing the outfield—and the ritualized combat of football have spawned countless novels and films. Perhaps basketball, with its double quintets and densely woven interplay, offers too complex a metaphor. Nobody’s told Charley Rosen, though, and over the years he’s crafted five novels with hoops at their center: Have Jump Shot Will Travel, A Mile Above the Ring, Barney Polan’s Game, The Cockroach Basketball League, and The House of Moses All-Stars. No Blood, No Foul is forthcoming from Seven Stories in 2008.
Rosen’s personal favorite is The House of Moses All-Stars, about seven tall Jews barnstorming Depression-era America in a converted hearse (three players sleep in the crypt). Like the subject of Rosen’s erstwhile dissertation, The Canterbury Tales, it’s full of tales within tales. The pilgrims include a mad Bolshevik, a 6’ 10” Hasidic virgin, two petty criminals, a Zionist worrier, an Irish ringer who forgets to shun ham on buffets, and the morally compromised narrator, Aaron Steiner. “It’s really about America, the dissolution of the culture economically and in every way—the noble experiment was a failure,” Rosen says.
He has two more books underway: The First Season, a history of NBA predecessor the Basketball Association of America’s debut (’46-47) for McGraw Hill, and Beyond Basketball for Wisdom Press. He still teaches that course at Omega each year, with partners including Darryl Dawkins and Scott Wedman. Though there’s plenty of on-court work, it isn’t a sports clinic, focusing more on the spirit of teamplay. “We try to get ego out of the way so the game can come to you,” he explains. Rosen and his third wife, Daia Gerson, are Tibetan Buddhists, and after mumbling that his meditation practice is “lazy,” he confirms that Buddhism profoundly affects his approach. “You leave your life behind once you step over that white line. That’s where you are, this is what you’re doing. You play the game with as much awareness as you can.”
Rosen is chief NBA analyst for FoxSports.com, churning out 17 or more columns a month. Quick to separate himself from the right-wing TV network, he calls it “a good gig” with no muzzle on content. He enjoys posting idiosyncratic lists; his Top 10 NBA international roster included Tim Duncan (St. Croix), Steve Nash (South Africa), Manu Ginobili (Argentina), and Dennis Rodman (Mars). When he wrote that Chinese phenomenon Yao Ming has gigantism and might suffer from brittle bones, a colleague quipped, “Six billion people want to kill you.” Indeed, recent blog headlines include “Charley Rosen Is Making Enemies With His Lists” and “Fire Charley Rosen!”
“The bloggers are lunatics,” Rosen grins. He’s “on a crusade” at Fox, trying to shift the NBA’s focus from superstars to teamwork. A generation ago, players came up through long on-court apprenticeships. With college freshmen recruited straight into the majors for staggering salaries, under the glare of publicity, “You have to justify the money you’ve spent, so you give them a lot of court time, meaning you have to dumb down your game. These kids have great talent and ball skills, but they don’t know the game. The NBA is just chasing the ball around the court.”
In 1995, at age 53, he played with the Albany Golden Bears at the World senior Games in Utah, earning a bronze medal. But he hasn’t played in 10 years now. He lays his big hands on the table, displaying gnarled joints. “That one got snagged in Rick Barry’s jersey,” he says, launching a knuckle by knuckle autobiography.
In More Than a Game, Rosen describes his “Over-50 Defense”: “Instead of playing bone-on-bone, instead of staking my ego on every possession, I came to joyfully dance through the games as best I could. I admired and vocally applauded good plays made by both teams. Just as happy to lose as to win, I was thrilled just to be playing. At long last, when I was too vulnerable to play with hatred anymore, I finally got it right.”
This article appears in October 2007.
