Charley Rosen has played and coached basketball for nearly 50 years. He played in the old Eastern League, he was an assistant coach under Phil Jackson with the Albany Patroons, and later coached several CBA teams – including, in 1991-92, the Patroons. He is currently an analyst for Fox Sports, and from time to time he has written several well-acclaimed basketball books, both historical (The Great Molinas), and fictional (Have Jump Shot Will Travel, The Cockroach Basketball League).
His new book, Crazy Basketball: A Life In and Out of Bounds (University of Nebraska Press), is his autobiography of his years in minor league hoops. It features his time as a member of the Scranton Miners (Eastern League), a time in which, for his entire six game career, he saw the darker side of minor league hoops – a player carrying a gun in his gym bag; other players that were trapped in the minor leagues because their point-shaving tactics in college blocked them from the NBA.
On a personal note, I was more interested in reading his observations of his time with the Albany Patroons. In Crazy Basketball, Rosen included the article he wrote for Sport magazine on the 1983-84 Patroons’ championship season, in which he chronicled, day by day, the ups and downs of a team with such well-remembered names as Derrick Rowland, Lowes Moore, Kenny Natt, Penny Elliott and Andre Gaddy. And yes, this was the team that gave Phil Jackson his first professional coaching championship. Nice to see that Phil picked up about 10 more rings after he left the Patroons.
There are other anecdotes about life in the CBA. When coaching against the Quad City Thunder, he commented that the building they played in, Wharton Field House in Moline, Ill, was so small, it was like playing basketball in a telephone booth. With that, the Thunder fans kept razzing Rosen every time his team visited their arena; they held up phones and said, “It’s for you, Charley.”
The book recalls Rosen’s return to the Patroons as their head coach for the 1991-92 season; Siena hoops fans won’t be happy to read page 264, where Rosen says that Marc Brown “couldn’t defend a fire hydrant and couldn’t make a shot on the move.” Rosen is also critical of his own time as Patroons head coach, and also recalls his firing after 41 games.
If you’re a hardcore minor league hoops fan like me, you may notice some typos in the book – mostly team nicknames (for example, Rosen references the Oklahoma City Thunder at one point, mixing up the current NBA franchise with the CBA’s Oklahoma City Cavalry; he also turns the Quad City Thunder into the Tri-City Thunder, mixing them up with the Tri-City Chinook that played in the league at that same time). But if you overlook these small things, you will be amazed by Rosen’s recall of the off-the-wall antics of minor league hoops.
Chuck The Writer 