Dave Boling: Washington State coaching icon George Raveling continues to offer wise advice when it comes to college athletics
College sports, having lost their way, need George Raveling more than ever.
It might require a visionary like Raveling to renew the conscience, spirit, and ideals that have gone missing.
Considering that he just turned 87, we better learn from him while we still can.
With extreme graciousness, Raveling answered a recent inquiry for a brief phone interview for background on a story about a former Washington State basketball player with whom he’d been very close.
His answers were so thorough and heartfelt, and he was going so well, that he kept weaving stories without prompt.
He talked for half an hour, and it became clear that Raveling is still an impressive orator, deep thinker, innovator, and activist. And his recollections remain strong of his years as an influential and pioneering basketball coach, as well as an international ambassador for the game.
He recounted his love for WSU and Pullman, and his biggest mistake as a coach (not landing Spokane’s John Stockton). And he gave examples of the life-long relationships that are possible when coaches and players share common space in their minds and hearts.
It was a privilege to be given his time. So, in the final minute, I asked: What’s wrong with college sports?
His answer wasn’t specific nor curative, but he saw the ways in which the environment has changed after court orders turned college athletes into professionals, with even fewer regulations.
And that’s the place to start as we review the impact George Raveling had on the game of basketball – from Pullman, Washington, to all points around the globe.
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“We’re teaching kids the wrong values,” Raveling said. “It’s all about money. Sports have become driven, insanely, by money. I worry about these kids when they become adults.”
Some athletes collect millions of dollars, and change schools several times, sometimes playing into their mid-20s – while the connection between athletics and academics seems abandoned.
“I coached during a time when getting an education was important. Today, you don’t even hear any academic discussions,” Raveling said, noticing that classwork seems a quaint and forgotten concept.
Further, Raveling said he sees no one willing or able to step up to discover solutions.
“The biggest thing with college athletics is the same as (the problems) globally – we lack courageous leadership,” he said. “I say ‘courageous’ leadership because it takes courage to stand up and make the right decisions and advocate for the right reasons, and be willing to do the right thing at almost any cost.”
Still intellectually curious, Raveling has tried to pinpoint the core qualities of leadership, asking friends to provide lists of great contemporary leaders, not including the business arena, in which money is too-commonly used as the yardstick.
“No one has yet been able to get to five (on a list),” he said.
Raveling recalled when recruiting was not a matter of name-image-likeness financial opportunities.
“I always felt I had to have better relationships with the players,” he said. “If it’s only about winning and losing, hell, you can go anywhere. I had a responsibility to those players’ parents to be more than a coach. I felt I had to be a leader and a role model. I’m not trying to be self-serving with this, but I saw that as the responsibility of the position.”
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Given his retirement from coaching came 30 years ago, it’s worth retracing Raveling’s roots.
As a player, George Raveling was a sensational rebounder. He pulled down 29 in one game against Seton Hall in the 1960 season, and is still on some of Villanova’s top 10 lists more than 60 years after playing.
That should tell you a great deal about Raveling. Rebounding is a function of desire —aggressiveness directed by anticipation, fueled by a hunger for the ball. It’s an effort that takes a miss and turns it into a second chance – a theme in Raveling’s life.
Born in Washington, D.C., Raveling lost his father, a horse trainer, to a heart attack when George was 9. Soon after, his mother suffered what was labeled a “nervous breakdown” and was institutionalized. He was sent to St. Michael’s, a Catholic home for boys near Scranton, Penn.
Villanova offered Raveling a future. He responded by becoming a beast on the boards, averaging 16 per game as a junior.
In a definitive Raveling story by Vince Devlin in the Spokesman-Review in 1983, Raveling recalled being the first Black basketball player to perform in West Virginia’s home gym. At one point, Raveling closed in on a Mountaineer guard breaking toward the basket with the ball.
His punishing foul at the rim laid out the opposing player. Realizing the player he had decked was All-American Jerry West, Raveling said he quickly hoped he hadn’t caused too much damage in such a hostile environment.
For him, the moment wasn’t about being a racial pioneer as much as just playing the game with the aggressiveness he felt it deserved. But it was an example of how Raveling would come to be connected with so many high-profile figures, and play a part of pivotal moments in history.
Several years later, as an assistant at Villanova, Raveling and a friend attended the 1963 March on Washington. They talked their way into duties providing security on the podium for speakers, leading Raveling to be positioned near Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during his “I Have a Dream” speech.
As the historic gathering cheered, King folded up his typed notes and walked toward Raveling, who asked if he could have it as a souvenir. King acceded, and Raveling held onto the historic document without mentioning it until an off-handed comment to a reporter in his first season coaching at Iowa led to its rediscovery.
Raveling turned down million-dollar offers for the three pages of the speech, and they are now displayed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
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“So much of my adult life started in Pullman, Washington,” Raveling said. “Think about this, Washington State took a helluva chance when they hired me. I had no head-coaching experience.”
But as an assistant at Villanova, and then Maryland (under Lefty Driesell), Raveling had earned a reputation as a convincing recruiter. He had been the first Black assistant in the Atlantic Coast Conference. But his first two interviews for head coaching jobs ended without offers.
“I’m from the East. I’m an African-American. But Washington State took a gamble on me. Ray Nagel (athletic director) and Dr. (Glenn) Terrell (WSU president) were committed to me,” Raveling said. “My success was due to their loyalty.”
It was 1972, and Raveling was the first Black coach in the Pacific-8 Conference.
“At the time, it was the Pac-8, and of the eight coaches, 50 percent are in the Hall of Fame today,” Raveling said, adding himself to UCLA’s John Wooden, Washington’s Marv Harshman and Oregon State’s Ralph Miller.
“It was a powerhouse basketball conference in that historic framework,” Raveling said. “As good of a basketball conference as there was anywhere in the United States.”
The Cougars, however, were considered one of the weaker programs. WSU had been to only one NCAA Tournament in its history, in 1941. And a scant total of three Black players had competed for the Cougars before Raveling’s arrival.
On the day he was hired, Raveling was asked about the challenges of recruiting to WSU by Spokane columnist Harry Missildine. “People who say you can’t recruit at WSU must be people who like to deal in negatives. I deal in positives,” Raveling said. “The test of a man is what he can do, not how many excuses he can give you why he can’t do it.”
Race, Raveling said, “was never, ever, an issue at Washington State.”
Raveling’s eventual success, leading the Cougars to two NCAA Tournaments, were part of his acceptance in the region, but his engaging personality was probably more important.
Guard Terry Kelly, a Gonzaga Prep product and part of Raveling’s first NCAA team in 1980, remembered his coach’s infectious personality.
“I felt Raveling’s energy, so did all the news reporters that came down. All those guys felt it; they were giddy when they were around Raveling,” Kelly said. He remembers walking with Raveling out of the gym after practice and his stopping to engage the custodian. “The way coach greeted him, he just lit up. I thought, wow, that’s the way you treat people. He was like that with everybody.”
Coach Jim Walden, in his 2005 book on Cougar football, recalled how Raveling used humor to charm boosters in the homogeneously Caucasian Palouse. Walden said Raveling told a gathering that he had heard some fans suggest they needed more “white guys” on the team, “so this year, I went out and recruited Roosevelt White and Willie White.”
Cheers and laughter. Raveling had them in his pocket.
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WSU and Spokane stories started coming back to Raveling, and one of his first was “the biggest mistake I ever made in coaching.”
Spokane Chevy dealer Jerry Camp, who supplied Raveling with his comp car, made only one request of the coach during his time in Pullman.
“He asked me to come up and take a look at (Gonzaga Prep’s) John Stockton,” Raveling recalled. Raveling had gotten Kelly out of G-Prep, but “for some reason, I didn’t think this (Stockton) kid from Spokane was good enough to play at the time. I wasn’t punctual about seeing him and it bothered Jerry, who called me another time. He said, ‘I never asked you to do anything before, but you’ve got to drive up and watch him’.”
About five minutes into the game, Raveling understood. He’d blown it. “I realized I made the biggest mistake of my career. I should have been up there and worked harder. He had even gone to the Cougar Cage Camp and wanted to go to Washington State. I tried to make up for it, but I think his dad thought, rightfully so, that if I really wanted him, I’d have been up there more aggressively.”
Stockton, of course, became a Hall of Fame professional player.
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As early as 1977, Raveling was giving off hints that college basketball might not be a broad enough environment for him.
He told Charlie Van Sickel of the Spokane Chronicle: “Many of the things that interest me the most are outside the walls of athletics. Athletics is strictly a vehicle that can move me along the road of life and help me expand as a person until I find that special area where I can make a special contribution.”
After leaving WSU, he coached three seasons at Iowa and eight more at USC. He assisted head coaches Bob Knight on the 1984 Olympic men’s team, and John Thompson on the 1988 Olympic team.
A long post-coaching career as an executive with Nike followed, as he helped build the shoe company’s basketball presence around the world.
Raveling was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015.
Over 22 seasons, his teams’ win percentage was a solid .533. They never won a conference title, and advanced to the NCAAs six times, with a 2-6 record. Hall of Fame-worthy? Raveling’s records short-sell his impact.
In a story on Raveling in the Sports Business Journal in 2017, Hall-of-Fame player Charles Barkley was quoted: “Coach Rav is like my grandfather. He’s the ‘Godfather’ for all the brothers playing basketball.”
And former USA basketball chairman Jerry Colangelo added: “If ever someone could be looked upon as a world ambassador for basketball, that’s George.”
In his Hall of Fame speech in 2015, Raveling recalled the time when, at age 13, he held a basketball and felt empowered by it.
You can picture that moment, being lifted from what seemed like a Dickensian youth, living in an open dorm with 80 other hardscrabble boys in search of identities. His future could have gone in any direction, but no one could imagine the course of Raveling’s journey.
The game would take him around the world, and allow him to influence the lives of the famed and gifted. But he continued to treat the janitors and the night watchmen with an equal respect and deference. And he repaid his debt to the game many times over with the impact he made over decades across the globe.
Yes, basketball was his vehicle. But he was always the driver. And there hasn’t been another like him.