Bill Raftery, 73, gets first chance at Final Four on TV

HOUSTON — The practice session was almost over. Mike Krzyzewski wandered over to press row, said hello, and then asked Bill Raftery: "Did my wife straighten you out?"

He was referring to a few moments earlier, as Duke went through light drills at NRG Stadium the day before a South region semifinal, when Mickie Krzyzewski had chatted with the CBS/Turner broadcast crew. Feigning injury, Raftery announced:

"She called me 'Rafferty.'"

Krzyzewski smiled, and said: "Don't you hate when people mispronounce your name?"

They both laughed — and this, it should be noted, is a default mode during interactions with Raftery — but later, noting a long relationship that goes back to when Krzyzewski was coaching at Army and Raftery was coaching at Seton Hall, the broadcaster got the last word.

"Back then, he was 'Kruh-shev-sky,'" said Raftery, delivering the needle with glee. "Now, he gets to Duke and it's 'Shuh-shef-sky' — so that's the background on that."

There's little chance that Raftery will be in the background this weekend in Indianapolis when he calls his first Final Four on TV — after calling it on radio for 23 years. Not with the potential for one of those familiar catchphrases to pop at any time, filling a big moment with infectious energy:

"Onions!"

His ascent to the top analyst's job at 73 has been greeted with nearly universal approval.

"He is beloved," says Jim Nantz, the longtime play-by-play announcer. "When you listen to him on the air, you can hear his smile."

Says Sean McManus, chairman of CBS Sports: "I think people feel he's not only talented, but he deserved it."

The question, then, is simple: Why hasn't this happened sooner?

Raftery was given the assignment only after Greg Anthony was arrested in January in Washington, D.C., and charged with soliciting a prostitute. If not for "unfortunate circumstances," as Raftery puts it, he'd still be sitting a few seats down on press row, calling the games on radio. And to hear him tell it, he'd be OK with that.

"I never coveted it or had any idea it would happen," he says.

Quite possibly, it means more to those who know Raftery — and in college hoops circles, that's just about everyone.

For 33 years, since leaving coaching to try broadcasting, Raftery has delighted college basketball audiences with upbeat commentary peppered with memorable catchphrases.

"Send it in!"

"To the tin!"

"With the kiss!"

"A little lingerie on the deck!"

Nantz says he's delighted to be reunited with Raftery. They worked together in the 1980s, both on games and in the studio. And nothing, Nantz says, has changed.

"He's the same guy he was," he says. "All the rest of the world has gotten a little bit older, but Raftery is this timeless guy who continues to see things very quickly, very crisp in his commentary, this whimsical approach to dropping in a quip here and there — I just laugh."

BIRTH OF CATCHPHRASES

Raftery says the catchphrases weren't manufactured, but "just popped out," probably products of his New Jersey upbringing — friends busting each other's chops, having fun — but nothing he'd ever said before.

"The bank shot, to me, was — what is a bank shot?" he says. "So that became 'the kiss.' My mom was a great lady, as all moms are. She never watched my games, but if I'd ever said 'jock' on the air, she'd have been shocked. So it became 'lingerie on the deck,' instead of saying, 'He faked him out of his jock.'"

Onions? Yeah, it means what everyone thinks it means, at least in part. Raftery first used it years ago, when the Nets' Kevin Edwards hit a 3-pointer to beat Orlando.

"The hard part is," Raftery says, "it doesn't sell if it is that. It's really about you — you know you can't use 'courage' because guys in the military have courage, and it's a basketball game. But there's a toughness that some of these kids have. And that word just sort of came out. … It really was just like intestinal fortitude or toughness. … It just fit."

There are, of course, more catchphrases. Raftery hears them wherever he goes, fans yelling them from the stands in arenas or in concourses at airports. To him, part of their appeal is their brevity. In big moments, it's a way to cede time to the play-by-play guy.

"You'll say, 'Mike (Krzyzewski) might run this for (Jahlil) Okafor,'" Raftery says. "So Jim describes it, and now Okafor makes this unbelievable shot. You only have that much of a window, a quick in and out."

In other words — or word: "ONIONS!"

LEAVING COACHING

You might say Raftery had some when he left behind the head-coaching position at Seton Hall only a few days before the 1981 season.

A three-sport athlete, Raftery set the state's all-time scoring record in 1959 at St. Cecilia's High School in Kearny, N.J.; it wasn't broken for 35 years. He played basketball at LaSalle, and earned a tryout with the New York Knicks. George Blaney, the longtime college assistant and head coach who grew up with Raftery, says only a back injury prevented Raftery from a long professional career.

"Billy has become such a wordsmith, I guess, in his communication and what he does," Blaney says. "But he makes people forget what a great player he was. And the fact he was a really good coach. … I just think he's a basketball treasure."

Raftery was 154-141 in 11 years at Seton Hall. But he'd been interested in broadcasting for years, and had said as much to Dave Gavitt, the Big East commissioner who also called games on TV. When Gavitt called with an offer, but told him he had only two days to decide — and guaranteed him only nine games — Raftery chose TV.

"It was the hardest thing I ever did, leaving those kids I'd recruited," Raftery says. "But it just worked out."

He ended up calling 32 games that first season, and kept adding more. CBS. ESPN. The New Jersey Nets. More recently, Fox Sports. For the first dozen years, he worked for a bank — keeping "a day job," he says — and kept his approach simple.

"I'm really enjoying this," he says. "I'm just gonna put my head down and do the best job I can."

And as the years went on and Raftery became a fixture on the college basketball landscape, he says he never spent much time thinking about calling games on the sport's biggest stage.

"I had fun all year doing whatever I was doing," he says. "It wasn't a goal to be in there (calling) the last game. And radio (for the Final Four) just happened. And now TV sort of just happened."

PHOTOS: NCAA TOURNAMENT CHEERLEADERS

Among the reasons, he says, that he didn't think the Final Four assignment would happen was Billy Packer's longtime hold on the job — Packer retired in 2008, after 27 years — and he hastens to add that Packer is a friend. But that brings up a story about Raftery and his wife Joan bumping into Packer at the Indianapolis airport before a Final Four sometime in the past.

Raftery offered Packer a ride, "knowing that he wouldn't pay for a cab." During a lull in the conversation, Joan Raftery asked Packer, "Which team do you coach?"

"Before he could answer, I said, 'All of them,'" Raftery says.

He laughs. But it points out a contrast in his style with other color analysts. McManus says the catchphrases sometimes obscure "a darn good basketball analyst." And Raftery's meticulous preparation is evident in a bulging black notebook, and especially several pages ripped from a legal pad and covered in a tight scrawl, including diagrams of plays and other curious notations. How much of it makes it on air? Who knows? But as Nantz says, you can hear the smile.

"I try to enjoy the game and enjoy the moment," Raftery says, "whether that's by an expression or a thought. And I think there's a lightness in the game, too. There are opportunities to present something in a light way. … I don't want to have the tendency to really overelaborate or drive it home. If you can do it nicely, hopefully people like it and it works."

TEAM OF THE FUTURE

Raftery's promotion has given CBS and Turner a way to take the spotlight off of Anthony's suspension. With Grant Hill replacing Steve Kerr, now coaching the NBA's Golden State Warriors, only Nantz returns from a year ago on the Final Four team. Although the trio has worked together only since the Big Ten tournament, there have been pretty of light moments.

"I can't remember laughing this much on the air," Nantz says. "I've enjoyed every single second of it. I call it the 'Magic of Raft.' He makes everyone better."

McManus, who says he like the different perspectives, especially between Raftery and Hill, the former Duke star who retired from the NBA in 2013, says the arrangement is not temporary.

"It's not looked at as a one-year stopgap," McManus says. "I hope this is the team for many years into the future."

Asked again what the promotion means to him, Raftery launches into one more story, telling about when he attended the 1976 Final Four in Philadelphia with his high school coach. They sneaked in, he said, and sat in the last row of the old Spectrum.

"They had birds flying around in the building," he says, "so I said, 'Coach, move your arms.' He said, 'Why?' I said, 'Just to let the pigeons know we're alive, so they don't (defecate) on us.'"

His point: "I was always a part of it."