Raveling's Record Rich With Impact

I'm not much for sending cards and flowers, as my wife can attest.

But I sent a get-well card to George Raveling as he struggled to survive in a Los Angeles hospital.

The gesture was probably more important to me than it was to him. He got 4,000 other cards. Georgetown Coach John Thompson ignored "no visitors allowed" signs to see him, and Nolan Richardson, the Arkansas coach, peppered him daily with faxes about college basketball. Bill Cosby called.

Newspaper people customarily throw a stiff-arm at personal relationships with those they write about. And I'd written about Raveling since 1972 when he showed up in Pullman as Washington State's new basketball coach.

He was the second African-American hired to coach a major-college basketball team, following Fred Snowden at Arizona by a month.

At WSU, a school where coaches come and go with the Greyhound bus, Raveling stayed 11 seasons, a quixotic black man in a wary white world.

He succeeded there not because he brought the school championships, because he didn't. He succeeded because he brought warmth and caring, visibility and credibility, humor and grace.

Raveling, 57, retired as the head basketball coach at USC yesterday, handling this one with a dignity I'd come to expect. He moved aside rather than ask his job be held open while he recuperated from his near-fatal September automobile accident.

He wouldn't hang around to hurt the chances of his longtime

assistant, Charlie Parker, to succeed.

"Although my health is improving," he said in a statement yesterday, "my present physical state does not allow me to work the sidelines in my accustomed manner.

"As I have previously stated, it has been my intention to conclude my college coaching career at the University of Southern California. The present state of my physical condition has brought me to this point sooner than I had expected."

In 22 seasons, Raveling won 336 games and lost 292. He didn't win national titles, as did his friends, Thompson and Richardson. The number that said most about him was the 4,000 cards he got in the hospital.

He'd touched that many people.

"What can I say," said Rod Commons, an assistant athletic director at WSU since 1976. "I loved George Raveling. For me, his leaving was the most difficult I've been through at Washington State."

Raveling was misunderstood. He became college basketball's court jester - animated, funny, outrageous - but also was dependable, loyal, inspiring.

He was characterized as a good recruiter of talent but a poor coach, when the opposite was true. He took Washington State to two NCAA tournaments and yet had only two players in his 11 seasons who made it to the NBA: Craig Ehlo and James Donaldson.

Raveling had been the top recruiter for Lefty Driesell at Maryland when he was named to replace Bob Greenwood at WSU. Greenwood had left a year after replacing Marv Harshman.

Mike Dolven was a senior on Raveling's first WSU team.

A caring person

"He was interested, even then, in kids as human beings," Dolven told the Los Angeles Times in 1986, "and it was my first experience with anybody worrying over what the kids were doing in class. I thought his personal involvement was extraordinary. He cared more about life than basketball."

During those first years in Pullman, Raveling subscribed to 150 newspapers and five comedy services. He read one self-improvement book after another and listened to tapes when he didn't have time to read. He wrote a column about college basketball carried by 12 newspapers.

He was informed. He was funny.

"Where I grew up," he'd say, "we used to steal things that began with A . . . a television, a radio, a watch."

He talked about WSU running a wishbone offense. "We shoot the ball, and wish it goes in."

Bringing respect to WSU

Raveling brought much-needed attention and respectability to WSU when it was changing football coaches every year. He also succeeded in the most difficult of circumstances, an urban black man in a rural white world.

"He cared about people in the department - he did when he was here and when he had gone," said Commons. "There was just no one quite like him."

Raveling would return your call from a telephone booth in a small town in Mississippi where he was recruiting. He would gladly share the information he had gleaned from newspapers. He seemed to care as much about your wife and kids as he did about what you would write about his team in the newspaper.

Raveling left WSU after the 1982-83 season for Iowa, where he couldn't stand the scrutiny. Three years later he was in Los Angeles at USC. He had wanted to end up at the University of Washington, to follow Harshman.

Raveling owned property in Seattle. "What other town is so perfect to recruit to," he said.

The Huskies hired Andy Russo instead.

Want to comment or pass on an idea? You can contact Blaine Newnham by voice mail at 464-2364.