George Raveling, a pioneering Black college basketball coach and an executive at Nike who was instrumental in bringing Michael Jordan to the company, died on Monday. He was 88.
Mr. Raveling had cancer, his family said on social media.
George Henry Raveling was born on June 27, 1937, in a segregated hospital in Washington, D.C. Garfield Hospital, he wrote in an account of his life on his website, “had five floors, and four of them were for white people. Black people had to enter from the back.”
He grew up in Philadelphia, the son of a horse trainer. “At age 9, my father passed away, and by 13, my mother had a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized for the rest of her life,” he wrote.
Raised by his grandmother, George was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Pennsylvania, St. Michael’s School for Boys. When he arrived at Villanova to play college basketball, there were only 10 Black students at the college.
After graduating and working briefly as a marketing analyst for Sun Oil Company (later Sunoco), he turned back to basketball, becoming an assistant coach at Villanova. He then moved to the University of Maryland, becoming the first Black assistant coach at a college in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
He became the head coach at Washington State in 1972 — the first Black head coach at a school in the Western conference, which was then known as the Pac-8.
He was a head coach for the next 22 seasons. After 11 years at Washington State and three at Iowa, he moved to the University of Southern California in 1986, where he was known as a player’s coach, letting the team vote on everything from what defense to play to the color of their sneakers.
One of the best teams of his career was the 1991-92 U.S.C. team, starring the quirky future N.B.A. player Harold Miner, who liked rubbing his nose on things — walls, the basketball, his coach’s shoulder — and averaged 26 points a game. The team was 24-6 and a No. 2 seed in the N.C.A.A. tournament, but it was upset in the second round by Georgia Tech.
Mr. Raveling was also an assistant on the United States Olympic team in 1984. The team featured Mr. Jordan and Patrick Ewing, and won the gold medal.
In 1994, Mr. Raveling was in a car crash near the U.S.C. campus. He fractured nine ribs and his collarbone and pelvis. After his recovery, he said he did not have the urge to coach again.
“When older coaches came in, it was with the idea that your main job was to coach,” he told The New York Times the following year. “Today, most of your responsibilities are with the spillover from societal problems: drugs, agents, academics, alcohol, family problems. Now, the easiest part is coaching.”
How did he cope with that? “I didn’t,” he said.
He finished his coaching career with a 335-293 record and made six trips to the N.C.A.A. tournament, finishing with a record of 2-6.
He briefly worked as a television basketball announcer before joining Nike in 1996, first as director of grass roots basketball, then as director of international basketball.
He played a key role in signing Mr. Jordan, a move that helped invigorate the Nike brand. Mr. Raveling was close to Mr. Jordan after coaching him in the Olympics, and began lobbying him to join Nike. But Mr. Jordan was an Adidas fan.
In the end, Nike won Mr. Jordan over by planning a new idea: a signature shoe for him known as the Air Jordan. In the 2023 film “Air” about Mr. Jordan’s signing, Mr. Raveling was portrayed by Marlon Wayans. According to Mr. Raveling, Mr. Jordan gave Ben Affleck, the film’s director, his blessing to make the film on the conditions that Mr. Raveling appear in the movie and that Mr. Jordan’s mother be played by Viola Davis.
“I signed with Nike because of George, and without him there would be no Air Jordan,” Mr. Jordan said in a statement after Mr. Raveling’s death.
Mr. Raveling was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015. He is survived by his wife, Delores; his son, Mark; his daughter, Litisha Hall; and his grandchildren.
In 1963, Mr. Raveling attended the March on Washington led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Because of his height — he was 6 feet 6 inches — Mr. Raveling was recruited from the crowd to work security, and wound up asking Dr. King for the typed pages from which he read his famed “I Have a Dream” speech.
Mr. Raveling hung on to them, and for many years displayed them framed on his wall. In 2021, after declining offers in the millions of dollars, he donated the pages to his alma mater, Villanova.
Victor Mather, who has been a reporter and editor at The Times for 25 years, covers sports and breaking news.
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