Charley Rosen, a fiery former basketball player and minor-league coach who became the author of nearly 30 books, most of them about basketball, died on Saturday in Kingston, N.Y. He was 84.
The cause of his death, in a hospital near his home in nearby Accord, was thyroid cancer, Daia Gerson, his wife, said.
A 6-foot-8 basketball lifer who found a kindred spirit in the Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson, Mr. Rosen was described in 2007 as an “odd mix of street fighter and Bodhisattva, with a dash of vintage Deadhead” by Chronogram, a Hudson Valley media website.
To Mr. Rosen, basketball was the best of all sports. He listed the reasons in a column for the news website Hudson Valley One in 2019: “The almost continuous action. The exquisite balance between offense and defense. Players having to make so many decisions on the run. Whereas catchers don’t pitch, defensive tackles don’t throw forward passes, every hooper at just about every level of competition needs a certain mastery of all the basic skills — shooting, dribbling, passing and catching passes, cutting, and so on.”
Mr. Rosen was a star center at Hunter College, a semipro player and the coach of four teams in the Continental Basketball Association. He fictionalized his C.B.A. coaching experience in a novel, “The Cockroach Basketball League” (1992).
His other books included the novel “Have Jump Shot, Will Travel” (1975); “Crazy Basketball: A Life In and Out of Bounds” (2011), a memoir largely about his journeyman experience in the C.B.A.; and “The First Tip-Off: The Incredible Story of the Birth of the NBA” (2008). He collaborated with Mr. Jackson on two books with almost identical titles: “Maverick: More Than a Game” (1975), an autobiography, and “More Than a Game” (2001), a memoir by both men, told in alternating chapters, mixed with coaching philosophy, specifically Mr. Jackson’s use of the triangle offense.
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The post Charley Rosen, Prolific Writer of Basketball Books, Dies at 84 appeared first on New York Times.
