Charley Rosen, a fiery former basketball player and minor-league coach who became a best-selling 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 in New York, 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.
In 1994, The Wall Street Journal called Mr. Rosen basketball’s “foremost literary chronicler.”
Two of Mr. Rosen’s novels made The New York Times’s best-seller list and were named Times notable books of the year: “The House of Moses All-Stars” (1996), about a touring Jewish basketball team in 1936 that barnstorms the country in a hearse with a Star of David painted on the side, and “Barney Polan’s Game: A Novel of the 1951 College Basketball Scandals” (1998), about the point-shaving schemes that ensnared players from seven schools, including the City College of New York. It was a fictional treatment of a subject that he had tackled as history in “Scandals of ’51: How the Gamblers Almost Killed College Basketball” (1978).
“Rosen the novelist makes clear what Rosen the historian could only suggest: the fog of moral grayness that made the scandals possible,” Allen Barra wrote about “Barney Polan’s Game” in The New York Times Book Review.
After coaching the Bard College men’s basketball team to a 1-16 record in 1979-80, Mr. Rosen chronicled the season in “Players and Pretenders: The Basketball Team That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” (1981), which People magazine called a “funny, tender ‘Zen and the Art of Basketball Losing.’”
“Writing is Charley’s gift to basketball,” Mr. Jackson told The Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y., in 2005. In turn, Mr. Rosen became a go-to source for reporters eager to hear about his shared history with Mr. Jackson in the C.B.A. He also defended his friend’s stint as the president of the New York Knicks from 2014 to 2017, which ended in failure — a sharp contrast to Mr. Jackson’s tenures with the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers, which resulted in a combined 11 N.B.A. championships.
Charles Elliot Rosen was born on Jan. 18, 1941, in the Bronx. His father, Benjamin, a tailor, was chronically ill and died when Charley was 15. His mother, Pearl (Kurtz) Rosen, was a bookkeeper for a community house. His parents, members of the Communist Party, handed out leaflets at subway and bus stations and held meetings of what Mr. Rosen called a Communist “cell” in their apartment.
He began playing basketball at 9, grew more serious about it when he was 13 and, as a senior at Theodore Roosevelt High School, made the varsity team. As a freshman center at Hunter College, he recalled in “Crazy Basketball,” he “overcompensated for my basic shyness and confusion by being mindlessly aggressive.”
His skills improved. When he graduated in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education, he held school records for points and rebounds (and is still in the top 10 in those categories).
He played briefly for the Scranton Miners of the Eastern Basketball League; coached the boys’ basketball team at a junior high school in Middletown; earned a master’s degree in English from Hofstra University in 1970; and wrote articles for magazines.
On assignment for Sport magazine, he attended a postgame party in 1973 at a loft above an auto repair shop in Manhattan where Mr. Jackson, who was then playing for the Knicks, was living. Beneath Mr. Jackson’s “peaceful hippie smile,” Mr. Rosen wrote in “More Than a Game,” he was a relentless competitor but “was never possessed by the Vince Lombardi ethic that equated losing with dying.”
They developed a quick friendship and played hundreds of one-on-one games at the Y.M.C.A. in Woodstock, N.Y., where they both lived for a time. In 1983, Mr. Jackson hired Mr. Rosen as his assistant coach with the Albany Patroons of the C.B.A.
After working with Mr. Jackson for three years, Mr. Rosen went on to coach four teams: the Savannah (Ga.) Spirits (for one year); the Rockford (Ill.) Lightning (for three seasons, including 1989, when they were swept in the finals); the Oklahoma City Cavalry (one season); and the Patroons (not quite one season; he was fired before it ended).
“In truth,” he wrote, “I wasn’t anything more than a fairly good C.B.A. coach.”
As a coach, Mr. Rosen was intense to the point of wildness. He was known for taunting referees and for accumulating so many technical fouls in one season that the league fined him $1,700 (that’s 68 technicals at a cost of $25 each).
In 1989, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he took a swing at a rival coach whom he accused of telling the opposing team to play a full-court press late in a game that was already in hand. Mr. Rosen was arrested for assault and resisting arrest and spent an hour in a jail cell until players chipped in for his $400 bail. He conceded that he had been out of control.
“What I did was indefensible,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1991. “I got caught up in all that macho B.S., that basketball is life and death.”
He would coach again — the SUNY New Paltz Hawks women’s basketball team, from 1993 to 1995 — but by then his focus had turned to writing books.
In later years, he wrote analyses of basketball on the Fox Sports and HoopsHype websites.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Rosen is survived by a daughter, Alexandra Rosen, and a son, Darrell Rosen, from his marriage to Susan Weiss, which ended in divorce; a stepdaughter, Oona Edmands; a stepson, Theo Edmands; several grandchildren; and a sister, Selma Leff. His marriage to Barbara Chesneau, a swimmer whom he met when they were athletes for the United States at the Maccabiah Games in Israel — she won a gold medal in swimming and he won a gold medal as a member of the basketball team — also ended in divorce.
Mr. Rosen returned to the subject of point-shaving in “The Wizard of Odds: How Jack Molinas Almost Destroyed the Game of Basketball” (2001), the story of a talented former college and N.B.A. player who fixed college games between 1957 and 1961.
Mr. Molinas’s brother, Julie, had contacted Mr. Rosen, impressed with his previous books about the college scandals, and offered him the use of scrapbooks, letters, photographs and transcripts of interviews for a prospective biography.
Mr. Rosen could not refuse. Early in the book, he wrote, “For Jack Molinas, the real game was power — taming the unknown, manipulating people, odds and possibilities, making the future dance to his own secret music.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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