Remembering St. George, an opera-loving basketball fan
…and mentor to a Hall of Famer
Fr. Raymond B. St. George, a French professor and band director at Providence College in the 1950s, loved opera music and was also a big basketball fan. St. George was also a great athlete in his own right—a 1990 inductee to the Providence College Hall of Fame as a baseball player (Class of 1950).
One of Fr. St. George’s students, a prominent Providence cager (Class of 1960) confided in the priest and soon developed a love of opera music himself.
Upon graduation, this brilliant economics major and budding star on the hardwood had a choice of three career paths:
Become a student-teacher at Providence with a promise of becoming a full professor once he attained his Master’s degree.
Continue to play ball, but in the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) industrial league. He’d also have to hold down a job with the company that sponsored the team. $9,500 per year. Decent money for 1960.
Suit up for the then-St. Louis Hawks in the fledgling National Basketball Association (NBA). Pay was worse than the AAU.
The teaching position at Providence troubled him. On the application, there were boxes for “race: “Negro” or “Caucasian.” His late father was black while his mother was an Irish-American Catholic. He didn’t want to deny either side of his heritage by checking either one of the boxes offered.
He decided to cross out both options and, instead, made up a new box. He labeled it, and checked it. “African American.”
It wouldn’t be for a couple more decades until the general public started using this term.
The AAU circuit offered better money than the NBA was, but he was also the first-round pick of the Hawks. However, the Association of 1960 lacked the prestige we’d see in later decades, and many even questioned the “pro” aspect of the league at that time.
Ultimately, he negotiated a signing bonus of $1,500 with the Hawks to get his pay commensurate with the AAU offer. His econ studies were starting to pay…
Early in his rookie season, he took over at starting point guard for the Hawks.
Prior to home games, and to the astonishment of his new teammates, he would often sneak away to the opera house located next to St. Louis Kiel Auditorium.
Fr. St. George made a mark on the young man who would never become an opera star, but would shine in basketball arenas for decades.
College life and the professional basketball ranks were a far cry from the tough streets in the “worst part of Brooklyn” where the fellow grew up. His father died tragically of a bleeding ulcer when he was 5 and he was thus "the man of the house."
His first job—delivering groceries—began at the age of 7. One of his customers in the late 1940s was a new arrival in Brooklyn. “I had no idea until he opened the door and I looked up and saw that it was Jackie.”
The great Jackie Robinson, star of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
“I was pretty stunned. But Jackie was great. He immediately thanked me for the groceries, then sat me down and asked if I ever got a chance to go to Dodger games. I told him that my brother and I would save up our money and when we had enough, we’d go sit in the bleachers. I’m sure that Jackie knew that every kid in Brooklyn did the same thing, but he took the time to sit down and listen to me—and by doing so made me feel important and became my role model. I saw the harsh way he was treated on the field, yet he never complained. So when things went wrong for me or I was mistreated, I’d tell myself that if Jackie didn’t complain about his situation, then I certainly couldn’t complain about mine.”
This star-struck youngster used these lessons to eventually fashion a career as a dominant—yet unorthodox, left-handed—point guard, inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1989.
His last season as a player was as a 37-year-old reserve for my hometown Portland Trail Blazers, a team for which he was also the head coach (player-coach).
He coached the Blazers for another season and was let go following the 1975-76 season.
Famously, in 1976-77, with Dr. Jack Ramsay at the helm, Portland won the World Championship.
But our friend had the last laugh, perhaps.
In 1977-78, he returned to coach the Seattle SuperSonics—for whom he had been a player-coach in the late 60s and early 70s—and took the Sonics to the Finals in his first season back.
In 1979, the Sonics brought the World Championship to the Emerald City.
He coached 4 more NBA teams and ultimately hung up his coaching shoes in 2005 after a stint with the Knicks. This was years after his 1998 induction into the Hall of Fame—once again—this time as a coach.
For good measure, he was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006.
He was also a two-time coach of gold-medal winning Olympic basketball squads—an assistant with the 1992 “Dream Team” and Head Coach of the 1996 team.
When the “Dream Team” was inducted to the Hall in 2010, it was his third time! There is only one three-time inductee in Springfield.
When the NBA celebrated its 50th Anniversary, he was named one of the top 10 coaches in NBA history and one of the top 50 players of all-time.
In 2022, for the league’s 75th Anniversary, he was noted as one of the top 15 coaches ever and one of the Association’s 75 best players of all-time.
Quite a career.
"I learned my basketball on the playgrounds of Brooklyn. Today, being a playground player is an insult. It means all you want to do is go one-on-one, it means your fundamentals stink and you don't understand the game. But the playgrounds I knew were tremendous training grounds."
Thus spake Leonard Randolph Wilkens aka Lenny Wilkens.
The 44th anniversary of Seattle’s only World Championship is on June 1st.
As always,
Brian O’Leary