When Charley Rosen died in September 2025 at 84, tributes for the former basketball star, coach, sports chronicler, and best-selling novelist, lit up media scoreboards like three-point shots at the buzzer. Richard Sandomir’s New York Times obituary called him “fiery.” Dave Hoekstra described Rosen as a “basketball gypsy with a genuine soul.” Perhaps the warmest recollection came from former basketball player Tamir Goodman — the onetime “Jewish Jordan” — who called Rosen a dear friend. Rosen gave him a boost in a documentary about Goodman’s quest to remain an Orthodox Jew in professional basketball. “Charley was an extraordinary person and a talented author who will be deeply missed especially in the basketball community,” Goodman wrote on social media.
The 6’8” Rosen found basketball as a tall and gawky kid in the Bronx in the 1950s and became a star at Hunter College. He knocked around as a player and coach in minor hoops leagues until he found his voice as a writer. His nearly 30 volumes of basketball history included explorations of the central role Jews played in the pro game’s earliest days, the infamous early 1950s college basketball betting scandals, and the “Zen” of the game with kindred spirit and longtime friend Phil Jackson, a onetime star player who became a famed NBA coach. Rosen also spun fictional tales about the game, two of which, “Barney Polan’s Game” and “The House of Moses All-Stars” received “Notable Books” recognition by the Times.
Rosen’s presumably final volume, “Dribbling A Basketball On The Road To Damascus,” a coming-of-age tale that came out a month after his death, blends memoir, elements of the classic “point-shaving” scandal, and life in mid-century Jewish New York. His other novels drew on his knowledge of the game, but this one draws directly on the author’s life. The first-person narrator, Charles “Chazz” Klein, is a stand-in for Rosen. Descriptions of his dysfunctional home life — frequent beatings by an angty, in-pain, and invalided father and little warmth from an overburdened mother — offer heartbreaking glimpses of mid-century working class Jewish life in New York. The boy is contemptuous of his Jewish identity and is painfully ignorant of its teachings, even as he suffers from playground antisemitism and Nazism and World War II hover in the wings.
The book offers two rare bright spots in his narrator’s childhood. Rosen’s warm recounting of old-time New York sidewalk sports like stickball and stoopball were catnip to me, a onetime Brooklyn street kid. One of the book’s few sympathetic characters is an adult Black man who takes the awkward but tall narrator under his wing and teaches him the ins and outs of New York City street basketball. The boy blossoms as a player and enters a fictional Metropolitan University on a scholarship. There, too, his disdain for inhumane and ill-educated coaches comes through. The story takes an even darker tone when he accepts a proposal to “shave points” in an upcoming basketball tournament, by deliberately playing badly enough to win a game by less than the betting line. The underdog team will still lose but will do so by a close enough margin that gamblers in the know will win big by betting on them. To his credit, Rosen does not let his own doppelganger off the hook. The narrator initially attempts to justify his actions by telling himself his team will still win and the one teammate who is his friend is desperately in need of the money — which he is not. When the scheme unravels and players and coaches are indicted, the narrator escapes the legal net, but it remains over his head for years, as future scandals rake up the still smoldering coals of his college errors.
One key difference between Charley Rosen and “Chazz” Klein is that the narrator becomes a successful player in the NBA’s early days. It’s an era that Rosen explored in nonfiction, and his descriptions of life for players at the league’s beginning offer tantalizing tidbits of its struggles. Given that Klein is a one-for-one stand-in for the author, Rosen’s failure to make the bigtime emerges as one of his greatest regrets.
Rosen’s narrator suffers numerous unsuccessful romantic involvements and does not reach a state of composure until the book’s final pages. He reaches a satori of sorts when he retires to a tiny cabin in upstate New York and fills his life with reading and watching sports. But the “Damascene conversion” arrives too late and too abruptly to satisfy. The narrator’s ending is a noisy and raggedy rollercoaster which jerks the reader from his seat.
One of the book’s strengths is the cold lens Rosen focuses on his lonely and unhappy childhood. He rubs no Vaseline on its edge nor softens his harsh black and white snapshots with sepia toning. He suffers indignities in school and on the playground from cruel classmates. Even though the story seems to be told from the distance of middle age, his bitterness comes through. He does not forgive adult or child pettiness.
For all its good points, the book suffers from inelegant writing, gratuitous use of rough street language, confusing chronology, and anachronisms that take the reader out of the story. One jarring example: a YMCA gym rat tells another the only way they could win an upcoming game would be by bringing Bill Russell in as a ringer. But the Celtics great did not enter the NBA until 1956, and the scene is set well before that.
If Rosen had been daring, he could have made his book more dramatic and challenging by deeper mining of his life and skipping the hoops scandals, which he had already addressed. Autobiographical details such as parents who were active Communist Party members, three marriages, and long association with the singular Jackson, could have yielded a more thoughtful and meaningful volume.
Former journalist Alan D. Abbey is a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a regular reviewer of books for numerous publications. He is writing a novel of first century CE Roman Judaea, much of which is set at locations within walking distance of his Jerusalem home.
