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- Raftery was a three-sport star in high school and a New York Knicks draft pick before becoming America’s color commentator, with catch-phrases like “onions!” and “Send it in, Jerome!”
- CBS analyst Bill Raftery’s life story includes nuns and onions and the Roaring ’20s, and bar-hopping with Bill Murray. And it’s almost all true.
- Raftery will work his eighth Final Four in Indianapolis, and says: “They should have it there every year.”
INDIANAPOLIS – CBS color analyst Bill Raftery comes to the 2026 Final Four in Indianapolis fresh off another of Bill Raftery moment, another timeless call of a timeless basketball moment.
This was the East Region championship game this past Sunday, Duke leading UConn, and Duke has the ball with eight seconds left, now seven, now six, and Duke is going break the UConn press and win the game until something happens. The Huskies tip the pass, steal it, and now the ball is in the hands of Braylon Mullins, the sweet-shooting UConn freshman from Greenfield. It’s all happening so fast, but we’ll always have the video of Mullins’ 35-footer that sent the Huskies to the Final Four.
And we’ll have Raftery’s benediction.
“Utterly impossible,” he says, softly, but not for several seconds. First he steps out of the way, as the best color analysts do, allowing play-by-play man Ian Eagle to describe the play in an explosion of energy and emotion.
“March means drama!” Eagle shouts.
Then, nothing. At the scorer’s table at the Capital One Arena in Washington D.C., Raftery and co-analyst Grant Hill are stunned silent. There is a camera angle of them just sitting there, bewildered, stunned – a reaction shared by millions of us, watching on CBS – before Raftery comes to life, putting the moment into his unique perspective.
“The deflection, the reaction, and then the major onions out of Indiana,” he says of the 2025 Mr. Basketball from Greenfield-Central. “They all can shoot. Nylon! From deep. Astounding.”
The call is only days old, but like Mullins’ shot – Raftery’s words buoyed by the shot, or perhaps vice versa – it will become timeless. It will become, like Bill Raftery, ageless.
Well, this is a story about Bill Raftery, the poet laureate of college basketball, so words matter. Precision is paramount, so let’s acknowledge that Bill Raftery does, in fact, have an age. And his age is everywhere – on his Wikipedia page, his Basketball-Reference.com page and in almost every story written about him these days, all of them getting around to the question people always ask:
How long are you going to do this?
Because Bill Raftery is 82.
“I’m a little older than that,” he says.
But wait. Your age is everywhere, I tell him – on Wiki, on Basketball-Reference.com, in almost every story written about you. Your Basketball-Reference page even has your age when you were a record-setting scorer in high school and then at La Salle. You were 19 at La Salle in 1963. You’re 82 now. The math adds up.
“Listen,” he says, “the age thing they did – they put it in years ago, and I never corrected it. I figured, what the hell?”
So you’re…
“So I’m older than everyone’s saying,” he says, then goes quiet. He doesn’t elaborate. Sometimes, as Raftery has learned over the years – as his Braylon Mullins call showed, and as his Irish-American mom insisted – silence is better.
Sometimes, it’s what you don’t say.
Bill Raftery, big-time La Salle scorer
The whole thing isn’t a lie, by the way. The stories about the Irish dance hall during the Roaring ‘20s and that baseball glove in 1962? The debut of his legendary call, “Onions,” coming in an NBA game? Closing down that bar with Bill Murray? True stories, all of them.
Only his age is incorrect, and Raftery is quick to say he has never lied about his age. He doesn’t know where the wrong number got its start – Wikipedia, Basketball-Reference, a reporter somewhere back in the day – but he didn’t do it.
“I didn’t exaggerate or lie,” he says. “Everywhere I’ve worked, they’ve known my age. And medicine, right? You have to get your medicine. You tell them your age, they give you your medicine. You can’t lie about it.”
So you’re not 82, I’m telling Raftery. You’ve got to be close – 83?
“I’m a little older than that, even,” he says.
Never mind that. And anyway, everything else about the Bill Raftery story, as unlikely as it is, stands up. He really did graduate from St. Cecila in Kearny, N.J., in 1959 with a state-record 2,193 points. He really did set the freshman scoring record at La Salle (370) before going to the varsity and lighting it up for 17.8 ppg in 1961.
He really did play soccer and baseball in high school, a center-midfielder and pitcher who earned all-state in all three sports (basketball too). Ask him for a baseball story, and you get this:
“Once we were playing in the Babe Ruth League,” he’s telling me by phone from his home in Florida, catching his breath between Washington D.C. and Indianapolis, only now he’s interrupting himself to ask a question:
“Who gave up that home run to Hank Aaron?”
No. 715? I’m thinking. A name occurs to me: Al Downing?
“Right, Al Downing,” he says. “I lost the (Babe Ruth) state title game to Al Downing 2-1 for the right to go to nationals. We were playing in Rahway. They were from Trenton. I got our only hit – swung hard, it hit the top of the bat, and as (Downing) went to get it, it spun farther away from him. I beat it out, but I realized then: I don’t think this game is for you.”
Bill Raftery’s untold story: baseball, Knicks, Ireland
Raftery played baseball for one year at La Salle. Ask him about it, and this is what you get.
“I pitched a few games poorly, then became the entertainment chairman for the team,” he says. “I do remember one time I was on the bench, talking, and Gene McDonnell our coach hollered my name – so I grabbed my glove and ran onto the field.”
Here comes the punch line.
“Unfortunately, we were up to bat. What happened was one of our guys hit a line drive that hit the first-base coach, and they wanted me to be the first-base coach. I’m out there with my glove, looking like a boob.”
No, here comes the punch line.
“Lenny Toff, who was an NBA referee, was also the umpire that day. He goes, ‘Hey, Billy – stick to basketball.’”
That’s how it happened, right here in America, but only because Raftery’s parents had come over decades earlier from Roscommon, Ireland. This was shortly after World War I, with the European political landscape shifting and many Irish families looking for something else and finding it in America. His parents passed through Ellis Island three years apart before settling in New Jersey.
“They met at an Irish dance hall,” Raftery says. “I’m sure there was beer involved.”
Frank and Margaret – “Frank and Mother,” as Raftery refers to them – had three kids. As you may have noticed from their youngest, Bill, the Raftery kids were taught not to talk themselves up … or to put others down.
“That was Mother’s doing,” he says. “You weren’t permitted to say anything about anybody. ‘But Mom, he beat me up at the playground!’ And she would say, ‘That’s enough, he’s a little diff.’ You don’t get in the gutter when you say ‘a little diff.’ There’s a guy you don’t want hang with – he’s a little diff. It covers all the spectrum, you know?”
As for his dad?
“Frank came over in 1921. The Irish need not apply in those days, you know? There was a problem getting jobs,” Raftery says, “but unions were hiring different ethnic people. He passed the state test to become a stationary engineer – heating and A/C, these days – and he’d have different Irish people, young guys, in the house and he would teach them how to pass the test. He wasn’t getting paid. It was just something he would do for somebody’s nephew or a friend’s son. He was a hard worker, kind, never pushy. Just a nice man.”
Ask Raftery about his basketball career, and he’ll acknowledge what you’ve learned – the points, the records – but he’ll volunteer only how it ended:
“I was the 800th pick for the New York Knicks,” he says, exaggerating slightly, of the 1963 NBA Draft – when the Knicks selected him next-to-last, 82nd overall, in the 14th round. “I was the director of recreation for Kearny and trying out for the Knicks. I could keep both jobs if I made it. I went to summer camp and was invited back to fall camp and was cut there. I got home and Mother said, ‘What are you doing home?’ I got cut. She says, ‘Well, too bad about you – go get a job.”
“My mother was a sweetheart. She was just blunt.”
Words matter. The fewer the better, sometimes.
No ‘onions’ for Butler in 2010
Bill will talk about his famous calls – onions upon onions, plus Jerome sending it home – but only if you ask. Don’t ask, let the phone go quiet for a moment, and he’ll fill the silence.
“I was lucky to have a sister and brother,” he says, then talks about Rita and Fran.
Rita Raftery, a basketball star herself, stunned the family by entering the convent. She was a member of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth in Morris Township, N.J., for 62 years, and president of Saint Elizabeth University from 1997-2013. She died in 2020, at age 85.
Fran Raftery was a teacher and state champion soccer coach at St. Cecilia, then superintendent of the Moonachie (N.J.) Board of Education. He played the bagpipes. He died in 2019, at age 80.“She was sharp as a tack,” Bill says of his sister, “and my brother was a good man.”
Brevity, right? It’s what makes his calls so timeless, the way he can work his magic in just a few words.
“Onions!” he shouted when Villanova’s Kris Jenkins beat North Carolina at the buzzer in the 2016 NCAA title game. “Double order. Sautéed.”
Raftery was prepared to shout it six years earlier as he called the 2010 NCAA title game for CBS Radio, but Butler forward Gordon Heyward’s halfcourt heave at the buzzer bounced off the backboard and rim as Duke escaped 61-59.
“From my angle,” Raftery says, “it was going in.”
The ‘onions’ origin story, by Bill Raftery
Raftery doesn’t remember when he first used “onions” to describe a clutch basket, deferring to his play-by-play guy of a decade-plus, Ian Eagle, who worked alongside him for years with the New Jersey Nets.
“He’s usually right,” Raftery says of Eagle. “We were in Orlando. Kevin Edwards knocks down the 3 (to force overtime for the Nets). I’d never said it before, just blurted it out: ‘Onions!’ That was supposedly the first time. I don’t know why it came out.”
That was Nov. 8, 1995.
Seven years earlier, Pitt’s Jerome Lane had shattered a backboard against Providence. Raftery was on ESPN’s call for that one, and as the crowd was teetering and the rim was tottering, Raftery waited 10 whole seconds – letting the arena speak for itself – before shouting:
“Send it in, Jerome!”
Brevity, always. Bill Raftery is one of the great storytellers of our time – at a bar with Bill Murray, on the television in your living room – because he keeps it short. That Bill Murray get-together really did happen, by the way. It was during the 2024 NCAA Tournament, when Murray’s son, Luke, and the UConn Huskies were playing at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Raftery was there for CBS, one thing led to another courtside, and soon enough he and Murray are out on the town.
Murray picked up the tab.
UConn is in the 2026 Final Four, and Luke Murray is still on Danny Hurley’s staff – for one more week, anyway, before taking over at Boston College – which means Bill Murray and Bill Raftery, together again. I ask Raftery teasingly, because he feels like a friend after a few minutes on the phone, if Downtown Indy will be safe with the two of them in town.
“It’ll be safe,” he says, chuckling. “It’s a tournament. My family’s all coming in. We have several nights planned.”
Now he’s getting wistful.
“It goes quick, these NCAA Tournaments,” he says. “When you’re having the time of your life, it goes so fast. You wish it would linger more, you know?”
You do, and the same goes for Bill Raftery as America’s color commentator. You wish he could linger a little more, you know? But the end will come someday, as it comes for all of us. He’s 82, or 83 – or a little older than that, even – and though he changed representation last month, hiring the influential Creative Artists Agency (CAA), who knows how much longer he’ll be doing this?
“I always say to people: They’re gonna let me know,” he says. “Unless it’s a health thing, God forbid, usually it’s: ‘OK, pal, hit the bricks.’”
Until then, he’ll keep the same schedule. This is his eighth Final Four in Indianapolis – “They should have it there every year,” he says – and unless there’s a health thing, God forbid, or someone tells him to hit the bricks, he’ll be at the NCAA Tournament in 2027.
How old will he be in 2027? He still hasn’t told me his age, nearly an hour into our call, and here I thought we were friends. So I get blunt, like Mother might’ve tried. I tell him: Bill, pretend I’m the hospital and you need your medicine. How old are you?
“I’m…”
And he tells me. God’s honest truth, Bill Raftery tells me his age. But words matter, and sometimes silence is better. Sometimes, it’s what you don’t say.
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