Lessons from Dad by Brian Geltzeiler

By Brian Geltzeiler The game of basketball was taught to me at a very young age more as a philosophy than as a game. As regular readers of this space know, my father was a college basketball player at Newark-Rutgers from 1945-1950. He wasn’t a run of the mill end of the bench player. He was the first player in Rutgers history to score 1000 points and in the 1949-1950 season, he was third in the nation in scoring. The cool part of the story, besides that it’s MY dad, is that he never could make his high school team. He was a 6’4” post player in an era where those were quite common. Independent of a big growth spurt, he was a successful college basketball player because he played a particular way. My father instilled a love of basketball in me that has only grown throughout the years. The ironic part about it is that these days my love for the game far outpaces his. Where my priority is wall-to-wall NBA, at his tender age of 83 years and 10 months, his is the New York Ranger...