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Growing up in Brooklyn, Rat Cogit spent his whole childhood wanting to be on an NBA court.
Kids grow up dreaming that they could hit the game winning shot of a championship game, but I was the one that said I want to be the referee that blows the whistle and says the basket was successful.
It was weird. You really got to love being a ref because you're going to get a lot of hate.
Love them or hate them. They are essential to the game.
Being a player sometimes you have to sit on the bench, but when you're a referee you're just in it.
That was cool for me. Rat realized his dream and just a couple seasons into his career as a ref.
He came to story court with his dad, Barbara Shop owner Leon Cogit.
When he told me someday you're going to be an NBA referee, I said, yeah, of course.
You were always supportive no matter what I said.
I told him I wanted to be a ballet dancer.
He would say, oh, good. But mom was totally against it.
She wants to see you as a doctor, as a lawyer, you know.
Her main concern was to marry me off.
Who's going to take a guy like that?
Who's going to be a referee?
What kind of a job is that?
I always remember when you asked me, how many lawyers do you have in this country that say, I don't know, maybe three, four million.
How many doctors? There's about six, seven million doctors.
How many NBA referee? I'm going to be one of them.
Since that, I said to your mom, don't bother him anymore.
He's going to be NBA referee.
Do you remember when I knew Jersey played Milwaukee?
The whole family went. They just filled up a whole section.
And they were embarrassing me.
My partners were looking at them like, all those people who are here for you, you have more fans than the players do.
And then we miss even one game yet.
There are a lot of people like Marat, people who aren't the athletes, but who do make sports possible.
On the sidelines, there's the coach and their assistants.
Masked, typing up the crowd.
The camera operators dodging stampedes of massive players to show you the perfect shot.
Vendors, ticket sellers.
Groundskeepers, scorekeepers.
And all their efforts are pretty much unseen, happening just off camera.
So in this episode of our season about game changers, we're talking about the people who may not get credit, who might even get a lot of grief, but they still make it all happen.
Michael Garofalo. And I'm Jasmine Morris.
It's the Storycore podcast from NPR.
So fans aren't always happy to hear what a referee has to say, but they're usually pretty happy to hear this voice.
For half a century, Clarence Hasket, known as fancy clancy, has hocked beers at Baltimore Orioles games.
And in that time, he sold over one million brusquies.
And while most are watching what's happening on the diamond, there's another competition happening in the stands between clancy and other vendors, like his friend Jerry Collier.
Here's clancy. My very first day, I was still in high school, and I don't know why I remember this, but I made $8.25.
And that you probably the second day of my new job where I was a beer vendor when I was 19 years old.
And you just crushed it.
When I looked around the ballpark, there was this ray of sunshine everywhere you look, a guy who outworked people, who outloved all the customers more than anybody else.
And I said, that's who I want to be like.
See, I had little secrets, though.
I used to move quicker than a lot of the other vendors because I was a sprinter in college.
Another thing, you know, I had to gift a gap and I used to do rhymes, so that helped me out.
Give me one of your rhymes.
Well, back in the old days, I used to use this one a lot.
Hey, empty your pockets, put your money in your hand because here's clancy, your beer man.
So you know, you used to do little things like that.
And all the vendors that we work with, all of us, have some type of a personality for doing something.
And if you go into the stadium and your number one, you have incredible pressure to be a selling machine.
And the way that I look at my job as a vendor, my mindset is I'm a professional athlete.
I have to stay in shape. I have to train doing the off season because vendors running around with straps around the neck.
That's only on television commercials.
Good vendors pick up their case and they carry it.
It's consuming. Yeah, it's in your soul.
Put it this way. Both of us when it came to our wedding, how do we plan our wedding?
Around all your stuff. Yep.
You know, clancy, you epitomize to me and so many people all that's right in the world.
If it's a rain out, the oral game, and you only sell two cases of beer in the biggest game of life, that's not a problem.
And I think that's more than the rhymes and all the rest.
You're larger than life in a lot of ways.
I can always go somewhere and get a free beer from somebody.
I can go in the restaurant or a bar that I've never been in before.
It's always somebody new who I was.
So I definitely shake a lot of hands.
And as long as I'm still healthy, I know I got another good 10 years.
Turns out clancy was right.
That interview with his friend, Jerry Collier, was recorded 10 years ago.
And fancy clancy hasn't quit yet.
Now let's get a little closer to the action.
If you go to a Dallas and Averick's game, you might see a group of guys walk out onto the basketball court during a break and start dancing.
And if you had to describe them, you might struggle a bit.
But they would tell you, just call them beefy.
You have JJ, chunky D, pork chops, wonder bread.
Well, I just called them bread.
I just called them wonder.
We're so lazy. If your name has more than two syllables, we're not going to use them.
That's big Rob Maiden and Daniel Boye ain't right, Jacob.
Two members of the Mav's maniacs.
A dance troupe for plus sized men.
That story court, they talked about how it all got started.
I'll never forget, going from the night grade to the 10th, I went from five, six to six, three over the summer.
It was so bad that my mom thought something was wrong with me, but my dad had little football.
So he would say to me, man, if I would have known you were going to be this big, I would have made you play.
You should be a tidy and right now I should be at the games.
I said, well, I wasn't really into a lot of people hitting me.
Now I was good, I'll pass.
The maniacs. We're just big guys dancing.
And it's all good natured.
Yeah. But it's pushing them below.
And we'll start out fully dressed, but we have this moment that's called the bust out.
And we're dancing because boo!
We kind of end with some exposed bellies and we have half shirts, which shows off a little more skin.
A lot more skin, if you're my size.
I've seen so many people start out going, oh boy, what is this?
And by the end of the sun, they go, these guys are pretty good.
But my father is a man's man.
So he didn't get any of that stuff.
I would invite him to games all the time and he'd give me a million excuses as to why I have to get up early tomorrow.
Well, I don't drive at night, but I would never forget.
He came and he met me after the game.
He's watching all these folks come up to us.
Their sign in autographs and a fan had my face on his shirt.
I look at my dad and I said, can you believe that?
That guy said, did you say his father and I said, yeah, and he said, sir, would you sign this?
My father never signed autographs in his life.
I won't ever forget the look on my father's face and he did not stop talking about it.
How much he just respected me as a man because he said, you look like you really were born to do this.
And it really stuck with me because now when I'm raising my kids, I'm not as hard on them about what they're trying to do with their life because I just have this belief that it's going to work out.
And so far, life has worked out pretty good.
When we come back, a basketball coach whose success was measured by losing every single time.
There's always got to be a four guy.
There's always somebody who's going to lose.
Only problem is, I lost too often.
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Jasmine, you remember the Globe Trotters, right?
Of course. Anyone who grew up in the 80s remembers the commercials on TV.
The Harlem Globe Trotters coming this holiday weekend to the New York metropolitan area.
I think a flashy move, strict shots, spinning balls on fingers, that kind of thing.
Right. So I got to see them once when I was a kid.
It was amazing. Probably one of my favorite sports memories ever.
But if you were to ask me who they played that day, there's no way I could tell you.
And it turns out the way the whole Globe Trotters thing works, you're not supposed to remember the other team.
Yeah, the Globe Trotters always win.
The whole deal is that they make the other guys look bad.
And it's always the same team that loses, the Washington generals.
The generals started in 1952 and they were founded by this guy named Red Klotz.
He was also a player and the team's coach.
And it's hard to know exactly how many games he lost.
It was actually in the tens of thousands.
He was the foil. He was the Globe Trotter nemesis.
But he liked being that pain in the ass.
He had that little sense of humor that made you want to kick him and then you want to hug him.
That was sad. They would knock him down, but he'd get back up and he'd just love being poor to that.
That's Red's daughter, Jody Ferrari.
She came to story court with her husband, John.
They met while they were both working on the Globe Trotter's world tour with her dad.
So again, these games are mainly for fun.
There was still an aspect of competition involved.
Here's how John and Jody describe it.
Well, there is entertainment in a Globe Trotter show.
But what is different is the basketball doesn't know if it should go in the hole or not.
And you seen it, huh? You do everything right and the ball doesn't go in.
Right. And now all of a sudden the score is tied and anything can happen.
Really, they're talking about one time.
The only time that's general's officially beat the Globe Trotters.
And of course, Red Klotz was right in the center of it.
That time not only as the coach, but also as a player.
It was January and Martin Tennessee 1971.
It was an old arena. They were playing very aggressive basketball and that game was tight with the score and one thing led to another.
Red said, I had the ball in my hands and it was the last shot.
So I took it and it made it.
He said the audience got very, very quiet because no one was sure what to do at that point.
And the guys jumped up on the bench and ran back to the locker room.
It said, well, we didn't have any champagne.
So we poured on with soda all over our heads.
It was a wonderful moment, but bittersweet because you don't ever want to disappoint people.
So it was an awkward win.
Yeah. You know, Red would always say the Globe Trotters losing is similar to someone shooting Santa Claus.
And you know, as Red said, the Trotters were upset and they said, you know what?
You're not going to win again.
And we haven't. The Cummings and Goings of our house had to do with dad going away for the tour and dad coming home.
And he would often write me letters back then about where he was.
Yes, there were the Madison Square Gardens in New York, but they would go to the little towns, whether it was 200 people or 20,000.
Basketball was not known in the world at that time.
They would take that game and play in a country where they had never seen basketball before, ever.
The strangest places would be in Spain where a floor would be set up in the middle of the bull ring.
We've played in the desert in Djibouti, Africa.
On the Persian Gulf, we flew onto an aircraft carrier, played the Trotters and the Flight Deck.
They played for a landbarrow in the Philippine jungles and on the beach in the Bahamas.
And the surf would come underneath the floor.
And Red actually got the guys together and he said, I don't want anybody chasing for loose balls and going into the surf.
And I don't think a coach in basketball history has ever said that to his team.
The generals were very special to Red.
This is what he'd given his adult life to do.
And he'd never defined himself by the score, but he'd defined himself by the effort that not only he gave, but that his men gave.
I think that that was the beauty of dad.
He believed that laughter and bringing joy to people was important.
He didn't like losing games, but he knew that there was a greater purpose to what they did every night.
And that was how he won for him that was winning.
Yeah. And Red, he had so many nicknames over the years, you know, the losing as coach, the level bluser and things like that, but I never once ever heard him say, oh, whoa, it's me.
He accepted the fact that he wasn't the star.
He realized his place. I don't think enough of us do.
Even after he left the road, my dad always kept an old scuffed up basketball in his trunk.
And if the car wasn't in the driveway, he was off at the local school yard shooting baskets.
And this is well into his 80s.
He just loved to play the game and he would always be found out there shooting the ball.
I like to see his love of the game.
Winning and losing is part of life.
Maybe in the biggest loser before a sub-asca ball.
It doesn't mean anything.
You're enjoying yourself and you're trying to win.
That's all for this episode of the Storycore podcast.
And this is when we usually tell you about the off-mic team that helps make this podcast happen.
Like Juddesty Kendall and Max Young Rice are producers.
Our executive producer Amy Drozdowska, our technical director, Jared Floyd and our fact checker Katie Scott and let's not forget Liz McCarty who made the art for this season.
We also want to give a special thanks to producers Von Dias, Camila Cushani and Calcron.
And facilitators Maya Millette, Elena Cohen and Christina Stanton.
This episode is dedicated to Lina Onwear, a former Storycore producer who worked on a lot of these stories and was the biggest Lakers fan we knew.
We love it when you guys call in and tell us your stories.
And this week we want to know who in your life doesn't get enough credit.
Leave us a voicemail at 702-706-talk.
That's 702-706-TALK. I'm Jasmine Morris.
And I'm Michael Garafalo.
Thanks for listening. Support for this podcast comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
