When Herb Brown talks basketball, players – and coaches – listen

By Michael J. Pallerino

When he closes his eyes, Herb Brown can still hear the sounds of sneakers on the asphalt; bouncing balls; shots clanging around the irons; and all those voices from the old Brooklyn and Long Island neighborhoods. The sounds play out as the soundtrack from a youth where young men in certain situations had to grow up fast.

Herb Brown was 12 years old when his father, Milton, died of a heart attack shortly after moving his family from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh. So there was young Herb and his 7-year-old brother, Larry, in a new city a lifetime away from those New York City streets. Herb did what any oldest brother and son would do. He stepped up his game to face the music life had dealt him.

It wasn’t until after the family moved back to Long Island that the Brown brothers first heard the alluring sounds of basketball serenading them. It was the late-1940s. It was still basketball back then. You still had to play the game. You still had to know the rules. You still had to be fundamentally sound. And you still had to earn your playing time. You won; you kept playing. You lost; you sat and waited – sometimes for hours, a weekend even. Those are times he most remembers – watching, waiting and learning.

It was about that time the Brown brothers met Roy Ilowit, a coach who ran camps in Maine and Pennsylvania. With Ilowit as a father figure, the boys attended the camps, honed their basketball skills and fell in love with the game that would eventually be their destiny. “Coach knew our mother didn’t have a lot of money, so he helped us attend the camps,” Herb recalls. “He taught us the fundamentals and taught us how to coach. We fell in love with the game.” (Ilowit went on to hold a distinguished career as a football coach, athletic director and eventually the dean of the school of education at CW Post College.)

On the home front, the Browns lived right in the middle of town, where there was a park with a basketball court where everybody played: old timers, college players, younger kids. “The older guys were fundamentally sound, competitive and eager to take us under their wings. They taught us the right way to play and how to handle ourselves when we played. There was no ESPN or YouTube, no gyrations, just basketball. Setting screens. Backdoor picks. Set shots. And defense. If you weren’t any good, you were never going to play. So you had to try like heck to get better so you weren’t always watching everybody else play.”

More than anything else, Herb remembers the time spent playing one-on-one and shooting for hours on end with Larry. “We just played and played – every day. I can’t tell you how much we played. When we weren’t sneaking into the local elementary school to use the gym, we were on the playground. We learned in the schoolyard: one-on-one, two-on-two, three-on-three, five-on-five, both half court and full court.”