George Raveling, the former Iowa Hawkeye basketball from 1983-86, passed away earlier today at the age of 88. He was inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013 after accumulating a 336-292 record at Washington State, Iowa, and Southern California. In 2015, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
His contributions to the game of basketball extend beyond his work on the sideline. In 1994, he was seriously injured in a car crash which led to his premature retirement
from coaching. After rehabbing from the injuries he sustained, he became a longtime executive at Nike. He was also credited as the man who convinced Michael Jordan to sign with Nike & was played by Marlon Wayans in the 2023 film, Air.
As Iowa’s head coach, he assembled perhaps the greatest collection of talent Iowa City has seen. He recruited future NBA players in B.J. Armstrong, Kevin Gamble, Ed Horton, Roy Marble, and Greg Stokes. Marble was the long-time leader in career points for the Hawkeyes while Armstrong went on to win 3 NBA titles with the Chicago Bulls.
He went 54-38 during his time at Iowa, making the tournament in in 2 out of his 3 seasons he led the Hawks. His core group of recruits found the most team success the season after he departed for Los Angeles. They went 30-5 & finished the season in the Elite 8, which remains the furthest Iowa has advanced since the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985.
His reach extended well beyond the game of basketball. As a Washington, DC native, he attended Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 as part of the security detail. After King completed the speech, the 26-year-old Raveling “impulsive” asked King if he could have the manuscript of the speech. King gave the speech to Raveling, who never sold it. His copy of the speech resulted in the “first public display” of the manuscript in 2021, at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
