Billy Raynor: legend of the hardwood

Local basketball star gets number retired

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The exploits of Edward “Little Billy” Raynor Jr. on the hardwood courts from Boston to the Ivy League rank him among the top schoolboy players ever to come out of the city. His undefeated 1969 state title season at Catholic Memorial is still considered one of the best runs in Massachusetts high school hoops.

Billy and his older brother Bobby, a top talent at St. John’s Prep, were raised in the Mission Hill and Whittier projects. I met Billy while playing with his older brother Bobby during our freshman year at Boston University. Bobby stayed just one year at B.U. and became a “street entrepreneur” for much of his adult life.

Billy Raynor, second from left, is joined by (left to right) Tim Skaggs, Ron Perry, Ron Teixeira and Brandon Hatfield to celebrate Billy’s jersey retirement

“Bobby is my hero. I always looked up to him,” says Billy. “Our lives took different paths, but my love and respect for my brother has never waned. He was much better than I was growing up, but he always took time to teach me the ‘right way’ to play the game. I am happy that he is settled in retirement after traveling some difficult roads in his life.”

One of Billy’s cherished memories “was playing against my older brother Bobby when I was at Catholic Memorial High School, and he was at St. John’s Prep. I beat him off the dribble and went in to score a basket against my hero in a blowout victory over his team. It was one of the rare times that my mother, father, and family all came to a game. I remember it like it was yesterday.”

Billy Raynor was to become a significant star player while at C.M. In 1969, his junior year, his squad went 29-0, winning the Tech Tourney and the state title. Fran Costello, the late King Gaskins and Billy Raynor were the leaders of that team.

All three now have their playing numbers hanging from the rafters in the Catholic Memorial gym — Gaskins, #14; Raynor, #44; and Costello, #52.

Billy Raynor is a member of the 1,000 point club at Catholic Memorial High School. PHOTO: CATHOLIC MEMORIAL

Raynor’s senior year highlight was going 26-0 before losing the state championship game to Boston English High School a week after beating English for the Tech Tourney title. The loss ended a 55-game win streak for Catholic Memorial.

Billy would attend Dartmouth College, where he continued building on his playing credentials.

Brandon Hatfield, a Catholic Memorial grad who followed Billy to Dartmouth, considered being called “Little Raynor” during his freshman year at Catholic Memorial, the highest possible compliment.

“Billy was a mentor to me,” says Hatfield. As a freshman at Dartmouth, he traveled to Ivy League games with the player called “Billy Radar” because of his exquisite shooting skills. First-year players, then ineligible to play varsity basketball, were no match for Billy.

“I remember when he scored 45 points against Harvard in his first year. I was at that game. I also remember the blue velvet/suede suit he wore to the game. The man had a sense of style,” says Hatfield.

Years later, Raynor and Hatfield attended a Final 4 basketball event where CBS announcer James Brown, a Harvard graduate, recognized him. “He came up, and spoke to us.,” says Hatfield. “Humble as always, Billy said he didn’t know whether James Brown would remember him.”

“How could I not remember the man who dropped 35 on my Harvard team as a sophomore?” Brown responded. “Billy just smiled his gentle smile and kept moving,” says Hatfield.

Raynor would start for Dartmouth from his sophomore to senior years, finishing as the 9th leading scorer in school history. “They didn’t keep stats on assists back in those days, but I’m pretty sure that I was very high on that list as well,” says Raynor.

Despite struggles with some Dartmouth educators in his first few years in Hanover, Billy graduated with a degree in education in 1974 after spending one semester of his junior year in France and traveling to Senegal.

Pursuing a coaching career after college, Billy ended up spending five at Holy Cross in Worcester in the 1990s.

“During my tenure as head basketball coach, Holy Cross went from a scholarship to a non-scholarship school,” he says. “We could not compete at the level of scholarship schools. I felt bad about that. I wish we could have had scholarships so that we could have gotten the players we needed to be competitive.”

From 2000 to 2004, he served as director of Parks and Recreation for Boston. He would move on to become athletic director at Mass Bay Community College in 2005.

When the head basketball coach stepped down on short notice, Raynor quickly found a replacement.

“I know a guy who could do this job, so I hired me,” he says. And the results were spectacular, with four New England Regional Championships during his 12 years as head basketball coach.

But Billy Raynor found other ways to contribute, establishing the “Young Men of Color” program, which he started in 2009 and is still going strong today. “This program is one of my proudest achievements as an educator,” says Raynor, who still works at Mass Bay.

During his Catholic Memorial Hall of Fame ceremony, Raynor was inducted both as an individual and as a member of that championship 1969 basketball team.

Book release

Raynor’s honorifics will soon include the title of author, as he’s about to release his book titled, “Why Black Men Nod At Each Other.”

“The book’s essence is about my life being raised as a young Black man in the Mission Hill and Whittier Street projects, and the influences of both Black and white cultures on my life,” he explains.

Raynor will also soon be inducted into the Massasoit Community College Black Coaches Hall of Fame along with Roscoe Baker and Albie Holland.