Delaney also will visit with the parents of Marine Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey of Belchertown, who took his life in 2004 after returning from a tour of duty in Iraq.
Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame enshrinee Michael Jordan shares some thought with former NBA referee Bob Delaney during a game.Seconds left. Game on the line. Lebron James drives the lane, making plenty of contact, and lays it in. Bodies fly. The whistle blows as 30,000 people stand and scream. Three-point play or offensive foul?
Think the life of an NBA referee is stressful? For Bob Delaney, it was therapy.
Delaney, 59, retired last year after a 25-year career that included playoffs, an All-Star game and more regular season games than he can count in gyms across the country.
Now Delaney is making a circuit that takes him to places like Iraq, Fort Hood, Texas, and Walter Reed Medical Center to blow the whistle on post-traumatic stress disorder. He will be in the Springfield area the weekend of Aug. 6-7 to talk about the malady at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and to visit with the parents of Marine Cpl. Jeffrey M. Lucey of Belchertown, who took his life in 2004 after returning from a tour of duty in Iraq.
Although he’s had everyone from Michael Jordan to the guys in the nose-bleed seats woofing at him, the NBA was a cake-walk compared to Delaney’s first career as a New Jersey state trooper. Like his father before him, Delaney wore the badge of an organization he describes as being “steeped in military tradition,” joining in 1973 at the tender age of 22. After a little more than a year on road duty, Delaney was surprised and a bit nervous to receive a message that the lieutenant in charge of the organized crime bureau wanted to see him.
“I grew up Irish Catholic, which means I wake up feeling guilty in the morning,” he said in a phone interview.
The lieutenant asked Delaney if he wanted to work undercover on a crime task force with the FBI, an offer he readily accepted. He and the other task force members started their own trucking company on the New Jersey waterfront and soon gained entry into the underworld. For three years, in his undercover identity as “Bobby Covert,” Delaney rubbed elbows with the mafia and went to mob meetings, sometimes wearing a wire and often stopping on the way to throw up from anxiety.
On his last day undercover, Delaney recalled, he stood in the West Orange, N.J., armory watching a hood named Ronnie Sardella get fingerprinted. Still thinking Delaney was one of them, Sardella asked what he got pinched for. Another officer revealed that Delaney was a state trooper. Sardella’s response haunted Delaney.
“He said, ‘How could you do it to me?’” Delaney recalled. “You don’t tell on your friends.”
View full sizeBob Delaney walks with Maj. Gen. Sherko-Zervani of the Kurdish forces during his first trip to Iraq in 2009.The threats on his life only added to the emotional turmoil. Although it would be several years before it became a medical diagnosis, Delaney was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. His anger drove him to punch holes in walls. He shrank from company. The only comfort he found was from talking to fellow law enforcement officers who knew what he was feeling. One of them was Joe Pistone, an FBI agent who went undercover to infiltrate two New York mafia families under the name Donnie Brasco.
“They helped me tremendously,” Delaney said.
Those peer-to-peer sessions led to therapy, and therapy to health.
“In therapy, you feel this release and say, ‘Man I’m not crazy,’” he said.
Delaney found a new calling. He began talking about post-traumatic stress disorder with police officers, firefighters, emergency medical technicians and soldiers. Often, he would use a balloon as an illustration.
“I’d say, ‘How do I let the air out?’” Delaney explained. “You could pop it, but then there’d be no balloon. Or you could pinch the end and there’d be this screeching noise. Maybe you’d hear things you didn’t want to hear, but maybe you’d have a balloon you could use the next day.”
Delaney’s work took him to military hospitals, where he would talk to wounded soldiers, as well as to Iraq, where he’d speak to troops on the front lines. He traveled to Fort Hood, Texas, shortly after a gunman went on a shooting rampage there, killing 13 people and wounding 29 others. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan is awaiting trial on multiple charges of murder and attempted murder.
View full sizeBob Delaney, front and center, appears in a photograph with members of an Abrams tank unit in Mosul, Iraq, holding up a copy of Delaney's book on post-traumatic stress disorder.Recently, Delaney put in a call to Kevin and Joyce Lucey, whose son Jeffrey hanged himself in their Belchertown home eight years ago. Jeffrey Lucey turned to alcohol to keep away the demons that haunted him after the horrors he saw in Iraq. In the end, he was unable to escape them. Since his suicide, the Luceys have helped lead the campaign to address post-traumatic stress disorder in the military.
“We look forward to working together,” Delaney said. “Their willingness to share what they’ve learned on their journey with other parents will be absolutely powerful. It may prevent another soldier from going down the same path.”
Delaney was fortunate to find a special form of therapy as he tried to decompress from his undercover work. A former high school player himself, he began refereeing basketball games in the early 1980s. The late Darell Garretson, then the NBA’s chief of officiating, saw Delaney refereeing a Jersey Shore League game and took him under his wing.
“One thing led to another,” Delaney said. “I never even thought of the NBA as a goal.”
Delaney, who has worked many high-stakes games, including the NBA Finals, said the job actually helped him cope with his post-traumatic stress disorder.
“For me it was absolutely peaceful,” he said of his time on the floor. “Basketball had rules and regulation.”
He retired at the end of last season and has spent much of his time since then promoting his books, “Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob,” and “Surviving the Shadows: A Journey of Hope into Post-Traumatic Stress,” and talking about post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I think we’ve waited too long to talk about it,” he said.
On Aug. 6, Delaney will be at the Basketball Hall of Fame for a question-and-answer session on “Surviving the Shadows” to give copies of the book to teams of law enforcement officers playing in a tournament to benefit the Special Olympics.
On Aug. 7 he will talk about post-traumatic stress disorder at Westover Air Reserve Base.
Later that day, Delaney will return to the Basketball Hall of Fame to be ceremonially deputized by the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department. He also plans to meet with the Luceys sometime over the weekend.