Bill Raftery might have 'a little kiss' for the pope's ring at college hoops season opener in Rome

ROME (AP) — Hold the onions. Don't mention the lingerie. But maybe “a little kiss” of the pope's ring.

Bill Raftery is considering dialing back some of his famous catchphrases for his first broadcasting assignment of the college basketball season.

That’s because Pope Leo XIV could be listening.

Raftery will be the Fox analyst when Leo’s alma mater, Villanova, meets fellow Catholic university Notre Dame in Rome on Sunday. The Eternal City Tip-Off was created to honor the first American pope.

Raftery is known for phrases like “onions!” for clutch baskets and “lingerie on the deck” for when a defender figuratively gets faked out of their shorts by an opponent. And, of course: “With a little kiss” for old-school bank shots off the glass.

“I’ve got to refrain from some probably in deference to the pope,” Raftery told The Associated Press in a phone interview before flying to Rome. “But something might pop out that might cost me a day in the confessional booth.”

Because, as Raftery explained, “anything I’ve ever done has been spontaneous.”

More than halfway through his fifth decade as a college basketball commentator, Raftery is relishing his first trip to Rome since his 1969 honeymoon.

The event — it’s a doubleheader between the Villanova and Notre Dame men’s and women’s teams, though Raftery will call only the men’s game — includes a private audience with the pope on Saturday for the four teams and their fans.

“It’s a business trip, but this one’s got side doors to go out and see some incredible sights,” Raftery said, adding that between his wife, Joan, four children and multiple grandchildren, “over 10 of us will be there.”

Raftery wishes one more person could experience the trip, too: Rollie Massimino, the coach who guided Villanova to the 1985 NCAA title in one of the greatest upsets in the history of college basketball. Massimino died in 2017.

“I would love to see Rollie (meet) the pope. He would be advising him on church matters, business matters, basketball,” Raftery said. “And food, too.”

After coaching Seton Hall for 11 seasons, Raftery started commentating on games in the 1980s. Along with Dick Vitale, he was a pioneer in bringing catchphrases into the expanding college game, becoming a beloved fixture of the game.

“Part of what you’re doing, not that you think of it as entertainment, but it’s to make the audience enjoy what they’re watching,” Raftery said. “I can’t express deep enough to just be a small part of a lot of kids’ lives and a lot of great institutions. It’s like you got on the bandwagon and you never got off. Everything I did or said, was to be said succinctly and with meaning — to get in and out of the play-by-play man’s way.”

Despite his longevity and dedicated fan following, Raftery wasn’t elevated to CBS’ lead Final Four analyst until 2015 when he replaced Greg Anthony, who was arrested on a charge of soliciting a prostitute.

Raftery is in his mid-80s but keeps his exact age a mystery: He says he was born in April 1941, but that he's 86.

One of the hallmarks of Raftery’s career has been his dedication to the Big East. He was there in 1985 when three Big East teams reached the Final Four and Massimino’s Villanova upset Georgetown for the title.

“I was at the game and sat with Mike Tranghese, eventually the Big East commissioner. Dave (Gavitt) was the commissioner then,” Raftery said. “It was like a signature event for all of us.”

Raftery left ESPN in 2013 when the Big East’s media rights switched to Fox. Now Fox has multiple conferences and he calls games across the country with play-by-play partner Gus Johnson, who has plenty of fans of his own for his unabashed approach to calling games.

“The biggest thing, no matter what game you do, it’s a really important game for a lot of people. Whether it’s the schools, the towns, the communities,” Raftery said. “I’ve never really delineated what the league is when I’m going in, as much as trying to do as much good for these kids and these programs that their performance will allow.”

Raftery finishes each season with CBS at the Final Four.

So what does Raftery make of the current college landscape, which is dominated by roster chaos thanks to the transfer portal; name, image and likeness payments and conference realignment?

“I don’t know of anybody who likes it, but if you’re in it, you’ve got to play by the rules,” he said. “A lot of coaches have left. Some can afford to leave. … My only concern is these kids that don’t make it to the level that they’re all playing for. And are they sure they have a degree? Are they sure that they have a major that will help them contribute in life, raise a family?”

Those concerns fade away when game times come around, though.

“The greatest thing for anybody that does what we do is between 7 and 9 (p.m.), nobody cares about the rules, the eligibility,” Raftery said. “They just want to watch the game.”

Raftery is a basketball lifer: He starred in high school and college (for La Salle) before being drafted by the New York Knicks but never played in the NBA. He grew up in Kearny, New Jersey, which is known as “Soccer Town USA” and still enjoys watching that sport, too.

His late brother, Francis Raftery, was a state champion soccer coach at St. Cecilia High School in Kearny and also a teacher, principal and superintendent. His late sister was a nun: Sister Francis (Rita) Raftery served 16 years as president of what is now Saint Elizabeth University.

Raftery’s mother kept a strict Catholic household.

“We had to say the rosary every night,” Raftery said, recounting how he and his brother would groan about it. “My mom went every morning to church. She sort of set the standards for everybody.

So might Raftery be considering retirement as he prepares to call his first game in Rome?

“What a way to go out, right?” he said, but then added that he has no health issues and prefers to wait until his employers decide that he’s done.

“I’m just as enthusiastic as I was when I started," he said. "I enjoy what I’m doing. It keeps you young, interested, and you feel like you can still contribute. Hopefully, I’ll be able to do that until the bell rings."

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The interior of Finneran Pavilion is seen at Villanova University in Villanova, Pa., Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Students walk past an image of Pope Leo XIV at Villanova University in Villanova, Pa., Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Pope Leo XIV greets participants in an audience with the Jesus Youth International Conference in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican, Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

FILE - CBS broadcasters Jim Nantz, Grant Hill and Bill Raftery give commentary before an NCAA college basketball game during the semifinals of the Big Ten Conference tournament in Indianapolis, March 12, 2016. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)

FILE - Bill Raftery, a CBS college basketball analyst, smiles after an NCAA basketball game between Michigan and Indiana in Ann Arbor, Mich., Dec. 11, 2017. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — One of the countless memorable lines that have tumbled out of the “Star Trek” universe over the years is this gem, originally from a 20th-century poet named Delmore Schwartz: “Time is the fire in which we burn.”

It was uttered as an existential warning to Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in the 1994 film “Star Trek Generations.” But it feels equally apt this week after a one-two punch of loss that is hitting hard for devotees of the epic, six-decade science fiction saga.

First, on Sunday, Walter Koenig, who played Ensign Pavel Chekov in the original series during the 1960s, died at age 90. Then, on Thursday, the cosmos lost Patrick Stewart, a Shakespearean actor who in 1987 began to inhabit Picard, the poetic face of that show's sequel, “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and decades later the anchor of the darker streaming drama “Star Trek: Picard.”

For a fan base that has long signed on as acolytes of a brighter, more equitable future, recent days have given the present an unwelcome sting.

“What a heartbreaking week it has been,” said William Shatner, who played Capt. James T. Kirk in the original series from 1966 to 1969 and went on to star in six movie sequels. He is one of only two members of that long-ago cast still living; Leonard “Spock” Nimoy, his best friend on the show — and off and on in real life — died in 2015.

For all the characterizations of it as nerdy over the years — something many fans have come to accept cheerfully — “Star Trek” has long been at the vanguard of modern-day mythmaking. That has helped it seep into the culture in various ways, vacuuming up disciples as it goes.

The earliest space shuttle was christened “Enterprise” after the show's flagship after a mass letter-writing campaign persuaded President Gerald Ford to rename it, and the cast attended the ship's introduction. The handheld “communicators” from the show helped inspire early flip phones. Phrases like “Beam me up, Scotty,” “He's dead, Jim” and “Make it so” have infiltrated society ad nauseam. (The first one was never actually spoken verbatim on the show.)

Today, as the end of a decade-long streaming run of “new Trek” approaches and the franchise's longtime godfather, Paramount, rumbles into a new corporate era, Trek fans are legion and global and wondering what happens next.

They haunt online forums by the millions, discussing and arguing about themes, stories and minutiae — particularly “canon,” or how well the fictional universe adheres to or violates its own rules. Things can get contentious and aggressive for a fan base that has signed on for peaceful and utopian tomorrows.

This week, those same forums, now turned somber, are awash with tributes and laments — first for Koenig and now for Stewart. At the same time, the sense of mortality is palpable. “Bubble wrap George Takei and William Shatner ASAP,” one post on X said.

Fellow actors in the now-sizable cadre from various shows — and those behind the scenes, too — weighed in on the loss of two people who were, for them, legends.

“His Captain Jean-Luc Picard permanently expanded the universe of Star Trek without measure,” Akiva Goldsman, co-creator of “Star Trek: Picard,” said of Stewart.

Koenig was introduced in the show's second season for two key reasons. First, his character was a Russian in an era of U.S.-Soviet Cold War tension, part of creator Gene Roddenberry's effort to build a diverse cast that was groundbreaking for its era and featured, among others, a Japanese helmsman and a Bantu communications officer — not to mention the then-progressive presence of women in authority. Second, Koenig's Beatle-like looks, complete with mop-top, were calibrated to entice younger fans vibing at the time to the Monkees.

Koenig, oddly, was the first Chekov to exist but is not the first to die. His young counterpart in the lightly rebooted “Kelvin” universe series of “Star Trek” movies that began in 2009, the Soviet-born Anton Yelchin, was killed in 2016 when his car pinned him against a gate outside his Los Angeles home.

With Koenig's death, only two members of the original cast remain: Shatner and Takei, who played helmsman Hikaru Sulu. The two, who have had an occasionally prickly relationship across the decades, both remain active at ages 95 and 89 respectively. Shatner, a raconteur who has seemingly boundless energy, recently unveiled his latest project — front man for a heavy-metal band. Takei remains in the public eye on social media with his “Oh, Myyyy” content.

Takei and Koenig, who sat together on the Enterprise bridge as helmsman and navigator, were close in real life. On Monday, Takei said his “heart was heavy.”

“He was a writer, a teacher, a thoughtful man, and a loyal friend,” Takei said of Koenig. “Rest well, my dear friend. Keep navigating a steady course.”

Ever since the early 1980s, when Capt. Kirk said bitterly that “Galloping around the cosmos is a game for the young,” the “Star Trek” universe has embraced aging and mortality. It became a theme in many productions, perhaps most prominently from 2020 to 2023 in “Star Trek: Picard.”

Even so, the ethos of “Star Trek” has always been optimism and life. Even its darkest iterations, like “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” have been suffused with the notion that humanity — which has always, in the show's universe, meant far more than humans — would endure and thrive.

“Spock, you want to know something?” Kirk once said to his first officer. “Everybody's human.” Responded Spock, dryly: “I find that remark ... insulting.”

That exchange came in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” a 1991 end-of-the-Cold War political thriller that was the final film to feature the entire original cast. The story focused on the idea of the undiscovered country being the future, and the journey ended in the galactic equivalent of what John F. Kennedy once called “a hard and bitter peace.”

In truth, though, Shakespeare — whose work has infused not only the various incarnations of “Trek” but the careers of its two most prominent actors, Shatner and Stewart — meant something else when he coined the phrase. “The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns,” he writes in “Hamlet.” In short: death.

But with “Star Trek,” as with Shakespeare, the show must go on. That's exactly what Shatner, then at the ripe old age of 77, told this writer when they spent the day together in 2008: “None of us will be around forever,” he said, “but ‘Star Trek’ will.”

Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation at The Associated Press, has been watching “Star Trek” since he was 18 months old. His younger son's middle name is Kirk, which is not a coincidence.

FILE - Walter Koenig appears at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on Sept. 8, 2018. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - Patrick Stewart, cast member in the Paramount+ television series "Star Trek: Picard" poses for a portrait during the Winter Television Critics Association Press Tour in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 9, 2023. (Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP, File)

FILE- Members of the "Star Trek" crew, from left, James Doohan, DeForest Kelley, Walter Koenig, William Shatner, George Takei, Leonard Nimoy, and Nichelle Nichols, toast the newest "Star Trek" film at Paramount Studios on Dec. 28, 1988. (AP Photo/Bob Galbraith, File)