A Modest Mentsch

March 3, 2024 Michael Olesker

Ray and Janice Altman are shown with their family when Ray was recently honored by the University of Maryland. (Provided photoz)

Janice Weinblatt Altman was 23 when she met Ray Altman between pickup basketball games at the Park Heights Jewish Community Center. It was several years later, after she was married to Ray, when Janice first learned about his storied life in lacrosse and basketball.

“He never talked about his records in sports,” she says. “Never. And he still doesn’t. If people didn’t tell me about what an athlete he was, I wouldn’t know what they were talking about.”

She certainly wasn’t going to hear about it from Ray.

Married this month for 55 years, the Altmans have three children and seven grandchildren, none of whom knew for a lot of years that Ray was a University of Maryland Hall of Famer and a member of the Greater Baltimore chapter of the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame.

At lunch one recent afternoon, a guy said to Ray, “Didn’t you hold all the University of Maryland lacrosse scoring records?”

“For a little while,” he muttered, then quickly changed the subject.

That’s a slight miscount on his part. Six full decades after he graduated, Maryland athletic officials recently established the Raymond F. Altman Endowed Scholarship, and invited Ray and family onto the field at Byrd Stadium.

There, a big scoreboard behind them declared that Altman is still No. 1 in career assists, still No. 1 in points per game and still No. 2 in total career points, even though athletes of his era only played three years of varsity ball.

He was a two-time All-American who won the 1963 Turnbull Trophy as the best attackman in the entire nation. The same year, he was named Best Athlete at Maryland — in any sport.

In the encyclopedic “Jews in Sports” (Simcha Media Group), Ray is right there with immortals like Sandy Koufax, Sid Luckman and Hank Greenberg.

“In his day,” says Joe Finn, archivist at the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame in the Baltimore County community of Sparks, “Ray Altman was as good as anybody in the country. Believe me, my job is to keep track of these things. He was big, he was strong, he had field presence and he knew where everybody on the field was supposed to be, and he got the ball to them.”

But nobody’s going to hear any of this from Altman.

Maybe it’s his modesty that kept the University of Maryland from recalling his full impact for so long. It took 60 years — until last month — for the school to announce the new scholarship in his name. It was Ray’s grandson, Toby, who got the ball rolling.

(Naturally, Toby knew nothing of his grandfather’s athletic history until he was in the third grade and a classmate told him about it.)

Last year, Ray was diagnosed with leukemia. Toby decided to honor him by organizing a fund-raiser to support the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. That effort reminded some University of Maryland athletic officials that they, too, should at last be honoring Ray by establishing a scholarship in his name.

That’s part of a touching storyline. Ray was 15 when his father died, at age 42. Ray had already turned down an offer to go to West Point when the College Park scholarship came through. Even then, it wasn’t a full ride.

“He had to clean toilets as part of the scholarship deal,” Janice noted.

“I watched Ray play a lot of lacrosse,” says old friend Leonard “Boogie” Weinglass. “There’s only one guy who was better than him, and his name was Jim Brown,” whom many consider the greatest lacrosse (and football) player of all time.

“But more than that, he’s a great guy, a great attorney who handled a bunch of our legal stuff when I had [the Merry-Go-Round retail chain]. Quiet as he is in court, that’s how animated he is. He’s highly intelligent. And he’s a mentsch.”

“I first saw him at the old Hilltop Diner,” adds Allan Charles, partner in the TBC advertising agency. “He was already a legend in sports. But he’s also the epitome of a solid citizen. He’s not a braggart. He has no ego. He’s the most ethical guy you’d ever know.”

In his high school days at City College, Altman was named a basketball All Star of the old Maryland Scholastic Association. He set school records in lacrosse, In 2003, he was named to the Maryland Athletic Hall of Fame.

Somehow, he hasn’t been named to the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame, though lately there have been efforts to remind Hall officials about his remarkable history.

One last story: At Maryland, friends coaxed Ray into running for school president. He ran against a fellow named Steny Hoyer, who has gone on to spend decades as a powerful figure in the U.S. House of Representatives. And in his first and only foray into politics, Ray won.

It’s all part of a remarkable history. But you won’t hear Ray tell it himself.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University Press).