Early Life
Bavetta was born in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York on December 10, 1939. His father was an officer for the New York Police Department, and his mother was a homemaker. Bavetta attended Power Memorial Academy in New York City (the same school future NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar attended) and is a 1962 graduate of St. Francis College in New York and played on the schools' basketball teams. He began officiating after his brother, Joe, who officiated for the American Basketball Association, convinced him that it would be an interesting career. A Wall Street broker for Salomon Brothers with an MBA in finance from the New York Institute of Finance, Bavetta began officiating games between fellow brokers in the Wall Street League, played at New York's Downtown Athletic Club, and later worked high school games. For ten years, he officiated Public and Catholic High School leagues in New York and later nine years in the Eastern Professional Basketball League, which later became the Continental Basketball Association.
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Famous quotes related to early life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)