Herb Turetzky, Nets’ Official Scorer for 54 Years, Dies at 76

After one season in Teaneck, Mr. Turetzky adopted the Nets to Lengthy Island, the place they performed in three arenas, together with the Nassau Coliseum; then to a few houses again in New Jersey, together with the Prudential Middle in Newark; and eventually to Barclays Middle in Brooklyn.

Between 1984 and 2018, he scored 1,465 consecutive video games.

“After I did my 900th straight sport, they lined it on NBA TV,” he advised the New Jersey newspaper The File in 2012. “Charles Barkley was on, and after they made that remark to Barkley, all he stated was: ‘9 hundred straight Nets video games? Boy, that man’s seen a whole lot of dangerous basketball.’”

“I’ve seen some dangerous video games,” he added, “however I’ve seen some nice ones.”

In 2020, when all of the dangerous and nice video games — and people in between — added as much as 2,206, Guinness World Data licensed them as essentially the most by an official scorer in N.B.A. historical past.

Mr. Turetzky was inducted into the New York Metropolis Basketball Corridor of Fame in 2004.

Herbert Stephen Turetzky was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 19, 1945. His mom, Rose (Pearl) Turetzky, was a bookkeeper for the maker of Fox’s U-Wager chocolate syrup. His father, Sam, was a plumber. Herb performed basketball on the Brownsville Boys’ Membership (now the Brownsville Recreation Middle), the place he additionally discovered the right way to run a scoreboard and preserve a scorebook.

After he graduated from L.I.U. in 1968 with a bachelor’s diploma in economics, he was a trainer after which a principal at a Brooklyn elementary faculty. After that, he labored as a grants author for the New York Metropolis Board of Schooling and owned a trophy enterprise. He earned two grasp’s levels, in training and in administration and supervision.

All of the whereas, Mr. Turetzky was touring to Nets residence video games. His longest break from his scoring duties started in November 1968, when he was driving to a sport in Commack, on Lengthy Island. He misplaced management of his automotive on the Lengthy Island Expressway, crossed a grass divider and crashed into an oncoming automotive. The driving force was killed.

“I used to be in a coma for about six weeks and broke my complete left facet up, creating some muscular harm, had a concussion, broke my jaw,” he advised The Asbury Park Press in 2005.