It was just another dinner on the road, except that college basketball analyst Bill Raftery was in the same restaurant, and when Raftery’s around, nothing fits into the “just another” category.

“We were in Madison for the regional one year,” said Bob Davis, voice of Kansas University football and basketball. “Max (Falkenstien) and my wife and I went out to dinner, and we saw Verne Lundquist and Raf on the other side of the restaurant. They waved. Pretty soon the waiter comes by and says, ‘That silver-haired gentleman would like to buy you guys a drink.’ We politely declined, and I said to tell him he’s got a couple of teetotalers from Kansas he’s dealing with. Pretty soon the waiter comes back and says, ‘The silver-haired gentleman would like to know if you’d like the money instead.'”

Typical Raftery, taking a funny moment and making it funnier, almost making a competition out of it, and winning.

Thanks in part to his sharp wit, Raftery never had to go back to coaching after leaving Seton Hall (1970-81) for the broadcast booth. He will do the color on the Boston College-Kansas game today, 1 p.m. tipoff in Allen Fieldhouse, and Don Criqui will be manning play-by-play duties for CBS.

During his short stay in Lawrence, Raftery will make people laugh, from waiters to co-workers to coaches. And he’ll come to the microphone armed with a depth of knowledge about both teams.

Raftery’s humor and competitive nature both were on display the first time KU associate athletic director Larry Keating saw him coach.

“I was coaching the freshman team at Stonehill,” Keating said. “We played the Providence freshmen, and the varsity game was Seton Hall and Providence. They gave us seats right behind the Seton Hall bench. Raf was pulling his jacket off, throwing it. Mickey Crowley was (refereeing) the game. He was a New York-area guy, and Bill was all over Mickey. He got away with saying more stuff in that game without getting a technical, but it was more funny than serious. He always seemed to be able to say the right thing to officials. They sort of laughed it off, and he still was able to get his message across.”

When Raftery traded the whistle for the microphone, ESPN was two years old, just beginning to turn college basketball into the monster it has become.

Some of his catch phrases have become well known, but his style is such that the schtick always takes a back seat to substantive analysis.

Television viewers today are likely to hear many of these quickies roll off Raftery’s tongue today:

“With the kiss!”

“With the blow by!”

“Onions!”

“Send it in big fella!”

“A little nylon.”

“Don, Boston College goes … MAN TO MAN!”

“There’s a little lingerie on the deck.”

Huh?

“A lot of times, stuff just comes out, you don’t know why you said it or where it came from, and it ends up sticking,” said Raftery, who arrived in Lawrence on Friday night after attending a funeral in Albany. “When we were kids and a guy made a great move we would say he faked you out of your jock. That’s sort of a little bit offensive, so I didn’t want to say that, and I guess that just popped out.”

And it stuck.

Raftery, 63, was 27 when he took the job as head coach at Seton Hall.

Kevin Toohill was at Seton Hall on a baseball scholarship and was a walk-on on the basketball team as a senior for Raftery’s first team.

“He would wear those shirts with the fuzzy things on the end (of the sleeves),” Toohill said. “We used to kid him that he looked like one of the Temptations.”

One of the few players old enough to buy alcohol, Toohill said he had a very important job on the bus rides back to Orange, N.J.

“I was in charge of the cooler,” Toohill said. “I had to make sure he had a six pack for the ride home.”

Toohill, who owns a cap-and-gown business in New Jersey, was Chris Mullen’s high school basketball coach when Mullen was a sophomore at Xaverian in New York City. He remains friendly with Raftery.

“If you’re out with him he won’t let you leave, and the next morning he’s the first guy up in the morning, and you’re sitting there laying with your tongue hanging out and he’s full of energy saying, ‘Hey, let’s go, Toozy.’ Toozy. All my life nobody’s ever called me Toozy, except him.”

Gary Cavallo, a senior co-captain of Raftery’s first team and a high school teammate of George Mason’s Final Four coach Jim Larranaga, remains close with Raftery.

“I always ask him: ‘Do you miss coaching?’ He always says he loves what he’s doing, but the one thing he misses are the Saturday-morning practices,” said Cavallo, a contractor in the New York City area. “He always loved it when he implemented something and it worked. He got a little kick out of that.”

And a big kick, Cavallo said, out of beating Bobby Knight’s West Point team.

“He wasn’t a legend yet, but you knew how good a coach he was,” Cavallo said of The General. “That was a fun bus ride after that one.”

Raftery was noted for scheduling aggressively, getting powerhouses to come to Madison Square Garden, schools such as UNLV and North Carolina.

“We seldom won those games,” Raftery said. “Once, when we won, I don’t remember who it was against, and (Assistant coach) Hoddy Mahon – he was with me for 10 of my 11 years – we shook hands with a minute to go and I told him, “We’re going out on the town tonight with the wives and staff. How much do you have?’ He said: ‘I’ve got $20.’ I said: ‘I’ve got $20. We’re going to have a terrific time.’ We’d sign for it and we’d worry for two months about how we were going to get the money to pay for it.”

Times have changed for coaches, and television has been a big part of that change. Before Raftery coached and talked about games, he played them.

An all-state soccer, basketball and baseball selection for St. Cecilia High in Kearny, N.J., Raftery played basketball at Lasalle University and was drafted and cut by the New York Knicks.

Once mistaken for Knicks forward Bill Bradley in his prime, Raftery was quick with a response.

“Someone said, ‘Hey, that was a big game you had yesterday.’ I told him, ‘I didn’t have his game. I couldn’t get into Princeton. And I certainly wasn’t a Rhodes Scholar,'” Raftery said.

Maybe so, but Bradley once tried to run for president. Raftery calls big-time college basketball for a living. You make the call: Who’s smarter?