UD defensive back receives unfinished portrait by late coach/painter Kevin Tresolini, The News Journal
Patrick Crowley has another Delaware football treasure that will last a lifetime.
What makes this keepsake profoundly unique is that it marks the end of a legendary figure’s life and a tradition that helped define him.
“Definitely a special token to take away from Delaware football for me,” the walk-on cornerback and special teamer out of Concord High said.
Former Delaware football coach Tubby Raymond was 92 when he died Dec. 8 after a brief illness. Raymond’s 300 wins and three national titles made him a College Football Hall-of-Famer.
Raymond was also an artist who made sure winning wasn’t the only tradition associated with UD football.
He began painting weekly portraits of Blue Hen seniors when he was an assistant coach in 1956 and continued after his retirement following the 2001 season until several weeks into the 2017 season, when health issues kept him from his easel.
David Raymond had recently obtained his father’s unfinished artwork from Coates Bateman, Tubby’s friend and neighbor in Landenberg, Pennsylvania. Raymond’s art studio was in Bateman’s home. David Raymond brought his dad’s creations to the UD football office so they could be given to those pictured.
It included photos of players whose drawings he hadn’t yet started. But Crowley’s portrait was well underway.
“It’s just an honor to be able to have that to take away and for the rest of my life always have that painting of myself,” Crowley said.
Crowley has been an avid UD football follower since his youth and playing for the Blue Hens is the culmination of a lifelong dream. His portrait drawn by Raymond, including, as all senior portraits do, “Dick” the Blue Hen chicken, plus his photo still taped on as Raymond’s guide, is now framed and hanging at his family’s suburban Wilmington home.
Tubby Raymond, the College Football Hall-of-Famer who turned 91 on Nov. 14, 2016, paints University of Delaware football seniors. Suchat Pederson/The News Journal
There, it shares wall space with the framed letter Crowley, then 13, received from Joe Flacco during his 2008 rookie year with the Baltimore Ravens after Crowley had written to the ex-UD quarterback, plus earlier photos of young Crowley and Flacco as a Hen.
Other unfinished portraits landed with former Delaware defensive back Jim Simmons, now the Brandywine School District’s director of secondary education, and UD senior Ridge Moser, who has been a Blue Hens football operations intern since he was a student at Glasgow High.
The artwork helps preserve his father’s legacy, David Raymond said.
“It really is like, on a spiritual level and on a material level, having him with us,” David Raymond, a former UD punter, said of his Blue Hen football portrait as well as paintings of family members his father did. “I’m certain that extends to other people who have his artwork.
“From an art perspective, this is what’s wonderful about the painter’s ability to capture moments and to capture emotions on whatever medium they’re working with. It lasts forever.”
A bit of 'closure'
Simmons, a safety and cornerback on Delaware’s 1987-89 teams, had been part of a large senior class, so not every player received a portrait.
When the season ended, Raymond, wanting to reward Simmons for his positive attitude and team-first approach, promised the Mount Pleasant High graduate “I’ll get you one,” Simmons recalled. He remembered Raymond perhaps including him on a portrait with a teammate that the other player ending up keeping.
“Over the years, when I saw him he’d say ‘I haven’t forgotten. I’ll get it done,’ ” said Simmons, who was football coach at Mount Pleasant from 1994-2000.
After seeing Simmons at a golf tournament last summer and Simmons having reminded him again, Raymond began outlining Simmons’ portrait.
What Simmons received is that very sketch, of Simmons’ face next to Dick the Blue Hen. Raymond had not yet begun to dab paint onto it.
“I thought about having it painted,” said Simmons, who now has the drawing framed, “but everybody I talked to said ‘No, leave it the way it is, that’s Tubby’s work,’ and they were right.”
After Raymond’s December death, which stunned and saddened former players, having such a keepsake cements his bonds with his former coach and the UD football program, Simmons said.
“Part of it is closure,” he said. “That portrait represents that you actually played there.”
Crowley received a text message in early February saying there was something for him to pick up at UD’s Carpenter football office. He was handed rolled up white paperboard, which he opened when he returned to his car.
“It was kind of mixed emotions,” Crowley said of his reaction to realizing it was his portrait drawn by Raymond. “I was really happy because obviously growing up as a Delaware fan, the number-one name associated with Delaware football is Tubby Raymond. If you know anything about Delaware football, Tubby Raymond is the guy. So I was excited about the fact that he thought of me and painted the picture. It was kind of a cool culmination going into your fifth year to remember your years by.”
There was also a sense of pride in being among Raymond’s final subjects. The 5-foot-6, 180-pound Crowley has seen action in six career games, mostly on special teams, and will be a fifth-year senior in 2018.
But Crowley also felt a tinge of regret and melancholy. He had periodically seen Raymond and spoken with him but “I never built a big relationship with him,” Crowley said.
Raymond had been friends with Crowley’s grandfather Archie Rapposelli, a UD guard from 1948-50 who was Claymont High football coach from 1966-72. Rapposelli died in 2005 at age 76.
“My parents told me coach Raymond used to come to the house all the time and have dinner with him,” Crowley added, “and they went to a lot of coaching clinics together . . . So with my love for Delaware football he’s always been one of the guys I looked up to.
“You hear so many stories you want to emulate him. I wish I could have made a point to go out of my way to sit down with him and just talk to him because that would have been awesome.”
Raymond, who still drove a car, would bring the portraits to the football offices. Each Saturday until last October, a UD player walked into the locker room to find his face on that poster board, along with Dick the Blue Hen and a catchy saying concocted by the clever Raymond, adorning a locker room wall or bulletin board,
The fact that his portrait is unfinished brings some artistic charm and perhaps deeper meaning, Crowley suggested, especially because it represents perhaps Raymond’s final brush strokes.
“I’m, if not the last, then one of the last guys that he got to paint,” Crowley said, “which is special for me.”
Raymond was honored in a moving memorial service at the Carpenter Center on Jan. 12 attended by several generations of Blue Hens, including Vice President Joe Biden and many football players whose careers came after his retirement.
Those portraits helped bond players from all those years and link them to Raymond.
“Tubby’s guys will eventually be gone but these paintings will be there forever,” David Raymond said. “That’s what’s so fabulous about art. I take great satisfaction in knowing that. Beyond his coaching, that’s a legacy”
Contact Kevin Tresolini at ktresolini@delawareonline.com. Follow on Twitter @kevintresolini.
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