After 57 years, the counting is about to end
Warriors’ official scorer set to retire after long tenure
Fred Kast has seen plenty of basketball in his 57 years as the official scorer for the Golden State Warriors — some good, some bad, some amazing. After Stephen Curry scored 62 points for the Warriors on Sunday night, Kast got a telephone call Monday morning from one of his closest friends.
“You know, after every basket that Curry made, I could hear him shouting, ‘Thank you, Fred!’ ” Kast recalled his friend telling him. “He was pulling my leg.”
Kast, who will turn 82 this month, has recorded every field goal, every free throw, every foul and every timeout in nearly every Warriors home game since 1963-64. He jots the stats into an NBA-issue, spiralbound notebook that goes to the league office at the conclusion of each season. In a league that has seen its share of technological advances, the official scorer — the person who logs each game’s most vital elements — is a throwback, and every team has one. Somewhere in the NBA archives, there is a small library of Kast’s handiwork.
Kast has refined his craft through about 20 coaching changes, 23 playoff appearances and four championships, manning the scorer’s table at no fewer than six arenas, including the Cow Palace, the San Francisco Civic Auditorium and Oracle Arena. But nothing lasts forever, and Kast is set to retire after the Warriors’ game against the Los Angeles Clippers on Friday night. As the news began to circulate among his friends and colleagues this week — Kast wanted to keep it quiet — they tried to register what it meant.
“It ’s a shock to the system,” said Brett Yamaguchi, the team’s longtime senior director of game operations.
Kast had not planned on stepping away this season, but disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic made him realize that it was time. Staff members who sit at the scorer’s table this season need two virus negative tests, collected 24 hours apart, in the three days before a game. That means Kast sometimes must make an extra three-hour round trip from his home in San Jose, California, so that he can be tested at the arena.
Before retirement, Kast has kept busy, working three home games already this week. He will be replaced by Kyle McRae, who has spent 30 years as a Warriors statistician. Kast has been tutoring Kevin Chung, who will assist McRae, providing Chung with copies of his work from a few recent games so that he could study them — and a couple of blank pages so that he could practice on his own.
Before he became the NBA’s executive vice president for basketball operations, Kiki VanDeWeghe was a high-scoring forward whose own stats were documented by Kast on multiple occasions.
“He helped set the model for how to do the job of official scorer at a high level,” VanDeWeghe said.
Growing up in Rahway, New Jersey, Kast may have gotten his basketball genes from his mother, Marie, who played a halfcourt version of the game as a young woman. His father, Fred, worked at a brokerage firm on Wall Street and kept his car in a garage that had a basketball hoop nearby.
Kast was predisposed to the game for one other reason: He was tall. By the time he reached high school, he was nearly 6-foot-6 and a promising low-post presence. He eventually left for Duke on a basketball scholarship, helping the team win its first Atlantic Coast Conference championship.
After graduating, Kast left for California to work in sales for a medical supplies company. As much as he loved the game, he thought his only connection to basketball moving forward would be as a fan.
In the fall of 1963, not long after relocating to the Bay Area, Kast bought a ticket to watch the Warriors — and Wilt Chamberlain, whom he had once met at a summer basketball camp — at the Cow Palace, the arena that was housing the team after its cross-country move from Philadelphia. Before Kast reached his seat, he bumped into a college friend who was working at the scorer’s table. The friend asked Kast if he would be willing to help.
Kast said he became the team’s official scorer later that season.
People who get jobs on the scorer’s table for the Warriors tend to keep them. Jim Maher has worked for the Warriors in various capacities for more than 50 years, most recently as their game-clock operator. Lori Hoye has been the team’s chief statistician since 1989, and now leads a four-person crew that tracks in-game stats on a computer system.
Hoye, 61, has long worked closely with Kast, whose scorebook is the official record and whose penmanship is precise. (“What happens if the computers break down?” Kast said.) He uses two pens: a black one to take notation in real time and a red one to compile totals at the end of each quarter.
Kast will continue to watch the Warriors from home — and “Dancing With the Stars,” one of his favorite television programs. In some ways, it might be easier for him to enjoy the team’s theatrics now that he no longer needs to pay close attention to his work. He marvels at the speed of the modern game, and at the skill of players like Curry.
“His shotmaking ability is uncanny,” said Kast, who never thought he would have a front-row seat for so long.
He is grateful that he had one at all.