Brooklyn, NY – The Jewish Kid From Being Homeless To NBA Referee

Brooklyn, NY – It was a few minutes into the game on Halloween night and a player for the hometown Milwaukee Bucks was trying to inbound the ball to a teammate.

When he took too long, the ref blew his whistle, signaling a five-second violation — and the crowd howled its disapproval at the offending referee.

But for Marat Kogut, a newly minted official who had just called the first infraction of his NBA career, the chorus of boos was music to his ears — the culmination of a 14-year dream filled with cold hotel rooms and a doubting Jewish mother.

The journey has included a razzing by NBA stars.

“They smell the rookie,” he said.

It all started during the NBA lockout in 1995, when Brooklyn-born NBA ref Dick Bavetta used the time off to visit a high school sports-officiating class that Kogut, then 16, was taking at FDR High School in Bensonhurst.

“He blew my mind away,” Kogut, 30, recalled.

After the class, Bavetta met privately with Kogut and encouraged him to pursue a career as a basketball official.

“He took down my name and address, and a few days later, he mailed me an authentic ref jersey,” Kogut said.

Afraid of ruining it, Kogut never took the jersey out of his home in the Kensington section of Brooklyn.

“I wore that thing like an undershirt — whenever I went to bed,” he said. “Whenever I was watching NBA games I’d put on the jersey and would mimic the ref movements.”

His mother, Laura, was not amused.

“She’s like the typical Jewish mother,” Kogut said. “She was a realist. When you have a dream you sometimes forget reality.”

His parents immigrated to Brooklyn from Ukraine in 1979 when Marat was just 2 months old. The Koguts sought to escape poverty and anti-Semitism.

The entire family slept on an Ocean Parkway bench after they were forced to leave a Queens homeless shelter. His dad, Leon, quickly found work as a barber and eventually saved enough to open his own shop, a popular Kensington spot above the Newkirk station of the Q train.

But the odds were stacked against Kogut.

In high school, he spent his free time volunteering as a ref at a local recreation league. At 6-foot-2, he knew he wasn’t tall or talented enough to make the pros as a player.

At first, he showed little skill with the whistle.

“I was clueless,” he said. “But it seemed fun.”

To improve, he took a local officiating class after school. That helped him prepare for a nationwide certification exam.

At 16, Kogut became the youngest person certified by the local International Association of Approved Basketball Officials.

He soon was honing his skills in youth leagues, where the pay wasn’t bad.

It wasn’t just about the money, though.

“It was really my passion to be on the floor,” he said. “It was tough for me in the beginning because I looked so young.”

Some of the games actually got violent.

“They would throw chairs and people would threaten him,” Leon Kogut said.

Marat attended St. John’s, where he served as student manager when the Red Storm advanced to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament in 1999.

“I had this whole vision,” Kogut said. “I wanted to be inches away from the Big East refs.”

He graduated in 2003 with a degree in computer science and found work as a life insurance salesman. He was miserable.

That June, Kogut got his big break. After a four-day training camp in Tennessee, he got hired to officiate several Division I games. The next summer, during a pro-am tournament in Los Angeles, he caught the attention of Ronnie Nunn, director of NBA officials.

Nunn invited him to a NBA referee training camp — and offered him a job working Developmental League games.

Kogut spent the next four years refereeing D-League games in the winter and handling WNBA games during his offseason. He earned about $67,000 his final year. The schedule was grueling.

“I missed birthday parties and engagement parties while sitting in a cold hotel room 2,000 miles away, but it was all for a dream,” Kogut said.

He was in his Mill Basin apartment when the promotion call came on Oct. 23.

“When those words finally sank in I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

The first person he told was his dad.

“He actually cried,” he said. “My dad is my No. 1 fan.”

Leon watches every game and constantly offers advice.

“I told him to stop tugging his pants,” Leon said.

Kogut gets paid $91,000 a year and receives a $300 per-game food and hotel allowance. But there are plenty of challenges. He is on the road about 20 nights a month and his work is closely scrutinized — a supervisor at each game grades every call.

“It’s not all glamour being on the court with the best players,” he said. “We eat and travel alone. It’s tough maintaining relationships and it’s tough missing family events.”

At home, he enjoys cheering on the Yankees, playing golf and doing magic for friends and family. At the start of the season, a crowd of supporters drove to Philadelphia to watch him ref the 76ers versus the Utah Jazz.

After the game, Utah forward Andrei Kirilenko greeted them while Kogut changed out of his uniform.

“We all took pictures with him,” Leon remembered. “He told us how excited he was for Marat.”

But the fun ended as soon as Marat got back on the court.

“He told us that he can’t socialize with the players, so we left,” Leon said.