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Officials united against scrutiny
Sunday, July 29, 2007
BY DAVE D'ALESSANDRO
Star-Ledger Staff
Jake O'Donnell was among the best in his profession for nearly three decades, a basketball referee with a square frame, Don Shula chin and a growling countenance that players interpreted as "not to be messed with." He officiated more than 2,100 NBA games, and each was characterized by an extraordinary knack for anticipating the play, marking him as a man who could smell contact and conflict like a distant rain.
But foresight doesn't follow you into retirement, apparently, because he never envisioned what the job would become for his successors.
"It's always been a thankless job -- no doubt about it," said O'Donnell, 68, who remains the only man ever to officiate both baseball and basketball All-Star games. "But I always thought I was different. I loved visiting different cities, loved being in the arena, and the atmosphere of the crowd. That's why I became the official in the first place. I never dreaded it like some guys, not one minute.
"But now, the strain of the job on these guys just seems overwhelming. The demands are ridiculous. I've only been gone 12 years, and from what I can see, the job is 10 times harder. I'm not sure ... if I would like it anymore."
Given the unending psychological deliberation lately about Tim Donaghy -- and what his transgressions may represent -- perhaps the best judges of the most nefarious episode in NBA history would be his peers and predecessors, who know of the job's demands better than those looking at the profession through the media prism.
O'Donnell is just one of them -- still a spiritual member of a universally distrusted group that will tell you that the pressures facing NBA referees are ceaseless, with daily burdens that sit on them like a possessive parent.
To a man, they want the sporting public to regard them as three regular guys (sometimes two men and a woman), who are responsible for fending off the chaos, mayhem and self-interest that lie just beneath the civil disguise of athletic showmanship.
But they also make it clear that this is perhaps the easiest part of their job, which also includes 150,000 miles of travel per season, 120-150 nights away from their families, countless hours of film work and clerical duties, physical pain, nightly verbal abuse from strangers, unyielding scrutiny from supervisors they often do not respect, and punishments -- financial or worse -- for the occasional mistake.
And stress. Lots of stress. Perhaps the kind that would make a talented, 40-year-old man making $260,000 stray into a world that no referee had ever dared venture before.
"Sometimes, you look at a young guy and you can just see he won't be able to take it," said Hue Hollins, who officiated from 1975 to 2003. "It really takes a certain type to do this job. You have to have the right temperament -- one personality for on the court, one for off the court. You have to have intestinal fortitude. You're going to get abuse from the fans and second-guessed from your superiors, and you have to work through it. And then when you think you've got it, you're going to go back and do it all again the next night."
Hollins paused, as if to wonder how he did it for 27 years.
"You know," he said, "nobody ever asks me about this. And it's long past the time we started talking about it."
INCOMPETENCE AT THE TOP
During his 74-minute news conference to address the Donaghy calamity Tuesday, commissioner David Stern gave an erudite defense of his crew of 60 officials, which was remarkable for its balance. Each compliment was followed by a negative afterthought, which seemed to be a concession to the critics of the guys wearing the whistles -- who by league mandate are not allowed to defend themselves by granting interviews.
"By and large, they get it right most of the time," Stern said, and that was followed shortly by, "They get it wrong sometimes."
"Sometimes they perhaps carry themselves in a way that is not as modest as we would prefer" was followed by "but they do their darnedest to get the result right."
And he added that his greatest concern, "rather than chastising them ... (is) reassuring them that I am committed to protecting them, while at the same time making sure we keep our covenant with our fans" -- as if those are mutually exclusive aims.
This equivocation was noted with disdain by many members of his officiating staff, according to a current referee who cannot reveal his identity for fear of reprisal. The frequent implications that they represent the group holding the league back -- at a time when it should be at the top of its game, so to speak -- is the lingering problem in this relationship.
The NBA would not make anyone in its operations department -- notably, Supervisor of Officials Ronnie Nunn -- available to elucidate Stern's remarks for this story. But the men who once worked for him believe that he should be as forthcoming with his criticisms of management -- and himself -- for not understanding the demands of their jobs.
In short, they portray their employers as experts in the dubious art of creative tension.
"First of all, there's incompetence from top to bottom," Hollins said. "You have Ronnie Nunn at the top, who was never a top referee, and he is not respected by any ref in the field today. From there, the referee observers in each city are not competent -- I know of one who is a high school football coach -- and some of the group supervisors were failed referees.
"Sure, we make mistakes. But when I left the league, refs were in the 96th to 97th percentile of getting calls right. But it was always the same second-guess -- by incompetent people. From a mental standpoint, it's brutal. Most guys get gun-shy and can't take it. I'm a professional referee for 27 years, and some supervisor who proved he couldn't do it is telling me how to do my job? That's like sending an auto mechanic into O.R. for heart surgery."
"It goes back to the strain," O'Donnell said. "The games were easy. Now they have all these reports, you don't get to sleep until 1, you get a wake-up call at 4, and then you start all over again the next day. It's like a 20-hour job. The only free time is in the afternoon, and all you do then is take a nap. You make good money, sure, but the league has to ease up to a point.
"We haven't even gotten into the toll it takes on families -- that's a mess. If you talk to a lot of officials, I don't know if there are a lot of happy marriages. I'd say at least a quarter of them end up in divorce."
"Nowadays, you're even competing with the owners," added Wally Rooney, who was an official for 23 years until 1993, and a supervisor for seven years after that. "They actually have team employees doing their own work with (referee) statistics, so there's even more pressure. The feeling in the league (is), you get paid good money, why shouldn't you be under the gun every game?"
Mike Mathis, an official for 26 seasons until his retirement in 2002, was more terse: "David Stern doesn't have any interest in easing the burden of the officials," he said.
"He wants to control the players union and the ref union and the entire world," Mathis continued. "He should stop concerning himself with all that and look at what's going on. Just don't give lip service to the referees. They carry the integrity of the league. That's the lesson in all this. And now we got a disaster because it has been breached. It's great to sell shoes and jerseys and sell out arenas, but don't make your concern for the officials just a sidelight."
Which raises the question: If the job is so taxing, with the league erecting an infrastructure of unreasonable, Draconian demands every year, why do it?
In a 2001 interview with the Star-Ledger, referee Bob Delaney, the Paterson native and former New Jersey State Trooper, put it best:
"It's what we're trained to do," Delaney replied, when asked how he coped with the chronic irritants of the job. "Most of us have been doing it for decades, and regardless of what some coaches and fans might think, the vast majority of us are pretty damn good at it. You learn to deal with the headaches. It's hard at first for the young guys, but you learn to work with a crew to keep the game under control and let the athletes do what they've come to do. It can be a tough job, but it can also be a great job, especially when you get a tough call right.
"You never call a perfect game, because we're all human, but I can tell you this: Every one of us strives for perfection."
Another current official, who cannot be identified because of league rules, agreed.
"I read the other day that we're a bunch of corrupt egomaniacs with a God complex," he said. "That was very interesting. I always thought we were just a bunch of basketball fanatics trying to get the call right. I'm sorry we're not perfect."
EVEN MORE STRESS
Donaghy was clearly one of the imperfect ones, if gambling accusations are true. What made him allegedly break the law and risk his career won't be answered anytime soon, but one expert won't rule out the stress of officiating as a contributing factor.
"People that get into officiating they have a healthy attitude about control," said Dr. Les Barbanell, a sports psychologist from Fort Lee. "You need organization skills, leadership skills, and you want people to listen to you. To some extent, those are healthy character traits.
"But if they are excessive, it would turn into a problem. For example, if an official has a certain history where they would feel suppressed by parental figures or supervisors, they'd have a need for more power. If you believe in an unconscious, it takes them over and you have a blind spot. You're running the lives of multimillion-dollar players. That's an awesome feeling. It goes from a benign need for control to the pathological. If someone comes along and says, 'You can have more control, and we'll pay you for it,' it taps into your vulnerability."
Barbanell added that mental strain often leads to aberrant behavior.
"If you're not a popular person in any context, you're going to feel anxiety," he said. "There's always stress if you're a minority. And face it, if you're a referee, you're a minority. You're not a great guy to anybody."
Donaghy's fellow referees, of course, cannot accept that this could lead one to fix games. For them, integrity is not a conditional word; it doesn't change with the time zone or an arena's noise level. It is an indelible image of yourself, and of your commitment to do the job properly.
"I'm still floored he would do something like that," Hollins said. "I still say it comes down to one thing, if he's guilty: He thought he should be making more money for the job he was doing. I just wish the guy got out faster if he couldn't handle the stress, because he's just put more stress on the profession at large."
"The treatment from the fans is going to get pretty bad," O'Donnell said. "I could sit here and say I can handle it, but it would bother me if I'm still officiating. My heart goes out to those guys. You probably can't even go out for a beer after the game anymore. That's no way to live your life."
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