Sports dominated my life from the time I was a short, fat 1st-grader with a no-nonsense look that made grownups ask, “Don’t you ever smile?” I didn’t know that my ready frown foreshadowed a career. It’s a great asset for an NFL referee.
The kids at O’Keefe Playground near Merrill Avenue on Chicago’s South Side didn’t care if my expression was sweet or sour. All they cared about was whether a guy played a decent game of 16-inch softball.
To be good at bat and defense, I did what became my formula for success in any undertaking: Study the rules of the game. Learn where to apply them. And discipline yourself to follow through. After lots of practice and experience, I hit in the .600s and became decent at defense too.
This was the 1940s. If there was a hardball diamond in the neighborhood, no one told us. O’Keefe’s was gravel and sand and so small we had to soak the balls in water to keep from banging them over the fence. But the camaraderie during the games (both casual and with the O’Keefe Twilight League) drew us there every day after school and all week long from 8 a.m. to dusk during vacations. Some of us kept coming back for old times’ sake well into adulthood.
Only a fear of serious injury made me give up softball and O’Keefe in 1970. By then I was a referee in the Big 10 and had already been hurt in several games against challengers from all parts of Chicago. The next bit of damage, I was sure, would keep me from officiating an important football game.
O’Keefe’s diamond is gone. It was blacktopped. But it’s my most vivid childhood memory, and it endures in a Chicago artist’s rendering that hangs in the den of my Skokie home. The painting, commissioned by my mother, came to the former Bobbie Weiner and me as a wedding gift 37 years ago.
June 1956 not only marks my marriage and my degree in physical education from the University of Illinois, it also marks the first step I took to become a professional referee. My former high school football coach, the late Ellie Hasan, insisted I join the Central Officials Association. Hasan, a ref himself, knew I had turned to refereeing intramural fraternity games after an abysmal football experience.
I started out playing tackle football in Jackson Park, where the kids used my winter coats for goal lines. It was a logical choice. I was the tubbiest team member, so my coats were the widest. But try and explain that to parents who ask, “How come your coats wear out so fast?”
At Hyde Park High, I was football’s Fatty Arbuckle in a zebra-stripe uniform who sat out two seasons. I had too many inches across and not enough up and down to be sent into a game. When I shot up and slimmed down, Hasan made me linebacker on defense and a starting center. But I never found out how well I could play. Our team was awful.
Even so, I made varsity in college, and our opponents made me into raw hamburger. At 5 feet 10, 190 pounds, I wasn’t tough enough against guys weighing 250. My face was always swollen, and my ego was constantly bruised.
I quit the game and was left with a hole in my self-esteem where an interest in sports used to be. Officiating made the difference. The moment I put on the official orange shirt, I got tough and stayed that way.
My book could have been called “Raised to Referee.” My parents, between them, had the qualities a referee needs most. Mom never lost control during an emergency. She never threw up her hands and asked, “What shall I do?” She just did what had to be done automatically.
A referee needs that kind of self-confidence to make hundreds of split-second decisions. I have to be thinking on my feet every moment of every game. Even though seven officials work a game, I’m the one who makes the calls.
When I sold advertising for my late father’s magazine I learned the value of salesmanship, and I use it on the field as well as in business. A referee not only has to make the call, he has to sell it to everybody-managers, coaches, supervisors and, sometimes, the football commissioner.
Dad’s greatest legacy to my NFL career was his attitude towards risk. “Risk tests a man,” he would say. “Without taking risks, a man may never find out he’s better at what he does than he thinks he is.”
His belief became my belief and gave me the courage to apply to the NFL in 1975 even though I felt I wasn’t yet good enough. The feeling made no sense. I had already worked major games for 11 seasons in the Big 10.
In 1986 everything I had been taught by example and experience came together. I was the self-confident, take-charge kind of person with enough control to make the most important call of my officiating career-and sell it to coaches Mike Ditka and Forrest Gregg.
In a game between the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears, Packer Charles Martin stuffed Bears quarterback Jim McMahon into the ground right in front of me. “This guy’s out of the game,” I said to myself and threw down a flag.
When Martin started to get up, the Bears’ left tackle on the field, Jim Covert-probably the only other person on the field to see the foul-knocked Martin down. Two other officials dropped flags and, technically, we had an offset.
But I decided then and there that Covert wasn’t in the wrong. He had been protecting McMahon. I escorted all 6 feet 4, 280 pounds of Martin off the field.
My supervisors and Commissioner Rozelle reviewed the game on film and gave the call a seven, tops in a one-to-seven ranking system. I felt good. I had done what I had to do without hesitation.
Plenty of times I’ve been cussed out by players, coaches, fans. But I see myself as someone who administers the rules of a complicated game and makes sure it’s played fairly. An unfair advantage must be penalized.
An NFL official can live anywhere in the United States, but Chicago has been my city my whole life. I’ve bonded with people and places and have memories of both that I don’t want to let go of.
I bought my first referee uniform in 1955 at Jarvis & White, a sporting goods store, and put it on wrong. The striped shirt stuck out of the pants, and the socks sagged. Stu Popp, a salesman there, set me straight and showed me how to weight a flag so I’d look official.
I saw Dick Butkus play when he was a fullback and linebacker at Chicago Vocational High School in 1957. I had Howard Wirtz, the best-known referee in the Big 10 conference in 1962, for a mentor. He was the epitome of two major qualities that command respect: formality and firmness, which are part of my own officiating persona to this day.
After 17 complete seasons in the NFL and three stints in the Super Bowl, I no longer need mentors. My job now is to perfect what I’m doing and support younger officials the way a team of good people supported me.
The insight that drives me to improve my performance is: Nobody is perfect, and I’m no exception. I only hope I make fewer mistakes because I make them in public and they can be rerun on film.
