FaninAma
11/19/2007, 04:26 PM
Making the Right Call
A little "feel good" story about the Austin Mafia:
It isn't easy being a sports official, but modest salaries, lots of travel and constant criticism take a backseat to the camaraderie and challenges of the game
By Bruce Schoenfeld (http://www.cigaraficionado.com/Cigar/CA_Authors/CA_Author_Page/0,2870,40,00.html)
Two men walk into a restaurant in Austin, Texas, and notice a football game on the television above the bar. Well, notice may be too strong. What they do is glance up, look at it for a moment as a reflex action and, without any of the details registering, look away.
Football is Randy Christal's profession, and Jon Bible's, too. But it isn't the way they earn their living, and the score of a game is of no more interest to them than week-old lottery numbers. "I watched an entire NFL game yesterday afternoon," Christal says, a measure of pride in his voice, "and I couldn't even tell you which teams were playing. But I do know that Ed Hochuli was the referee." Christal, who gives management seminars, and Bible, an economics professor and an attorney, are officials.
Their sport is college football, though they also umpire college baseball and even worked the foul lines of the American League Championship Series during a 1985 labor dispute. Mostly, they referee football in the Big 12 Conference, spending their autumn weekends shuttling between their Austin homes and places like Stillwater, Oklahoma; Boulder, Colorado; and Lawrence, Kansas, sleeping in motel rooms and eating road food. At the end of the season, they probably couldn't tell you which team had won the conference. But they'll know who had a heck of a year calling pass interference. Officials across the four major American sports, whether they're referees, umpires, linesmen or anything else, live in a parallel universe to ours. They see the same games we see, but with different eyes. They can't root for a team, even in their hearts. They can't fraternize with players, famous or otherwise, and they can't let their emotions show, even when a stadium full of fans is thirsty for their blood.
"There's no doubt we're a different breed," says Bruce Dreckman, a major league umpire. He's sitting in a bar in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after working a spring training game, unwinding with three other umpires, a few fans he knows, and a whole lot of local regulars who probably would give him abuse if they knew who he was. "You go around this room," he says, "I bet you wouldn't find one other guy who would say, 'Yeah, I'd go out and do that.'"
Even if they thought they might like it, the boos might swiftly convince them otherwise. Lawyers and used-car salesmen hear the jokes about their careers, politicians know they'll never appeal to much more than half their constituency, but officials have chosen a profession in which getting publicly insulted is part of the job. More than that, it's an American ritual. Minorities are protected by civil rights legislation, while women, homosexuals, religious zealots, the elderly, the handicapped and even the overweight are defended from discrimination by the law. But hating the guy who enforces the rules at our sporting events transcends race, religion and economic status.
Last winter, Dreckman and some friends were listening to a basketball game back home in Iowa, and they heard Iowa State lose by a few points in the final seconds. "The guys started blasting the referees," Dreckman says, incredulous all over again in the retelling. "And I'm saying, 'You can't even see what happened! You're listening on the radio.' It didn't matter. We're the scapegoat. They're always trying to shoot the messenger."
If that isn't bad enough, nearly all the abuse is heaped on officials far from family and loved ones. That's because referees and umpires are nearly always on the road during the season. They're like traveling salesmen who don't get home for nine months at a time. Think of it like a professional athlete who plays half his games on the road, and the other half...on the road. Except for the rare occasion of working in your hometown, an official, a referee or umpire has no home games.
That's what the life has always been for officials, since professional and college sports began. And here's news: it's getting worse. Once upon a time, an ump could blow a call at home plate at Briggs Stadium in Detroit on a summer afternoon, and the 8,000 fans who saw it would be outraged, and that would be it. There was no instant replay on the scoreboard, and usually no television audience. Fans in the stands and even the reporters in the press box might have thought they saw a play a certain way, but they couldn't be sure. So they learned to live with human imperfection as part of the game.
No more. Now every game, in every sport, is seen live across the continent. If you have satellite television and a VCR, you can watch them all, night after night. If an ump blows a call, you can seethe at his incompetence again and again on "SportsCenter." Or you can see it on videotape and study the sequence as if it were the Zapruder film. "These days, the whole world is watching," says Ronnie Nunn, the National Basketball Association's director of officials.
Why does anyone choose such scrutiny for themselves? Most officials earn between $100,000 and $200,000 a year, so they're not getting rich. And it isn't as if officiating is an easy route to the field, the court or the ice. By dint of mathematics alone, getting to the top as an official is more difficult than getting there as an athlete. Major League Baseball has 30 teams of 25 players each, or 750 total. It employs 68 umpires. If players are more common than U.S. representatives, umpires are scarcer than senators.
Christal, who still longs for a call from the National Football League, has never made it, but he did referee the NCAA national championship game in the Fiesta Bowl in 2003. "There are probably a hundred national championship Fiesta Bowl rings around out there," Christal says, flashing the rock on his finger he earned for officiating the game. "There are seven of these." And that's the start of an explanation, right there.
Referee for Life
It begins with Board of Recreation or Pop Warner games umpired or refereed for pocket cash, and goes from there. You're a high school kid, you like sports, maybe play on a few varsity teams. But you aren't getting to the big leagues and you want to stay in the game.
"I wasn't a very good athlete," Christal says now, between sips of Merlot in the lobby of an Austin hotel. "I wasn't going to be on television playing sports. I was 22, I enjoyed the crowd, the band, the tradition, and I wanted to be part of it."
Christal, 55, teaches management for a living. He is familiar with the work of David McClelland, who authored the seminal 1988 work Human Motivation, and hypothesized that everyone seeks achievement, affiliation or power. "Power I don't give a flip about," Christal says, "but I really enjoy the affiliation with the other folks involved. And walking out there at 55 years old, in front of 50,000 to 80,000 people. I know that there are a lot of fat cats up there who can buy and sell everybody on the field. But they can't do what I do."
He has made refereeing his lifelong avocation, but he hasn't made it a living. It doesn't pay enough. Even some NFL officials, who earn substantially more, work other jobs and travel to game sites on Saturday mornings. Some years ago, when Christal was working the World League of American Football, he'd fly to Barcelona for the weekend, then work a week teaching at the Texas State Comptroller's Office.
These days, Christal is recognized as one of the finest football referees in the country. Twice in seven years, he has worked the Division I championship game. A career was hardly in his mind the first time he reffed a junior high flag football game while working as a tax examiner, but his competitive instinct kicked in. He found himself wanting to excel, a process that hasn't stopped. "You wonder if you're able to work that next level, and you do, and you survive it," he says. "Pretty soon, you start looking up the road again."
Around the time he moved from high school to college, officiating became the most important thing in Christal's life. "I would have left this job and become a plumber to keep officiating," he says. In the end, he'd sacrifice two marriages. "I've umpired in the Olympic Games and at baseball's World Championships. I've done the Rose Bowl, two national championship football games, eight College World Series. But at what cost?"
Along the way, he met Jon Bible at a Little League tournament. A year younger than Christal, Bible is the nephew of Dana X. Bible, a former University of Texas football coach. Jon was 16, one of Houston's better high school baseball players, when he umpired his first Little League game, back in 1966. "I figured out all you had to do was stand behind the mound, and at the end they handed you $7.50," he says.
Bible played in the Minnesota Twins' minor league system, then headed to law school. He started umpiring college baseball games for fun, made a contact and wound up in the Gulf Coast League. He realized that baseball's constant travel would doom his marriage, so he gave up umpiring for refereeing football, which would keep him home all week.
Christal and Bible became fast friends and the linchpins of a group of umpires and officials known as the Austin mafia. These days, if they don't grade out as the top two Big 12 referees every season, they're not far behind. Following the 2002 season, Bible was first in line for a bowl assignment according to the grades kept by the league office. He chose the conference championship game. Christal was second and ended up at the Fiesta Bowl, which was using a Big 12 crew.
That's how he found himself on the field for one of the most controversial finishes to a college season in memory. With Ohio State in need of a first down deep into overtime against Miami, a pass play ended in an apparent incompletion. It would have handed the Hurricanes the national championship, but several seconds after the play ended, a flag was thrown and a pass interference call made. Given the reprieve, Ohio State scored and eventually won the game.
As the referee, Christal was responsible for the entire officiating crew. But he was also responsible for watching the offensive backfield on the play, which is why he saw nothing more than exactly what he was supposed to. "People always ask me about that pass interference call," he says. "I say, 'The only thing I can tell you is, the quarterback wasn't roughed.' 'Well, weren't you watching it?' 'No, I've got a job to do.' I watch the snap, the right tackle if it's a right-handed quarterback, and then I live and die with the quarterback."
If he sounds prickly, it's because that play underscores how little the public understands his job. They don't know about the 90-minute conference call every Wednesday night during the season, the hours watching other officials on tape, the years of training, or even the three miles Christal runs on most days to stay in shape. "All anyone cared about on the pass interference call was how late the flag came, but if you watch the play on the tape, it was absolutely the correct call," he says. "The man was held three times on the same play. But because Dan Fouts said it wasn't pass interference, everyone buys into it."
Christal and Bible agree that the second-guessing is the most galling part of the job. Everyone who steps into the broadcast booth feels free to pass judgment, and these renowned broadcasters—all former players, not officials—influence the opinions of millions who might not fully understand the rules. "I worked Texas Tech and Texas [last fall], and a lot of people at our country club were at the game or saw it on TV," Bible says. "I can't tell you how many of them told me, 'Hey, you did a great job the other night.' Well, with all due respect, how the hell would they know?"
When Bible was one of a handful of officials offered jobs by the NFL for the 1994 season, he was thrilled. "I thought, 'This is the ultimate, this is the pinnacle, this is fantastic," says Bible, who had been working in the Southwest Conference at the time. He lasted three years, three of the worst of his life. He'd been refereeing for decades, as opposed to working as a line judge, a back judge or an umpire, but like all newly hired NFL officials, he started in the league in the defensive backfield, watching receivers running at him—a view he hadn't seen in years. He graded out poorly on the weekly reviews that each officiating crew is given. After that, he was afraid to make a mistake.
Getting fired was a relief. He returned to his law practice, caught on with the Big 12, and regained his life. Christal saw it all happen. He was sad to see his friend fail, but happy to have him back in the college ranks.
Having lived through Bible's NFL experience, Christal is the wiser for it. He knows now how special the bond between a referee and his crew is in a conference like the Big 12. He only earns about $875 a week (augmented by a $300 per diem, and airfare) for 10 weeks, as opposed to the $7,000 to $8,000 a week for 16 weeks that an NFL referee makes, but he didn't take the job to get rich, or even to watch college football. "I don't love the sport," he says flatly. "I don't even like it. What I love is my crew. They're family. I can't wait to get on a plane and fly to Columbia, Missouri, this weekend. What I do is fun. I don't know of anyone in the NFL—no one, absolutely no one—who says it's fun."
And yet, no less than any of the players on the field, Christal is a competitor. As content as he is in the Big 12, as rotten as his best friend's experience was in the NFL, he can't stand not knowing if he would have been good enough. So when asked if he would consider an NFL offer if given the chance, he doesn't hesitate.
He has spent his life reaching for the next rung on the ladder, and the NFL is at the top. "It's all about being the best," he says. "I'd like to know if I could do it. I'd work the NFL this Sunday, if I could."
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