Bring Real Refs Back - Now!

Every player, every coach has a story of zebra incompetence. The NBA, after just four weeks, is littered with evidence of replacement officials. Fights, suspensions, technical fouls, injured thumbs, dislocated shoulders, too many foul calls, not enough foul calls, insecurity, lack of knowledge. And it wasn’t as if the top referees in the CBA were working the NBA games because they weren’t; those guys weren’t going to risk incurring the wrath of the veterans they someday hope to join. In some ways, the first month of the season has been very close to preseason.

The game we love shouldn’t include referees who know less about illegal defense than the paying customers do. It shouldn’t include a referee who worked a beer league game involving Chris Mullin’s brother the previous night. There are stories in every city, every night, stories that should embarrass the league from the top down. A few nights ago at USAir Arena in Landover, Md., a replacement ref told a paying customer who wasn’t being at all abusive to “sit down and shut up.” The replacement ref should have been the one to sit down.

A few nights before that, a club official (who won’t be named here because the league would try to fine him $1 million) told me the two calls these CBA fellows simply couldn’t make to save their lives were goal-tending and illegal defense. In the first quarter of the ensuing game, the replacements missed two goaltending calls and illegal defense violations that were so obvious reporters were shouting them out from press row.

After a fight-marred game Monday night in Boston that featured 98 foul shots, Alonzo Mourning said incredulously, “Man, there were so many whistles blowing in here I thought there was an echo in the building. Seriously, I thought there was an echo. I was afraid to guard anybody after a while.”

To win a game on the road was nothing short of miraculous because every call seemed to be a homecourt call. The poor scab refs would just melt in Madison Square Garden and Orlando and the really pit-like places around the league. And they commanded almost no respect, even former NBA player Leon Wood. A replacement ref would have to ask a player for the ball a half-dozen times and then take it from his hands.

More than the replacment refs, who shouldn’t have been put in such a situation in the first place, blame the NBA. Playing hardball with the players this summer was one thing; playing hardball with the referees over what amounts in the big picture to tip money was petty.

Every night you’d look at a game and wonder how the league could let this continue. I’ve never seen Larry Brown/John Lucas/Hakeem Olajuwon/Shawn Kemp/Patrick Ewing so agitated, so out of control. HAKEEM? Mr. Peaceful? Larry Brown almost had to be tranquilized after a confrontation with one ref.

Unions and management can make the numbers say almost anything they want. We’re not going to get into some arcane examination of the numbers here, but let me say one thing: if it’s true, as union leader Mike Mathis says, that some NBA refs will make $34,000 per season less than their NHL counterparts with the same experience, the NBA ought to be ashamed, relative to the revenue the two sports generate. If the NBA isn’t a bully, it certainly appears to be.

I don’t want to hear a single word about the regular refs being in shape and having to take physicals and perhaps participate in a short “training camp.” If the deal is signed, get the real guys on the floor before the mishandling of some injurious situation claims Michael Jordan or John Stockton or David Robinson. If the scabs haven’t commanded any respect through the first month, imagine the disdain the players are going to show lame-duck scabs. Watch technical fouls go through the roof in the next few days if the real zebras aren’t hurried back.

“I can’t wait to see the old refs back,” Kevin Willis said after the brawlgame in Boston. “It’s going to be incredible. When you have inexperienced refs, they try hard but they make crummy calls.”< But as one coach said, “At least they were bad for both teams.”

The fastest game in the world is also the most difficult to officiate. The best officials in the world have a difficult enough time trying to make the right call. Anything less than the best was a joke, except we grew tired of laughing some weeks ago.