Joe Forte felt good. In fact, he felt better than good. He was an hour outside Philadelphia, the weather was beautiful, and he was about to spend the evening doing what he loved to do best: referee a basketball game.
“This is my favorite time of year,” he said. “Once you hit February, it’s all downhill. You can see the finish line so you don’t feel tired. And the games are better because everyone is sharp. I walk on the floor every night and look around and say, ‘This is exactly where I belong.’ There is nothing I would rather do than referee a basketball game. To me, it’s like I’m still playing the game. Only now, my shots are my calls and my goal is to hit at least ninety-five percent of them.”
On any list of the top officials in college basketball, Joe Forte’s name will appear, usually right at or very near the top. At the age of forty-two, he is one of the most respected men in his profession, a fact reflected by five Final Four appearances in the last eight years and two appearances in the national championship game.
To Forte, like most of the men who officiate college basketball games, refereeing is a profession. True, most college officials have another job, but during the winter that job usually takes a backseat to refereeing. A top college basketball official will work about eighty games during a season, usually averaging a minimum of four games a week.
Forte has gone a step further than other officials. He has just quit his job as a salesman for a food products company to devote full time to the marketing of the new whistle he and fellow official Ron Foxcroft invented. The whistle is called, cleverly enough, “The Fox40.” Forte’s name is pronounced “Fort-A,” but Fox40 is close enough.
The whistle is the product of four years of work. It came about after Forte and Foxcroft, working a tournament together in South America, realized that in certain situations, their whistles couldn’t be heard over the din of the crowd. “What if we could invent a whistle with a higher pitch that could be heard anywhere?” they said to each other one day, and the concept was born.
It took four years, lots of time, and lots of money, but eventually they developed a pealess whistle with a higher pitch than the old whistle. Now, more and more officials are using it, Forte and Foxcroft are marketing it nationally, and they are starting to make some serious money.
“A lot of people say to us now, ‘Gee, I wish you’d have told me, I would have invested in you guys at the beginning,’ “Forte said. “But the fact is, when Ron and I first started doing this, a lot of people laughed at us.”
No one is laughing now. Except perhaps for Forte.
He has been involved in sports all his life. He was born in the Bronx and one can still hear the twelve years he spent there in his voice. His parents moved to Levittown when Forte was twelve and there he played high school baseball and basketball. One incident, his sophomore year, may have had as much influence on the way Forte works today as anything that ever happened to him.
“We were playing in a big Christmas tournament,” he said. “You know, big deal type games if you’re a kid. In the second quarter, I was bringing the ball up and this guy was guarding me tight. I went by him and he tripped me. It was an accident, but the ref didn’t see it at all. I fell and he called me for traveling.
“I got up, really upset and said, ‘Come on, call the damn foul!’ He nails me with a technical. My coach was a really strict guy. He yanked me out of the game right there. I sat down, figuring I wouldn’t play until the second half. Then, at halftime, the coach tells me I’m off the team for cursing at the ref and getting a technical. I couldn’t believe it. I went home that day and it wasn’t until five days later that I got reinstated after a lot of negotiations.
“Now, when I work a game and a kid gets upset at a call, you know, reacts instinctively and says something he shouldn’t, I try to remember what happened to me. I know it isn’t personal, it’s just an emotional reaction. It takes a lot for a kid to get a technical from me.”
Having survived his outburst, Forte went on to star in both sports first at Brevard Junior College and then at High Point College in North Carolina. In basketball, he played on two teams that reached the NAIA Final Four. In baseball, he was a good enough prospect that the Cincinnati Reds signed him and sent him to the Florida State League.
But after one season of minor league baseball, Forte figured out that the major leagues wasn’t in the cards for him. When a friend of his from college landed a job coaching football at Ballou High School in Washington, Forte went there as an assistant coach and a physical education teacher. Two years later, looking to make more money, he got into sales.
It was during this time that Forte began to officiate. He had done a little refereeing in college, working intramural games to make some extra money, and he had enjoyed it. When he got out of coaching, he looked into refereeing some junior high school games to keep his hand in the game. “I just wasn’t ready to grow up completely and give up sports altogether,” Forte said. “I’m still waiting to grow up I guess.”
Forte got hooked on refereeing. He started working any game he could get—at any level. “There were nights when I refereed four ten-and-under games,” he remembered, laughing at the memory. He was dating his future wife, Lois, at the time, and she got so tired of his obsession with refereeing that for a while she told him not to bother to call. “She dumped me,” Forte said. “I had to beg her to take me back.”
But the hours began to pay off. He began getting better assignments at the high school level. In 1971, Forte was offered the chance to referee freshman games in the Southern Conference and in the ECAC. He accepted. Two years later, he was elevated to varsity games and a year later was offered a job in the Eastern League, one of the minor league forerunners of the Continental Basketball Association.
In 1976, the NBA referees went on strike at the start of the season. Forte was one of several Eastern League officials asked to work in their place. There was the promise that those who did good work would have a chance either to stay in the league or be elevated in the near future. Forte turned the chance down. He wouldn’t break the strike.
“It broke my heart,” Forte said, “because there was nothing in the world I wanted to do more. But I believed in what the referees were striking for. They made their living this way and they wanted some long-term security. As much as I wanted to work I don’t think I could have looked at myself in the mirror if I had done it. Saying no was one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do in my life.”
Forte went back to the Eastern League and then, after the season, he received an application in the mail from the Atlantic Coast Conference. He filled out the application, sent it back to the ACC office, and several weeks later received a notice in the mail informing him that he was now an ACC referee. To this day, Forte has no idea who recommended him or if the ACC ever scouted his work before hiring him.
Forte did have limited experience working college games. In fact, his introduction to college officiating had been unique, to say the least. It had come in 1974 when he was working as a freshman referee in the Southern Conference.
“I was home on a Saturday when my phone rang just after noon. I was fixing lunch. It was the league office. There was a game that day at Fort Myer between American and Drexel. One of the officials assigned had thought it was a night game. The game started at one o’clock and he couldn’t get there. They said, ‘Get out there as fast as you can.’
“I threw on my [officiating] clothes, raced to Fort Myer [he was living in Maryland at the time], and came running into the gym just as Clark Folsom, the other ref on the game, threw the ball in the air. I was standing at the end of the court where the play was coming and I caught Clark’s eye and waved to him. He didn’t see me. So, I thought, ‘Should I wait for a whistle?’ I figured I’d just take a chance, so I stepped onto the court and got into position. Clark saw me then and everything was okay.
“But as soon as I got onto the court I heard a voice in the stands yell, ‘Hey, ref, what’s the matter? Don’t you know when the game starts?’ That started a little booing, no big deal. But there I was, working my first college game and I got booed before I’d even blown my whistle once.”
Welcome to the business, kid.
Forte was welcomed warmly into the ACC, quickly establishing himself as a top official. He made the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 1978 and just kept rising. He worked his first ACC Tournament in 1981 and was assigned to the final. He has worked every final ever since.
Now, though the ACC is still his primary assignment, Forte works games in seven different leagues: the ACC, the Big East, the Atlantic 10, the Colonial Athletic Association, the Southeast, the Sun Belt and the Metro. Most weeks he works a minimum of four games, often more. This week he’ll work six games, assigned out of five different leagues. Before the season is over, like most top officials, Forte will have worked in the neighborhood of eighty games. There are some who contend this is overwork, that officials work too often and as a result are not always as sharp as they should be.
Forte insists that isn’t so. “I think by working a lot you stay sharper,” he said. “If I’m off for a few days it takes me a few minutes to really get into the game. I like to keep working. Especially now, with the three-man crews, you aren’t running that much of the court. It isn’t as tiring. As long as you’re in shape, you’re okay.”
The reason officials work so much is simple: money. The top of the pay scale is $350 a night (in the ACC, Big East, SEC, and Big Ten) and with per diem and expenses added, officials may receive $650 on a top pay night. But most nights aren’t top pay nights and even so, a referee who works eighty games a year will probably net no more than $35,000. That isn’t bad for four months of work but it isn’t all that much; it is only made by the very top officials and those guys lose money taking time off from their full-time jobs to make that money.
So, officials tend to cut corners to save money. Often, they stay in cheap hotels, they will drive rather than fly when they can do it, and they will take work wherever they can, whenever they can. If the NCAA was smart, it would hire a group of full-time officials to work big games and the NCAA Tournament and pay them well enough so that they didn’t have to cut corners.
Forte admits that being one of the top officials in the country puts pressure on him, regardless of what league he is working in. “It’s nice when I hear guys say that I do a good job and they feel comfortable when I’m working,” he said. “But knowing I have that kind of reputation means I have to go out there every night and try never to be down or sluggish. Every game you work is a big game to somebody and if you act like a game isn’t important or is beneath you, they’re going to notice and they’re going to get mad and they’re going to be right. I try to look at every game and say, ‘Why is this game important?’ There’s always a reason why it is.”
There will be no problem finding significance in tonight’s game: Villanova—Georgetown. This is one of the Big East’s great rivalries. Both teams are scuffling to try to wrap up NCAA berths and both have been struggling a bit of late. For Forte, there is another concern: Georgetown has been in two fights in three weeks and he and his partners will have to be conscious of trying to avoid a fight when the game starts.
Forte reaches Philadelphia by 4 o’clock. The game is at 7:30. Since he is driving back to Washington after the game to stay at a friend’s house (he lives in Atlanta now), there is no hotel for him to check into. He stops at the Days Inn to meet Nolan Fine, one of the other officials working the game.
Forte calls Fine “Wonder Boy.” He likes giving other officials nicknames. Fine’s comes from a story in a refereeing magazine (yes, they exist) in which he was called the “Boy Wonder” of college officials. Last March, at thirty-three, Fine had worked the NCAA final along with Forte and Jody Silvester. Forte, who didn’t become a college official until he was thirty-one and worked his first final at thirty-seven, immediately dubbed Fine “Wonder Boy.”
Wonder Boy, who sells insurance and mutual funds in Virginia Beach when he isn’t officiating, is trying to sleep when Forte arrives, but he is quickly roused. Forte wants to talk plays (referee talk for calls that are questionable or tricky) and catch up on the gossip. Officials are very much a fraternity and there is little that goes on that all the brothers don’t know about very quickly.
“Officials learn to stick together,” Forte said in explaining the fraternity feeling. “I think we feel like we’re misunderstood by most people. We’re always seen as the bad guys. We don’t see ourselves that way. Most officials are good guys, very good guys, but most people don’t want to hear that. So if you’re going to be understood by anyone, it’s going to be another official. We all really like spending time together.”
That is not to say that officiating isn’t competitive. Just as teams want to make the NCAA Tournament, advance to the Final Four, and get to the national championship game, so do officials.
In 1987, for the first time the NCAA brought nine officials to the Final Four instead of six. Prior to 1986, three of the six officials assigned to the semifinals advanced to the final. Under the new system everyone worked one game. When the officials met on Saturday morning to receive their assignments the first three names called were those doing the first semifinal; the next three called were doing the second. “In other words, the last thing you wanted to hear was your own name,” Forte said. “Because hearing it meant you didn’t have the final. Everyone wants the chance to work the final.”
Forte’s first final had been in 1983. That was during a period when games were assigned according to crew, meaning either the crew from the first semifinal or the crew from the second would work the final. Forte was working in a crew with Hank Nichols and Paul Housman. All three were ACC officials.
When N.C. State beat Georgia in the first semifinal, Nichols turned to Forte and Housman as they prepared to go out for the Houston–Louisville game and said, “Well, guys, it looks like this is our last game of the year.”
Like everyone else, Nichols never dreamed that three ACC officials would be assigned to a final with an ACC team playing. In fact, as the other crew came off the floor after working the first game, Rich Weiler had turned to Larry Lembo and said, “We’re in the final.”
Forte laughs telling the story. “I remember telling Hank and Paul, ‘Let’s go out there and work such a good game that we’ll make things really tough on the selection committee.’ ”
They made it tough enough that the committee indeed selected them to work the Houston—State final. And, when Lorenzo Charles soared over everyone on the last play of the game to dunk Dereck Whittenburg’s air ball to win the national championship, what was Forte thinking? “I was thinking, ‘Thank God he’s nowhere close to goaltending,’ because if he had been it would have been my call to make.”
Forte says he loses sleep if he thinks a call of his in a crucial moment may have been wrong. He constantly looks at tape of his games, looking for general things like positioning as well as for specific calls to check up on himself. Before each season, he goes back and looks at tapes from the previous five seasons to see if he has made any changes—good or bad—in the way he works a game.
Now, he is telling Wonder Boy about his most recent strange call. “I have a game up at Rhode Island, okay? Kid from Rhode Island is inbounding. He can’t get the ball in and the defender is in his way. So, he reaches out with his off hand and pushes the defender out of the way.”
Forte stops like the guy in the TV commercial. “What’s the call?”
“Player control foul,” Fine says.
“Right, Wonder Boy,” Forte says, nodding in appreciation. He laughs. “I go over to the scorer’s table and this is what I said: ‘Guys, you aren’t gonna believe this one, but I got a player control foul on number twenty-three.’ They were all cracking up.”
Fine asks about another call, this one in a game between Providence and Miami that Forte had worked. In the last minute, with Providence down one, Tito Horford had blocked a shot that could have won the game for Providence. Forte had, as the officials say, “no-called it,” ruling the block was clean.
“Was that one all right?” Fine asks.
Forte nods. “I was really worried about it. I thought I had it and Larry [Lembo] and Timmy [Higgins] both said after the game it was a good call. But it bothered me. I wanted to see the tape. Well, I went to dinner with Larry and his wife after the game and as we were walking to the elevators all of a sudden we hear [Providence Coach] Gordy Chiesa behind us. He goes, ‘Joe, Larry.’ I’m thinking, ‘Oh boy, here we go now.’
“He walks up to me and he says, ‘Joe, I looked at the tape on Tito’s block. Tito got it clean. You made a good call.’ What a relief that was. Gordy really showed class coming over to tell me that.”
Forte likes most coaches and players. Naturally, officials don’t socialize with coaches. They stay in different hotels and learn to keep a certain distance. But working with people for years, you are bound to develop some feeling for them.
That is not to say that Forte’s career has not been devoid of run-ins. Georgia Coach Hugh Durham called him some ugly names in the newspaper several years ago after a close loss, and has never apologized. Forte won’t talk about Durham—at all. And, several years ago, Forte had problems with Virginia guard Othell Wilson, a gifted but troubled player who refused to keep his mouth shut during games. Wilson’s ACC career ended in 1984 with him chasing Forte off the floor after Virginia lost a first-round game in the ACC Tournament.
Wilson ran up behind Forte, screaming profanities at him. Forte turned and said, “Othell, you better get into your locker room.” Wilson kept screaming. Forte kept his cool and kept walking.
“I felt bad about the whole thing because I never felt like Othell was a bad kid,” Forte said. “But he just couldn’t control himself at times on the court. What was bad about it from my point of view was that it put me in the spotlight. That’s the last thing you want. You just want to work the games, make sure the kids are the ones who decide the winner and the loser, and go home.”
Forte has a simple motto when working a game: “neither seek nor avoid.”
Forte and Fine leave for the Spectrum at about 5 P.M. Officials are required to be in the arena ninety minutes before tip-off. Forte always leaves extra time in case of traffic or, if he is unfamiliar with a place, bad directions. Pulling up to the VIP lot at the Spectrum, Forte rolls his window down.
“Refs,” he says, and the security guard waves him through. “It’s funny,” Forte says, “no one ever asks you to prove it. I guess they figure no one would claim to be a referee if he wasn’t one.”
The officials’ locker room in the Spectrum has all the ambience of a dungeon. It is tiny and dirty with three small changing benches and one shower. It is remarkable that, in a major arena, no one has bothered to think about decent facilities for the referees.
Larry Lembo is the third official tonight. He will drive in from New York, where he is a teacher and tennis coach at Queensboro Community College. Twenty-five years ago, Lembo was a 6–4 center at Manhattan College, and he is still described by everyone who saw him play with the same word: “bitch.” As in, “He was a bitch to play against.”
Lembo has also been to several Final Fours and worked the 1980 final between UCLA and Louisville. In short, a top crew is working this game. Lembo, whose primary league is the Big East, is the referee. Forte is U-1 (umpire one) and Fine is the U-2 (umpire two). The U-2 is known as the “U-boat.” His job, off the floor, is to make sure the door gets locked on the way out and is unlocked either by security or by carrying the key himself when the officials return at halftime and after the game.
The difference in responsibility among the three officials in a game is minor. The referee runs the pregame meeting, throws the ball up for the center jump at the start of the game, and is responsible for getting the teams back on the floor after a time-out. The U-1 is responsible for the home team: getting them out of their huddle, controlling them if a fight breaks out. The U-2 does the same with the visitors.
Like the teams, the officials always review the game before they go out to work it. Different officials use different methods of running a pregame meeting. Lembo likes to let the two umpires mention situations that should be looked for before he does any talking. He saves the thing he likes to talk about least for last.
“God forbid, I mean God forbid, if we should have a fight, let’s break it up as fast as we can and then consult with each other before we adjudicate.”
Forte nods. “Let’s watch the stuff off the ball very carefully,” he says. “A lot of times, especially with the pressure defense, that’s what gets things started.”
All three officials know that a Georgetown game is very tough to work. Part of it is the Hoyas’ pressure defense, always trapping and slapping at the ball. But another part of it is that the shooting in Georgetown games is almost always poor on both sides. The Hoyas can’t shoot, but they can defend.
“The more missed shots you have, the more rebounds you have and the more contact there is,” Forte says. “The hardest game to work is the kind with a lot of missed shots and no dominant rebounder.”
This game has the potential to be hard.
The pregame meeting over, the refs relax. Forte is talking about technicals. When officials talk about technicals they say, “I teed him up,” as in, “Coach so-and-so kicked his chair over so I had no choice and I teed him up.”
Lembo is talking about the Georgetown—Pitt debacle of early January, Jerome Lane’s “intercepted” technical that kept Paul Evans from being ejected. “That was the worst game I ever worked in my life,” Lembo is saying. “I mean, right from the beginning. The kids were all over each other, the clocks didn’t work right for most of the game, it was really awful. I thought the game was never going to end.
“Then, in that last minute, we had to tee up both coaches. First, Evans goes crazy and Jody [Silvester] and Jimmy [Burr] both tee him up. Then, I’m about to give him another when Lane comes along and says, ‘Come on, man, please give us a break. He already got two.’ I figured, okay, let it go.
“Then the clock breaks again and John [Thompson] comes screaming out of the box. He was right about the clock so he was okay coming out of the box, but he was screaming and gesturing so much I had to tee him up, too. The whole thing was a nightmare.”
Forte tells a story about a completely different kind of technical. “Last year my partner and I are working North Carolina at Notre Dame.” Forte always refers to Gerry Donaghy as his partner since they often work together in the ACC. “In the last minute, Notre Dame is going to win the game and, after a foul call, the fans go wild, throwing things on the floor. Gerry tells the PA to announce that if they don’t stop it’ll be a technical.
“Next time there’s a whistle, they start throwing stuff again and the leprechaun comes onto the court. That’s it, Gerry tees him up. He goes over to the scorer and signals the tee. Digger [Phelps] comes over and he says, “Who is the tee on?’
“Gerry says, ‘The leprechaun.’
“Digger never misses a beat. He says, ‘The leprechaun is from Carolina.’
“Gerry just looks at him and says, ‘Oh yeah? Then what’s that ND on his uniform?’ ”
It is time to go. A security guard comes to escort them to the court. “If by some chance things get hectic,” he says, “we’ll take you out through the side tunnel.” Fine, the U-boat makes sure the guard knows to come back at the end of the half to open the door for them.
On the way out, Forte delivers his nightly line: “Guys, let’s call ’em right, so we can sleep tonight.”
Lembo laughs. “Let’s go paint a Picasso,” he says, and they walk onto the floor to the scattered boos that are as much a part of an official’s life as his whistle, Fox40 or otherwise.
The game is, relatively speaking, an easy one, even though Georgetown shoots a putrid 32.5 percent for the game and the two teams combine for 41 turnovers. The only real problem is caused by the weather. During the day, the temperature in Philadelphia hit 65 degrees, a record for the date. Because of the warmth, the ice underneath the basketball floor at the Spectrum is melting and the floor is full of wet spots. From the first minute, players are slipping and sliding as if they are trying to run on ice.
Early in the game, the officials call John Thompson and Rollie Massimino together to tell them they’re going to have to call all the traveling calls that will be caused by the wet floor. Letting the coaches know this early may keep them from becoming frustrated later.
At halftime, with Villanova leading 34–27, the talk is about the floor. “I’m afraid to do anything but take baby steps,” Lembo said: “You slip now, you’re done for the season.”
Forte is concerned about Villanova’s Rodney Taylor, who slipped coming down with a rebound and did a split, pulling something in his leg. “I just hope the kid isn’t hurt badly,” he says. “It’ll be a miracle if we get through this without a serious injury.”
Somehow, they do. Villanova wins 64–58 and the three officials leave the floor the way they like to leave at game’s end: unnoticed. “Very good job,” Lembo says as the three men shake hands in the locker room. “I can’t think of anything we could have done differently.”
“Nice job, guys,” the security guard says, bringing them postgame sodas.
“We always hear that,” Forte says, “when the home team wins.” He is back in the car heading for Washington thirty minutes after the final buzzer. He will arrive at his friend’s house shortly after 1 A.M. and will stay up an extra ninety minutes, winding down and watching a tape of the game. By noon on Tuesday he will be on the road to Richmond to work Old Dominion-Richmond that night.
“Good game,” he says, looking forward to it. “I’m with my buddy [John] Clougherty and my partner, Ron Foxcroft. Should be a good day.”
Not even the power of the word “refs” can get Forte as close to the entrance of the Robins Center as he wants to get tonight.
It is pouring rain when he and Ron Foxcroft pull into the parking lot and Forte wants to park the car on the sidewalk next to the back door of the arena. “Can’t let you do that,” a security guard says.
“Oh come on, pal,” Forte says. “We’ll get soaked walking up from the lot. There’s no one using this door, anyway.”
“Sorry,” the guard says, “I got orders.”
Forte knows he is going to lose this argument. He can’t even tee the guy up. So he goes for a laugh line. “Let us park here and we’ll give you a couple of calls.”
The guard, who is probably too wet to have a sense of humor, doesn’t even crack a smile. Forte retreats to the parking lot and he and Foxcroft sprint from there for the door.
Inside, John Clougherty has already arrived, having driven up from his home in Raleigh. With Hank Nichols now semiretired to run the NCAA’s two-year-old officiating program, Forte and Clougherty are generally considered the top two officials in the country.
They are friends, but there is also an unspoken sense of competition between them. One of them will be chosen to represent the U.S. in the Olympics next fall.
Before focusing on the game, the three men exchange gossip. There are two members of the fraternity fighting cancer, Pete Pavia and Charlie Vacca. Both have had to stop working, at least temporarily, to receive treatment. “I worked with Charlie in Hawaii over Christmas,” Forte says. “He seemed fine. Then I heard he had an attack down in Alabama and Lou Grillo saved his life.”
Forte has heard right. Driving through an ice storm after a game at Alabama, Vacca had lost consciousness in the backseat of the car Grillo was driving. Grillo pulled the car over, yanked Vacca out of the car and tried to find a heartbeat. Finding none, Grillo administered CPR. Vacca started breathing again. Fortunately, because there was little chance of getting an emergency vehicle to them in the horrible weather, a passing car told them they were little more than a mile from a hospital. Vacca recovered.
Later, telling the story, Grillo would shake his head and say, “Actually, we were lucky in a lot of ways. Suppose a police car had happened by and seen this black guy sitting on top of a white guy pounding on him? That wouldn’t have been too good a deal for me.”
Forte is the referee tonight. He goes through all the various possibilities, talking in referees’ lingo. As in most professions, referees have a language of their own. Some of the slang expressions they use are things like:
Tonight, Foxcroft has a play for Forte. “Saw it on television last night,” he says. “Guy shoots a three-point shot. Defender deflects it. It goes in. Two points or three?”
“Two,” Forte says. “The three-point shot is dead as soon as the ball is deflected.”
Foxcroft and Clougherty shake their heads. “Wrong. It’s still three. The latest Atlantic 10 directive talks about it.”
Forte is already reaching for his rule book. “That’s wrong,” he says. “I’ll prove it.” He is still looking through the rule book when it is time to go onto the floor. As they leave, he presents Clougherty with a new Fox40, complete with a ridge that has been added for comfort.
“It’s the new improved Fox Forty,” Forte says.
“Yeah, just like Kellogg’s corn flakes,” Foxcroft says. “It means we can raise the price.”
Even though this is a nonconference game, it is an important one to both schools. Each is scrambling for postseason position. Richmond is 15–3, Old Dominion 13–5. Early in the game, Richmond Coach Dick Tarrant is on all three officials. “I think they let an old guy [fifty–seven] like me get away with more than a young guy,” Tarrant says later. “I take advantage of it. Why not? You need every edge in this game.”
During one argument, Forte points down at Tarrant’s foot, which is across the line of the coaching box.
“Dick,” he says, “you’ve got a wing tip on the line.”
“Joe,” Tarrant shoots back, “I’m glad the game’s so easy you’ve got time to look at my feet.”
Forte laughs. Officials will often cut a coach extra slack if he says something funny. Hank Nichols, generally considered the referee of the last twenty years, tells a story about an argument he had one night with Jim Valvano. “Jimmy was all over me about a call. So, finally, I said, ‘Okay Jimmy, that’s enough. I don’t want to hear another word.’
“Jimmy says to me, ‘Hank, can you tee me for what I’m thinking?’
“I said, ‘No Jimmy, I can’t tee you for what you’re thinking.”
“And he says, ‘Okay then, I think you suck.’ I had to let him go. It was too good a line to tee him up for.”
Richmond controls the game until a flurry of missed free throws in the closing minutes makes it close. The Spiders finally win, 82–75, after a drawn-out last few minutes.
“I didn’t think it would ever end,” Clougherty says.
“Tom Young never quits,” Foxcroft answers.
Forte has his head buried in the rule book, still trying to prove he is right about the deflected three-point shot. He is well on his way to losing his second argument of the night. No matter really. He is happy with the game.
“Last night, when I looked at the tape of Villanova–Georgetown I noticed that when I was in the center position I was much too close to the play. I was so close on a couple of plays the kids could have passed me the ball. Tonight, I backed off. It was better.”
He is back in Washington by midnight. On Wednesday, he will fly to Raleigh to work Virginia–N.C. State. “Good game,” he says. “The kind that gets you pumped up very easily.”
He will be up early in the morning, though. “I want to call around and see what I can find out about that three-point deflection play.”
As soon as Forte’s plane lands, he races across the street to the Triangle Inn, the airport motel, knowing that Nolan Fine and Tom Fraim are there. He has confirmed that he was wrong on the three-point deflection play, but he wants to see if they will answer the question correctly or not.
They both come up with the right answer. Fine is in town to work Duke–Georgia Tech in Durham. Fraim will be with Forte and Rusty Herring at Virginia–State. They leave Fine to his afternoon nap and head off in search of food.
Once again, Forte is working with a strong crew. Fraim is retiring at the end of the season after twenty-three years as a ref. He worked the infamous regional final in 1987, during which Bob Knight pounded the courtside telephone after Fraim teed him up for coming out of the coaches’ box. Fraim’s only regret is that he didn’t tee him up again after the outburst.
Rusty Herring, the third official, is a rising young referee. He reached the Final Four for the first time last year and drives a car with a license plate that reads, “Luv2Ref.” His wife’s license plate reads, “LuvARef.”
Fraim is the referee tonight. His pregame talk is very detailed. He even has notes that he refers to. Fraim is into details: “On a foul-out, make sure the guy coming in is coming in for the guy who fouled out … If there’s a time-out called after a foul-out, make sure they sub before the time-out … Be careful administering free throws. Make sure you get the right shooter. Watch for guys going into the lane. We’ve been getting beat on that … Let’s have good visible counts … Try not to get straight-lined … Remember to suck on the whistle sometimes. Let’s not pop it too much in this game … Make sure you give the player’s number on a time-out call.”
This last detail is one of those little-known things about officiating. Why does it matter which player on the floor called a time-out? Answer: If there is confusion later in the game about whether a time-out was called by a team or by television, there is a specific reference in the scorer’s book as to which player called the time-out.
Fraim also makes reference to the emotions involved in calling a technical foul. “If we tee someone up, let’s help each other. There’s always that extra shot of adrenaline when you do it, so let’s not look dumb by going to the wrong foul line or something. Let’s call it, administer it, and get it over with.”
Technicals are taken very seriously in the ACC. Any time an official calls a technical in an ACC game he is required to call ACC Supervisor of Officials Fred Barakat that night to tell him what happened and why he called the tee.
Fraim adds one more thing: “If a coach comes out of the box because he’s coaching, give him some leeway. If he’s bitching, it’s automatic, tee him up.”
Forte, drinking his nightly ration of pregame honey, has one more thought when Fraim is finished: “Let’s not call anything cheap early. Let’s talk to the kids, rather than whistle them. This is an important game so the coaches might be hyper, especially early.”
Reynolds Coliseum is slightly less than sold out. Although Virginia is 4–2 in league play, they are still thought of as a doormat. For State, this is a big game. The Wolfpack is 3–2 in the ACC and has a four-game losing streak against Virginia. The Cavaliers always give them a hard time.
Tonight is no different. No one leads by more than four points during the first half. Seven minutes in, when Herring calls a foul on Charles Shackleford, Valvano is up screaming. Forte stands directly in front of him, facing the floor, saying out of the side of his mouth, “Easy Jim, easy.” He was right. Valvano is hyper.
When Herring calls an illegal screen on the last play of the half that allows Virginia to tie the game at 39–39, Valvano screeches all the way across the court, heading for the locker room.
In the locker room, Fraim asks Herring about the last call. “The screen gave them an open jump shot, Tom,” Herring says. “I didn’t have any choice.”
“Absolutely right,” Fraim says.
In preseason clinics, officials were instructed endlessly about advantage/disadvantage. The point being that not all contact is a foul, that if something mildly illegal happens that doesn’t affect the play, it should be no-called. The good officials are living by the rule. A lot of bad ones still call every touch foul they see.
“I almost popped the whistle on your toss, Tom,” Forte tells Fraim. “It was a little short.”
“Good thing you didn’t,” Fraim says laughing. “At my age I can only get it up good once a night.”
“It’s a pretty slow tempo,” Forte notes. “That means every call is an important one.”
The game is close until State goes on a 10–2 run for a 62–52 lead. Virginia comes right back with an 8–0 run. The game goes to the wire. A Mel Kennedy three-pointer cuts State’s lead to 71–69 with 1:14 left. But Vinny Del Negro hits a crucial drive with thirty-five seconds to go that ices it and State wins 75–69.
“Great game,” Forte says when it is over. “Both teams really played well. Del Negro is a hell of a player.”
Nolan Fine, who insists that Forte is by far the best official in the country, believes that Forte’s appreciation for the game is one of the things that sets him apart from other officials. “He played the game and loves it so much that he’s studied it to the point where he just feels the game better than the rest of us,” Fine says. “Joe never looks like he’s working out there. It all looks easy because he loves it.”
This game Forte loved. “A game like that, I stand on the floor before it starts, looking around, hearing the band, and I get needles in my legs,” he says. “I feel so lucky to do something I love and get paid for it.”
On Thursday, Forte will be in Washington for a game in an almost empty arena between two struggling teams, St. Joseph’s and George Washington. “But to them, Forte says, “it’s a big game. So to me, it’s a big game.”
The crew working St. Joseph’s–George Washington is a remarkable one, considering that this is a game between two not very good teams in the Atlantic 10. Forte is the referee. Luis Grillo is the U-1. Tim Higgins is the U-2. In April, all three of them will work the Final Four.
Higgins is one of the more popular officials around. His colleagues call him Barney Rubble because he looks and sounds exactly like the Flintstones’ cartoon neighbor. Before the game, Barney is talking about arenas he would like to work. “I’ve never had a game in Rupp Arena,” he says. “I’d like to work there.”
“I’ve never been in Pauley Pavilion,” Forte says. He turns to Grillo. “Of course, I love working at Mount St. Mary’s.”
Grillo is assistant athletic director at Mount St. Mary’s, a Division 2 school.
Forte’s pregame is simple. “Let’s remember that both these teams need a win,” he says. “They’re probably both going to be tight and maybe a little frustrated.”
It is GW that is frustrated. The Colonials have been playing horribly since New Year’s and are buried near the bottom of the Atlantic 10. Tonight will be another miserable game for them. They stay close for a half, leaving with the score tied at 27–27. But from a 36-all tie, St. Joseph’s goes on a 20–4 romp that puts the game away. The Hawks go on to win, 67–55.
It is not an easy night for Forte. He gets poked in the eye on a first-half play and needs Grillo and Higgins to up-periscope and freight-train in to make a call he can’t see. Late in the first half, one of the St. Joseph’s players sidles over to him and says, “You know that guy ain’t got no game.”
“Who?” Forte asks, thinking the player is talking about one of the GW players.
“Him,” the kid says, pointing at Grillo. “That ref ain’t got no game.” Forte resists the urge to tee the kid up and instead tells Grillo the story at halftime.
Late in the game, with St. Joseph’s on the foul line, Forte makes the GW cheerleaders stop pounding their megaphones against the wall, which in the quiet, empty gym reverberates all over. “Why did you do that?” Higgins says afterward.
“They shouldn’t be doing that,” Forte says.
“But they were doing it all game,” Higgins answers.
“They were?” Forte says. “I didn’t notice until then.”
He is tired. Friday, he will fly home to Atlanta for a day off. On Saturday, he will be in Columbia, South Carolina, with his partner Donaghy to work Clemson-South Carolina.
“Intrastate rivalry,” he says. “Big game.”
Every time Joe Forte walks on the floor, he tells himself he is working a big game. That is one of the reasons why he is so good at what he does. He’s a ref. And proud of it.