A Season Inside (36 page)

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.