Personal Foul. Tim Donaghy
on the other side of the court. Again, you could hear his foul language from at least 10 rows up; everybody could hear him. As I started walking over, Jerry started going off on me. “And you!” he yelled, pointing at me, but before he could get out another word, I T’d him up.
He just laughed. He had been trying to get Kantner to give him a technical foul the whole time. He was just trying to see how far he could push her, testing her limits like a five-year-old. Either she was too scared to call a T on him, or she probably thought the technical fouls would just bring attention to her, and, therefore, she’d have to explain it to the league office.
Kantner was really hot at me as we headed to the break. During halftime, she picked up a water cooler and threw it at me.
“Who the fuck do you think you are to ride in on your white horse to save me?” she demanded.
“Obviously you didn’t hear what he said to you,” I responded, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. “Because if you had heard what he said, you’d have given him a T yourself.”
Instead, she was just furious at me for giving Sloan the technical that, if she had been the least bit courageous or even professional, she would have given him herself. But she’s not the only one—plenty of refs would let players and coaches call them motherfuckers up and down the court and act like they had never heard a thing. The referees were just too scared of giving guys a T and getting in hot water with the league office. The postscript to Kantner’s story is that after she was fired, there were rumors that she was going to sue. Suddenly, she found herself with a job working with the referees in the WNBA.
When I came into the league, Darell Garretson was the Supervisor of Officials. Garretson was a tough guy. I would sometimes be in the room with him when he got phone calls from coaches and general managers who would complain about referees. He would literally tell those guys to go fuck themselves, in that specific language. He wouldn’t take shit from any of those guys, but he left his position in 1998.
At the time, there was a debate going on in the NBA as to what the “clear path” rule meant. A clear path situation was also known as a “breakaway.” It’s when a defender steals the ball and sprints down the court for a layup, and a player from the other team fouls him from behind. Does the offensive player have a “clear path” to the basket if there is a defender parallel to him? It sounds confusing, and it is. We were having a referees meeting prior to the 1996-97 season, and all 60 regular referees were in the room. Darell Garretson and his boss, Executive Vice President of Basketball Operations Rod Thorn, were debating the clear path rule in front of all the refs. They couldn’t agree about what the rule meant and subsequently got into a shouting match.
“Don’t tell me about the rule!” Thorn yelled at Garretson. “You weren’t at the competition committee meeting where we talked about it. You elected not to go!”
“I’m just trying to clarify it,” Darell shot back heatedly.
Thorn turned to the audience of referees. “Does anyone in the room not fucking know what I mean by a clear path rule?” he asked angrily.
We were totally silent, like kids watching a teacher and the principal getting into an argument. We had never seen anything like it. I’ll tell you this—none of us dared to challenge Thorn, who was the boss of our boss. To be honest, we were confused ourselves about the clear path rule—it’s a confusing rule. But by then the tension in the room was so thick we thought Garretson and Thorn might start throwing punches. Suddenly Bob Lanier, who was working in the NBA front office at the time, got up and shouted, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Timeout! All referees out of the room! Let’s talk about this without these guys in here.”
So the 60 of us quickly filed out of the room, and through the closed door we could hear Thorn and Garretson screaming at each other, calling each other motherfuckers. We were actually laughing, saying things like, “Who’s got money on Rod and who’s got money on Darell?” as if they were going to get into a fistfight.
That was the end of the line for Darell. He “resigned” the next year and was replaced by Ed T. Rush. Rush took a very different approach with the coaches and general managers. He told them, “We want to have open communication. If there’s a problem, call me.” So the coaches and general managers would get on the phone with Rush whenever they had a problem. Even Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban would call him to discuss things. But Rush inevitably gave the benefit of the doubt to the referee. He always had excuses like, “That was a hard game to call.” Cuban finally got frustrated with what he considered Rush’s line of bullshit and tried to get him fired. To his credit, Cuban wanted the game called by the book—a travel is a travel, a palm is a palm. He would say, “I want to have my team built and coached the right way. Call the game as it is in the rules.” But he was a lone voice in the wilderness trying to get rid of the special treatment for certain players, coaches, and owners.
Ed T. Rush had been working as an NBA ref since 1966. Injuries forced him to retire following the 1996-97 season, and the NBA office hired him as the Director of Officiating in 1998. Since the retirement plan didn’t pay nearly as much as disability did, a lot of refs approaching retirement managed to get “injured” and took the disability plan instead. As director, he hired a large staff of assistants to help him. Too many cooks spoil the broth, and too many assistants made our life a living hell—no one did things the same way. Rush was a champion bullshitter. He was one of those guys who wanted everyone to agree with him, and as a result he was two-faced. Rush told one referee what he wanted to hear and then turned right around and told someone else the exact opposite. This put the staff in a constant state of confusion.
Rush loved to play favorites, and instead of moving the best referees up the ladder, he moved his buddies up instead. Referees are rated by five separate entities: the coaches, the general managers, the group supervisors, the Director of Officiating, and the Executive Vice President of Basketball Operations. Those last two count the most, and Rush was a master of office politics, moving refs up and down based on friendships or personal feelings instead of their talent on the floor.
As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who saw through Ed T. Rush. In a 2002 interview in the Dallas Morning News, Mark Cuban said, “Ed Rush might have been a great ref, but I wouldn’t hire him to manage a Dairy Queen. His interest is not the integrity of the game or improving the officiating. The No. 1 priority of Ed Rush is maintaining power. There’s no question in my mind that [NBA Commissioner] David Stern is not the most powerful man in the game. It’s Ed Rush.” As usual, the NBA office didn’t respond well to that level of honesty: Cuban was later fined $500,000 by the league.
But Cuban had it right. Rush did think he was king of the NBA. He even went so far as to change the rating system that had been in place for years so that no one could question his decisions. Referees were no longer privy to their rating on the staff. It’s like Rush thought he could control and convince anyone of anything. Eventually, his bullshit caught up with him and he was replaced.
For some reason, the NBA refused to hire experienced former referees like Hue Hollins and Mike Mathis as group supervisors. Both were veteran referees who had worked the NBA Finals—they were very talented and would have been tremendous supervisors. Instead, the NBA turned to average, substandard, and low-achieving former referees who had nothing to offer the referees they would be supervising. The guys they hired merely filled their positions, beholden to the NBA for giving them a job and more than willing to do the front office’s bidding when a message had to be delivered to the rank-and-file referees.
By 2003, Ed T. Rush was out as Supervisor of Officials. After that, Rush’s job went to Ronnie Nunn. I remember standing in line with Nunn when the NBA started the drug-testing program for referees back in the 1990s. He hadn’t read the information packet the league sent out and was in a panic over the test. He told me about how he took walks in the woods with his buddies during the summer and smoked weed to help him relax. Nunn asked me, “How long does it stay in your system?”
I laughed. “Do I look like a doctor?” I said.
Mark