Personal Foul. Tim Donaghy

      During my first year in the CBA, I only worked weekend games—usually Fridays and Saturdays. The travel was exhausting and the pay was low—just $125 per game—but I knew I had to pay my dues. The grind took a toll on my social life as well. I’d been dating a girl named Ann for five years when she came to me one day with an ultimatum: “Tim, this just isn’t working for us. It’s either me or the games.” Wonder whatever became of her? Actually, it was a tough decision, as I had contemplated asking Ann to marry me. But I loved working as a referee and I wasn’t prepared to give up on my boyhood dream. In an act of serendipity, two weeks after Ann and I broke up, I met the woman who would eventually be the mother of my four beautiful daughters.

      Kimberly Strupp was the sole flight attendant on a 6:00 AM commuter flight from Rockford, Illinois, to Chicago. From the very moment I looked into her big blue eyes, I was a goner. During the flight, we exchanged some small talk and she gave me her phone number. She had an easy manner about her and a spirited sense of humor. I thought we made a real connection during the short flight and I couldn’t wait to see her again.

      Our first date was at Bookbinder’s restaurant in Philadelphia. She was based out of Chicago at the time and caught a flight to Philly to meet for lunch. We talked and laughed for hours, and in the process discovered we had much in common. She was a sports fan, liked to travel, loved to laugh, and was very family-oriented. From that day forward we were a couple. Kim eventually transferred to Philadelphia so we could be closer to one another. She traveled with me to many CBA games and supported me in every way. My dream of making it to the NBA became her dream, too.

      I worked a full slate of games during my second year in the CBA. The travel was rough, the schedule grueling, and the pay still lousy—but I was getting closer to my ultimate goal. I was constantly on the road, making stops at small arenas in towns like La Crosse, Wisconsin, Rochester, Minnesota, and Wichita Falls, Texas. To make ends meet, I worked a variety of odd jobs, anything to pick up a few bucks to pay the bills.

      I was asked to referee the NBA preseason before my third year in the CBA and again just before my fourth year in the CBA. It was an unbelievable experience, one that gave me reassurance that I was up to the challenge. At the NBA level, the game is lightning-fast and all the players are enormously talented. It’s the ultimate level of basketball competition, where only the elite survive.

      I never made it to that fourth season in the CBA: the NBA finally called my name after all those years in darkly lit gymnasiums in two-dog towns, all those soggy sandwiches eaten out of a bag with one hand while driving down a lonely highway, and all that time away from home. It was a dream no more. It was real, and I was right where I always belonged—center court, ready for the tip-off. My starting salary that first year was $69,000—not bad for a guy who’d been cleaning fish in a supermarket just a few years earlier. I was floating on air and finally doing something that made my dad proud.

      My relationship with Kim continued to blossom, and on Christmas night of 1994 I asked her to marry me. Of course, the proposal came in a hotel room in Detroit, where I was scheduled to work a Pistons game in a couple of days. In those days it didn’t matter where we were as long as we were together. We later eloped to Barbados and became husband and wife. For the first time in my life, I had a partner who loved me, supported me, and shared my dreams.

      Just minutes before my first NBA game, I remember telling myself, “I made it! I’m here! Stay calm, do the best job you can, and rely on what got you here.” I was extremely nervous, but at the same time I was thrilled to be on the court with the greatest athletes on the planet, running up and down the floor beside them, watching them do amazing things with 20,000 fans cheering wildly. I was one of a select group of officials who were given the honor of wearing an NBA referee’s uniform. It was a job I was born to do, and the uniform fit like a glove.

      My first regular-season game as a referee was memorable, to say the very least. It was November 9, 1994, and the Houston Rockets were playing the Indiana Pacers in Indianapolis. My boss and mentor Darell Garretson was at the game, and I was working with referees Paul Mihalik and Blane Reichelt. The NBA had just established new hand-checking rules—no one could put a hand on an offensive player who had the ball beyond the foul line. The league was trying its best to clean up a game thought to be getting too physical; the idea was that the new rule would make the pace of the game faster, and both scoring and ticket sales would go up—always the NBA’s main concern. Since this was one of the first games of the year, Garretson really stressed the hand-check rule during our pregame meeting.

      We called so many fouls during the game that the fans went nuts. It seemed as though we were blowing the whistle on every other play, usually for fouls that wouldn’t have been called the previous year. Between the three of us we called 69 fouls, an extremely high number for an NBA game. As a result, there was no flow to the game and the fans were noticeably irritated. And they were right—play stopped so often that the whole purpose of the rule was totally defeated.

      Still, the only thing faster than Reggie Miller’s trigger that night was the beating of my heart. Every time I blew the whistle, all 20,000 pairs of eyes were on me. I liked it, the same way I liked getting a laugh from my friends back in school. Talk about showtime!

      At the tail end of the game, things got intense. Indiana was losing in the final minute and Reggie had the ball in the corner, about to attempt a three-point shot. He was defended by Houston’s Hakeem Olajuwon, and after pump-faking him into the air, Reggie buried his shoulder into Olajuwon’s neck, trying to draw a foul but knocking Hakeem down in the process. Instinctively, I called an offensive foul on Reggie. The place went nuts—as did Reggie and the rest of the Pacers. He thought I would call a foul on Hakeem and that he would go to the foul line for three shots. He was wrong.

      Things got so chaotic that it took more than 20 minutes to finish the last minute of the game. The fans were throwing anything they could grab onto the court including water, beer, soda, and coins. Every time we got it cleaned up, they’d just throw more. I was standing in the center of the court to stay out of range of the flying debris; Mihalik and Reichelt stood on the baseline under the basket. Even the announcers at the scorer’s table were covering their bodies and microphones with whatever they could find. I remember thinking to myself, How the hell are we going to get this