Veteran referee talks Milwaukee, calls and memories
D.J. Carstensen will be waiting anxiously on Selection Sunday. Is he going to the NCAA Tournament this year or will his streak end at 12 straight trips?
Good news would come via email, followed by a phone call to tell him where he’s headed. No TV show for him. Referees are picked on the same days as the teams, just without all the fanfare.
Carstensen, 54, was born in Milwaukee and is still well connected to Wisconsin. Calling games in the Big Ten and Horizon League brings him to his home state numerous times each season.
Before working a game at the UWMilwaukee Panther Arena, Carstensen struck up a conversation at the press table and agreed to an interview about his experiences.
The resulting interview, conducted by telephone during the Big Ten tournament, evolved into a conversation during which Carstensen wandered through stories about his roots, playing at Utica College for Milwaukee Bucks championship-winning coach Larry Costello and strange encounters with players. He also discussed the business of officiating, misconceptions and one call he’d like to have back. (Hint: It involves Wisconsin.)
Here are highlights:
Q. You’re from Milwaukee? What’s the connection?
A. I was born in Milwaukee. My whole family actually originated in Milwaukee. Our start was my grandfather came over on the boat from Germany and ended up in Milwaukee. My mom and dad and both my uncles were Custer High grads. My uncle Jim was firstteam all-City and I think the captain of
the team the year Freddie Brown was on the (all-City) team.
My dad (Don) graduated from UWM, got his masters from UWM, was director of admissions at UWGB when it first opened and then went on to ACT, the American College Testing programs, and was vice president there for a number of years. Their national headquarters are in Iowa City. But (we) still had family in Milwaukee and Oconomowoc and Madison. So getting back to that area is always a bonus outside of the officiating for me.
Obviously, small world, for a guy like me to be able to play for Larry Costello, having grown up in Milwaukee was really a cool thing. I remember exactly where I was at when the Bucks won the (1971) world championship as a kid.
Q. When did you leave Milwaukee? A. Just my early years in Milwaukee, then we went up to Green Bay. We moved to Philadelphia in ’72, so I had 9 years … in Wisconsin but always came back because my grandparents had a place up in Three Lakes. On Townline Lake. And then we lived, like, four blocks from Bart Starr. We’d go trick-ortreating at his house. … To grow up in Green Bay, with 60,000 people and you’ve got the Green Bay Packers, there’s no family gathering that there isn’t some Green Bay Packers talk. We follow that closely.
Q. So, you go from Wisconsin to out east to Iowa. How did you then end up …
A. Back east? I was playing high school basketball, a pretty good high school basketball player. Had some lower Division I schools, some of the better Division II schools (interested) and really I think if I had my choice I would have gone to Green Bay, UWGB. But it didn’t work out.
Syracuse was recruiting me a little bit … just communicating. I wasn’t good enough. But Bernie Fine was the assistant coach. I think what happened was they looked at tape … Utica was going Division I, so I think Bernie Fine called Coach Costello and said, hey, we’re not going to offer this kid, but this may be a kid who can help you. I went out there and played the first four years of Division I for him. There was a group of guys that stuck with it and in our fourth year had a winning record. We were a small school, maybe 1,800-2,000 students, in Division I.
Probably one of the neatest things, we came back and played Marquette my senior year and should have won the game. We lost in overtime, and Rick Majerus was coach. But for Coach Costello, that was one of the first times back in Milwaukee. There were signs up in town: “Welcome back, Coach.” And for us to almost beat Marquette … it was probably the only time we lost a game and he went around and patted everybody on the back. He was such a competitor. Walter Downing hit a shot at the buzzer to send it into overtime, and Tom Copa hit a shot with four or five seconds left to win it. Playing in the Mecca and then refereeing there 30-some years later is sort of cool … a flashback.
Q. Let me get back to Costello. A. Yeah, I’m trying to get him in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Like a lot of people, I just can’t believe he’s not in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
Q. You knew about him from your time as a kid in Wisconsin and paying attention to the Bucks. When your high school coach says, “Hey, you’re not going to believe who I talked to …” how did that conversation go?
A. Obviously watching that growing up, that was a big deal. It’s sort of funny because you have this perception, right? NBA coach, NBA player, successful, and then you go play for him and it’s different. He was tough. He was demanding. In a positive way. We had a couple kids that were from tough situations that he stayed on that got their degrees, who are doing extremely well today, but while you’re going through it you don’t always understand it. You look back and you say, wow, he really shaped me and instilled a work ethic and values and accountability, things that today I try to put into the things that I do as a husband, father, referee, employee.
What’s crazy is I live eight houses down from where he lived (in Utica, N.Y.). My house is … when I came on my visit, I went to his house … same road, I live eight houses from where he used to live.
He was just a regular guy, never looked at himself (as special). He was a blue-collar kind of guy. It didn’t matter if it was pickup or if he was playing or demonstrating or whatever, it was 110%. And he expected that out of you.
Q. You go from coaching to reffing … you gotta figure this a low-pressure job, right, nobody’s ever mad at you, it’s going to be easy? Probably not.
A. The funny thing was coaching I was … immature as a young coach. So when I got into the officiating, I think there were some officials that did my games when I was young, they gave me a hard time. At this level, your people skills and management skills are as important.
When the game starts, everyone is an adult. But as the game goes on, some people revert to childish behavior. Then your job is to get them back to adult status and get them doing what they should be doing. Coaches … they’re in the position they’re in because they’re successful and very good at what they do, not because they’re good officials. Right? So if they’re spending more time officiating, the reality is they’re not helping their team or themselves. I always look at it like it’s my job to get you back doing what you do best.
Q. You do, like, 60-plus games a year, right? With the travel and everything, it’s quite the commitment. (Until last year Carstensen also held a full-time job.)
A. It is. It is. And one of the misconceptions of officials is there’s no accountability. Trust me. There’s a ton of accountability. The guys that come to Milwaukee and Madison, you see, they treat it like a full-time job. Whether it’s a full-time job or not. Guys are after the games looking at the game again. They’re looking at plays. They’re getting evaluated. There’s feedback.
Q. I was going to say, not that you’ve ever blown a call, but you did, when would you know about it?
A. Before I leave the locker room. Or in the car, pulling out of the parking lot. And you want to know about it. When you think about a game, you can have 150 possessions in a game. If somebody dribbles it five times each possession, that’s 750 times you can have a travel, a foul, a shot, a rebound, an out-ofbounds, a deflection.
Q. Over the years, is there some area you’ve improved or adjusted that you feel you did the best or you’ve grown the most?
A. Learning how to communicate and deal with coaches from a young official to a veteran official is something that you’re always working on. It’s an area that’s more of a strength for me today than it was when I was coming up, trying to figure things out.
But you’re always … you evaluate. When you look at your plays or you get clips back from evaluations, you’re looking to see, is there a trend? Am I missing a particular travel call or an illegal screen? So maybe going into a year after evaluating the previous year, I want to get better on everything, but I really want to focus on the pivot feet in the post. Or I really want to focus on dislodging the rebounder.
Q. I’d venture to guess that among college basketball fans and the people in the business, maybe the block/ charge thing is the most complained about?
A. From an official’s standpoint, you’ll hear people say, “Aw, he was moving.” Well, he can move. If he’s established legal guarding position, the defender can move. He can’t move into, say, the dribbler, but if he’s retreating, even though the guy runs him over while he’s moving, that’s an offensive foul.
The reason why people think the block/charge is the hardest call is probably because it’s the most misunderstood rule with fans and media, announcers. Sometimes I’ll be watching and they’ll say something and I’ll think, that’s not right. Everybody in the world watching the game takes it as gospel. So you’re always fighting perception.
Q. So is that the toughest? Are there tougher calls?
A. Goaltending is tough. Guys are so athletic and sometimes there’s the ball ... is it on it’s way down, is it at its peak, did it come off the glass?
The toughest plays are the out-ofbounds calls. You’ve got a ball that bounces … the calling official, you’re too close to the play, in essence. All of a sudden the ball shoots out of bounds and you’ve got four or six hands in the area.
Q. I almost hate to go here, but it helps to explain what you need for this job. You got lit up a little bit nationally for the thing a couple of years ago with Diamond Stone and Vitto Brown, where Stone kind of crunched Brown’s head into the court and came away with a flagrant 1. When you have that, you’re always going to get second-guessed. How do you get over that?
A. The one good thing about basketball is you’ve got to have a short memory, right? Even in the game. When I referee, what I try to do is referee just like the media timeouts, I try to referee in 4minute segments. I want to be as good as I can for these 4 minutes. Then I want to be as good as I can be for the next 4 minutes, and whatever happened in the previous 4 minutes I want to forget about and just focus on the 4 minutes I have right now.
Getting back to that situation, the penalty would have been the same: the free throws. The difference was Diamond Stone wasn’t ejected. But there are situations that all you can do, right, wrong or indifferent, is learn from those situations.
The good thing about basketball is the next day you may have another game. Right? Now you’ve got to be focused on that game. Whereas football, there might be another week and people are going to be focused on it continuously. What’s ironic about that, if I recall correctly, that same day was a day Grayson Allen tripped a kid. (Actually the Allen incident was several days earlier.) So while that (Stone-Brown) got a lot of publicity, it didn’t get as much because all the focus was on the Duke situation.
When I first started refereeing, if something like that happened, you might find out about it two weeks later. Today, 10 seconds after it happens, it’s on Twitter. I don’t do any social media. I’ve always told my kids, if you want to feel good about your dad, stay off social media. But it’s not taken lightly.
Q. So, to clarify, are you saying you wish you’d done that one different?
A. Me, personally, I wish I would have. … That’s one where looking back, I take ownership of that. There’s a human side too. As a referee, you hate to throw anybody out of a game. You want to make sure it’s legitimate. I’m far from perfect. I recognize it, and I’m sure there were thousands of people at the Kohl Center that recognized it too. And any other arena.
Q. I’ve enjoyed this conversation, and I’ve learned a lot and it’s cool to meet people you wouldn’t regularly in the course of life.
A. Like you said, you meet people you don’t normally get to meet. You talk about Wisconsin, one of my favorite (stories is) there was a dead ball at a game and a couple of the players came over to me from Wisconsin. They said, hey, you look like Sam Dekker’s dad. It was Sam Dekker, (Frank) Kaminsky, (Josh) Gasser … those guys.
So I would be refereeing, and Dekker would say, “Hey, Dad …” or the other guys would say, “We saw you the other night (on TV) and texted Dekker, ‘Hey, your dad’s refereeing so-and-so game.’ ” Every time they saw me, that group, they’d always come up and say something. That was always on the lighter side.