Philadelphia referees have dominated NBA officiating for decades Here’s why
PHILADELPHIA —
NBA players and coaches occasionally murmured about the league’s unusually large collection of Philadelphia-area referees, but none as loudly as Red Auerbach, the longtime Boston Celtics coach and executive.
“Every league meeting, he’d rant and rave about all the refs from Philly,” said Ed Rush, once the NBA’S supervisor of officials. “We’d say, ‘Red, some of these guys are from Trenton or Western Pennsylvania.’ And he’d say, ‘That doesn’t matter. They went through Philadelphia.’ He was probably the loudest voice in the league and he was always on his soapbox about that.”
That discontent exploded one night following a Celtics loss, when Auerbach, upset by Jake O’donnell’s officiating, tried to kick down the door to Boston Garden’s referee room.
“He was shouting, ‘Yo, Philadelphia Jake, you blankety-blank, come out here!’ ” recalled O’donnell, a Delaware Countian who was an American League umpire before moving to the NBA. “He was a loudmouth and he hated referees, especially Philadelphia referees.”
Throughout its 75-year existence, the NBA’S rules and records, its uniforms and arenas, players and equipment have undergone continuous evolution.
But one tradition that has endured is the quantity and quality of referees from this area.
These Philadelphia officials, past and present, wear their brotherhood like a badge of pride. Each offseason they gather for a dinner, actually a cocktail-fueled homage to common roots and shared experiences.
Many who have attended would be on any objective list of the best-ever referees — Rush, O’donnell, Earl Strom,
Joe Crawford, Joe Gushue, Jack Madden, John Vanak, and Steve Javie. Not far behind that elite group in reputation are several others who earned their black-and-white stripes here — Duke Callahan, Mark Wunderlich, Ed Malloy, Leroy Alexander, Ed Middleton, and Billy Oakes.
Maybe the best way to judge this group’s historic impact is its overrepresentation in the NBA Finals, an event restricted to the top-rated officials. For 59 consecutive seasons, from 1961 through 2019, at least one Philly ref, and usually more, worked the championship series.
Many are retired or deceased now but, though much more geographically diverse, the active referee roster still includes several from this area — Malloy, Aaron Smith, Mark Lindsey, Central High grad Tom Washington and Millersville University product Ashley MoyerGleich. And while Crawford, Callahan, and Wunderlich stepped aside during the last decade, they continue the work as NBA administrators who advise, train, and rate the 5,000 officials trying to access the sport’s premier stage.
Even two of history’s most notable nonPhiladelphia referees, Mendy Rudolph and Sid Borgia, had local ties. Rudolph, though raised in Wilkes-barre, was born here. Borgia, a New Yorker, had a summer home in Wildwood.
This connection between a city and a profession runs so deep that it continues to prompt questions like Auerbach’s: How did it begin? How has it been sustained? And why are Philly referees so often better than their peers?
There are no simple answers, said the officials themselves. Certainly the quality of basketball here helps develop quality refs. But just as important are geography, personal connections, word-ofmouth and, maybe most importantly, that feisty Philly attitude.
“One thing these guys all had that really made them successful was a little edge,” said Rush,
79, who at 24 went from coaching football at Marple-newtown High to officiating in the NBA and is now retired in California. “And that’s a Philly thing. You would know Joe Gushue was running the game. You’d know without question that Joe Crawford was running the game. The game’s not going to run them. So if you’re running the league, you want to make sure you put someone out there you can trust, someone who will take care of all the junk.”
Crawford, 69, who left active refereeing in 2016 and lives in Newtown Square, said he’s been asked “a million times” how Philadelphia has produced so many topflight officials.
“I tell them it’s the basketball,” Crawford said. “I was working twice a week in the Baker League even when I was in the NBA. They were pro players and they didn’t care that I was in the NBA. They were coming after me and I had to deal with that. When there are really good players like there are in Philly, you get better as a ref. You also learn to work games in tough neighborhoods. That’s where intestinal fortitude comes in.”
Intestinal fortitude is mandatory. O’donnell, 84 and retired in
Florida, suggested that as a young referee he preferred working games in tough Philadelphia neighborhoods. It steeled him for all those nights when NBA coaches and players cursed him and 20,000 angry fans screamed for his head.
“I was an orphan. I grew up in three homes, ran away from the last one at 15, so I was tough anyway,” said O’donnell, who eventually settled in Clifton Heights. “I wasn’t afraid to go anywhere. I liked working in the city because they were tougher and that made me tougher.”
Philly refs aren’t carbon copies, but they do share plenty of demographic similarities. Most were Catholic and white. Many were athletes themselves. Madden, Strom, and
Javie umpired. And most honed their craft in the old Eastern League, where Rudolph’s father was the commissioner, or in peculiarly Philadelphiaarea hoops institutions like the Baker League, the annual Gold Medal Tournament, or Margate and Wildwood summer leagues.
Not all grew up in Philadelphia or its surrounding counties. Madden was from Trenton, Vanak the Coal Regions. But they refined their skills here and joined the Philly fraternity.
The begetting in this tight-knit community is no less prolific than that in the Bible. Before the league broadened its search for referees and stiffened its vetting process, the Philadelphia crew uncovered a lot of referees without leaving home.
Vacationing in
Wildwood, Borgia spotted Gushue officiating an ocean-side game. Gushue mentored O’donnell, who served the same role for Crawford, who then helped Wunderlich and three fellow Cardinal O’hara grads in Malloy, Callahan, and the now-disgraced
Tim Donaghy. Wunderlich and Crawford have guided Smith and Lindsey.
Smith, a graduate of West Chester East High and
West Chester University, straddled both the old and new ways of getting the job. He made it through the NBA’S rigid auditioning, but also got a personal assist from his local predecessors.
“Aaron went through the system, but he lives up the street from Mark Wunderlich and he watches tape with Mark,” said Crawford. “He’s been over my house watching tape. Mark Lindsey the same thing. See that advantage?”