Whistle-Stop Tour Wasn’t in His Plans

Sleep was low on the list of priorities Wednesday morning for Ed Rush, director of officiating for the NBA. He was in his Fifth Avenue office in New York, bright and early, bracing for the storm.

For 32 years, one of the longest runs of any NBA official, his world was on the basketball court, whistle in mouth, giant men all around him. Now, in his first year as the top administrator for officiating for the NBA and its sister WNBA, he was in the eye of a different kind of hurricane.

“I flew the red-eye last night [from his home in Phoenix],” he said. “My office here is on the 14th floor, upstairs one floor is chaos. The phones are ringing off the hook from the arena people, and people with concerts and scheduling problems. Some of those people upstairs have had nothing to do but sit and stare at the walls for months, and today it all explodes.”

The long lockout that threatened to wipe out an entire season of pro basketball had ended in the wee hours of the morning, in a hotel where the two sides had bargained all night and come out smiling for breakfast. Now everybody, especially Rush, was raring to go.

“I love this game, just love it,” Rush said. “The decision to take the opportunity to move into the front office was a family decision, and it had a lot to do with cutting back on the travel.

“I’ll still travel a lot, but more on the West Coast and more quick trips like L.A. and Oakland. Thank God for faxes and satellite dishes and computers. I can keep good track of everything that happens.”

His concern, and the concern of everybody connected with the game--not to mention millions of fans who love it and live for it--was that there wouldn’t be anything to keep track of, that he would be a pencil-pusher without any paper.

“In these last few months, I did a lot of hand-holding,” he said. “That was part of the responsibility.”

He is directly responsible for the 55 NBA referees, 40 WNBA referees and 24 referees in the Continental Basketball Assn., which the NBA has now sanctioned as its prime proving ground for upcoming officials.

“I probably talked to 80% of the referees who worked for me every two weeks or so,” Rush said. “What was happening was that they were all getting about the same information--stuff they were reading in papers like the L.A. Times and seeing on America Online. And they all keep wondering if there was more going on than that, if there was stuff they weren’t hearing.

“And I kept telling them that what they were reading was really all that was going on.”

When he wasn’t working the phones, he was working the only basketball courts he could find, those of the CBA.

“I had much more time to work with CBA officials, to do some mentoring,” he said. “I needed that. It energized me, kept me from days of memo writing.”

So, for Rush, one of the best-known and respected officials ever to work games in the NBA, Wednesday was the first day of the rest of his life. And like any true administrator, he was concerned about the future of that for which he is administering.

“I’m worried about the public, about how they will take this, how fast they will come back to the game,” he said. “I gotta tell you, among a lot of my friends, the one word I kept hearing was apathy.

“I sure hope that doesn’t last too long.”