Getting the Calls

When the NCAA tournament begins, there are 96 of them, all dreaming of Monday night.

By the time the ball goes up for the national championship game, three will remain.

This is the tournament within the tournament: the selection of the officials for the Final Four and the NCAA title game.

Like the teams whose games they call, the refs do their best to move on--only with a committee of former officials watching every move, hearing every whistle.

It’s survive and advance, as the late Jim Valvano used to say at North Carolina State. Survive and advance.

Instead of a glance at the scoreboard and dejection or wild celebration at regional game’s end, the referees go home to wait by the phone.

“Everybody’s asking, ‘Did you get the call? Did you get the call?’ ” said Dave Libbey, a veteran Pacific 10 Conference official from El Cajon, who, yes, got the call on Monday. He’ll work one of the semifinals Saturday, his fifth Final Four.

His first was in 1992, and when he spoke to the NCAA that year from his office at the San Diego School of Performing and Creative Arts where he is dean of students, Libbey asked the NCAA to hold on half a second so he could tell the people gathered outside his door.

“Everybody started screaming,” he said. “There’s nothing like it in life, the first one.”

Just like the field of 64, you have your Duke, Kentucky and North Carolina of officiating too.

Consider Jim Burr. He’ll be calling his ninth Final Four in 10 years.

Even Duke has been to only eight of the last 14.

John Clougherty--a respected official perhaps best remembered for a controversial foul call in the 1989 title game between Michigan and Seton Hall--is sort of like Kentucky.

He has been here 11 times, and the last three years in a row. But like Wayne Turner, he was stopped a week short of the Final Four this time.

This year’s Valpo?

“These aren’t Cinderellas, by any means,” said Hank Nichols, the NCAA’s national coordinator of officiating and a veteran of six national championship games himself.

OK, so who’s Connecticut, here at last?

Try Curtis Shaw, a Southeastern Conference official who at 38 will work his first Final Four on Saturday after a decade of trying.

“Every time the phone rings on that Monday, you almost jump out of your skin,” Shaw said. “When somebody says, ‘This is Mr. So-and-So from the NCAA,’ you know this is either great news or bad news. This time he said, ‘Would you be interested in working any this weekend?’ ”

Seems as if there’s a story behind every striped shirt.

Remember the fellow who lost the button on his pants in the Duke-Temple game and had to run over to Mike Krzyzewski looking for a safety pin?

That’s Scott Thornley, and by the way, the committee didn’t judge him harshly.

“That’s what the insurance companies would call an act of God,” Nichols said.

No harm, no foul. Thornley made it to the Final Four.

Terry Christman? He wasn’t even on the first-round list. But don’t gloat, Steve Lavin. Your Bruins played only one more game than he worked.

It takes 96 officials--32 three-man crews recommended in part by their conferences--to call the first-round games, and 48 of those are also assigned a second-round game.

During the first two rounds, representatives of Nichols’ committee of conference supervisors of officials are stationed at each site to evaluate the officials, preparing to recommend the ones who’ll move on to the regionals.

“Obviously, they have to make the correct calls, take care of any situations that might develop, run the game, control the bench, pretty much standard officiating,” said Nichols, whose committee rates officials on mechanics, judgment, consistency and decisiveness.

Make the right call on a crucial play, and chances are you’re moving on, as Clougherty has many times, advancing to the title game four times.

Blow a call in the regional or get snagged by a clock error, and you’re going home.

Clougherty realized that almost instantly in 1990 after replays suggested Georgia Tech’s Kenny Anderson had not gotten off the game-tying shot--a two-point basket with his foot on the three-point line--before the buzzer in regulation time in a game against Michigan State that Georgia Tech went on to win in overtime.

“I got in the room and I said, ‘Guys, we are history. We’re not going to the Final Four. You might as well get your stuff to the cleaners, we won’t need it until November,’ ” said Clougherty, who came back to make it six of the next eight seasons.

On the Monday after the first two rounds, Nichols uses the ratings to recommend 36 of the original 96--plus four standbys--to advance to the regionals.

The NCAA basketball committee chaired by Kentucky Athletic Director C.M. Newton--the same committee that selects the field--considers Nichols’ suggestions, makes any adjustments, and prepares to set the crews.

After the regionals--officials from both the semifinals and finals are eligible--the 10 who make it to the Final Four get the word Monday.

There are three officials for each semifinal, three for the title game, and one standby, but their identities aren’t made public until an hour before the game, though word naturally travels among the officials themselves.

Those who are working the semifinals don’t even learn until Saturday morning which of the two games they will call.

“It’s not for suspense. It’s for their protection,” Nichols said. “It’s the whole idea that people don’t need to know who’s going to be calling the games, including the gambling situation.”

The NCAA whisks the officials in and out of town, and houses them apart from the main crowd.

But for one day at the Final Four, they share the stage. It is a large one, but they are the best of the best.

“I’ve felt that sometimes, in those first couple of rounds, sometimes some of the officials are trying so much to call a perfect game [to advance] that they’re really not as good as they may be later,” Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun said.

“As you get to the regional finals, you’re going to get the guys that are very, very good. The Final Four, to me, has appeared that they allow the kids to determine the national championship, which is exactly how it should be.”

Nichols called the Magic-Bird championship game in 1979 when Michigan State beat Indiana State.

In 1983, his whistle was at the ready when North Carolina State’s Lorenzo Charles turned Dereck Whittenburg’s airball into a game-winning dunk.

“I thought I might have to call goaltending, but it wasn’t close,” Nichols said. “It was outside the cylinder. That would have been a big-time call.”

He even nearly T’d up John Wooden in Wooden’s final game as UCLA coach in 1975.

“He didn’t like the ‘T’ I called on [Dave] Meyers,” Nichols said. “He was getting animated, but my partner calmed him down. I’m just glad it turned out the way it did.”

Out there on that stage, the lights can be bright.

Clougherty learned that in 1989, when he whistled Seton Hall’s Gerald Greene for a blocking foul in the lane with three seconds left in overtime and Michigan’s Rumeal Robinson made two game-winning free throws.

“I don’t think there was a question there was contact,” Clougherty said. “Was it severe enough to call a foul? I thought it was enough to put him at a disadvantage and I blew the whistle and called a foul. You don’t have time to analyze everything in your brain.”

P.J. Carlesimo, Seton Hall’s coach at the time, could have criticized Clougherty. Instead, he said, “John Clougherty is one of the best, if not the best, officials in the country. We couldn’t have asked for anyone else we’d rather make the call when the game is on the line than John Clougherty.”

Said Clougherty: “I can’t tell you what that meant to me. It was his team, and he’s never going to believe there was enough contact to call a foul, but he did say that and put the critics to rest.”

The officials will never be heroes.

They can always be goats.

And the pay?

Clougherty laughed.

“I get paid less to do a Final Four--$575--than a regular-season game,” he said.

“The point is, it’s not a monetary thing. Tim Higgins was saying the other day, ‘You know, the risk-reward is way out of line.’

“It’s the recognition. That’s what you feel.”