Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Calling the Shots My Five Decades in the NBA by Calling the Shots: My Five Decades in the NBA by Earl Strom. EARL STROM. Strom was the third National Association referee elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame (1995), and one of only twelve referees who have been elected. Starting in 1957 as one of the NBA’s first fulltime court officials, and often referred to as “the greatest of its referees”, Strom spent 29 years in the NBA and three years in the American Basketball Association (ABA). He officiated 29 NBA and ABA Finals, and 50 NBA and ABA Final games. Strom officiated 2,400 regular season games during his 32 year pro career, and 295 playoff games. He also refereed seven NBA All-Star Games. He authored the biography, Calling the Shots: My Five Decades in the NBA. . Marvin "Mendy" Rudolph (March 8, 1926 – July 4, 1979) [1] was an American professional basketball referee in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for 22 years, from 1953 to 1975. Regarded as one of the greatest officials in NBA history, [ citation needed ] Rudolph officiated 2,112 NBA games (a record held at retirement) and was the first league referee to work 2,000 games. [1] He was also selected to referee eight NBA All-Star Games and made 22 consecutive NBA Finals appearances. [1] Following his career as a referee, he was a color commentator for CBS Sports's coverage of the NBA on CBS for two seasons from 1975 to 1977 and he appeared in a television advertisement for Miller Lite. He was a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2007. [2] Contents. Personal life [ edit | edit source ] Early life and family [ edit | edit source ] Born in , , Rudolph was raised in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. [3] His father, Harry Rudolph, was a prominent basketball referee and . [4] Mendy Rudolph played basketball as a child and eventually chose the same profession as his father. [5] Upon graduating from James M. Coughlin High School, [3] he began officiating basketball games at the Wilkes-Barre Jewish Community and later worked scholastic games. [6] At age 20, he was recruited to referee games alongside his father, who served as Eastern Professional Basketball League (Eastern League) President from 1956 to 1970. [4] [7] During his career in the Eastern League, he officiated his first Eastern League President's Cup championship series in 1948 and was selected as a referee in at least one game in every President's Cup playoff and championship series between 1949 and 1953. [7] At the same time, he also served in the United States Air Force during the Korean War. [8] Rudolph was married twice during his life. His first marriage was to his childhood sweetheart and together they raised three children. But the relationship became troubled and eventually ended. [9] In 1961, Mendy Rudolph met Susan, a receptionist at the WGN office in City, while both worked for the station. [9] At the time, Rudolph worked at WGN as an additional job outside of officiating, which was common among referees from his era. [10] Mendy and Susan Rudolph were married in 1973. [9] Two years later, their first child, Jennifer Rudolph, was born. [9] Gambling problem [ edit | edit source ] Throughout his life, Rudolph suffered from a gambling problem [11] and was labeled a "compulsive gambler". [12] He would often spend his leisure time placing bets at race tracks and Las Vegas, Nevada and . [9] At that time, NBA referees were allowed to gamble, but this practice has since been prohibited. [13] As he incurred gambling losses, Rudolph was once offered by a Las Vegas gambler to erase his outstanding debt by participating in point shaving. [9] However, he refused to accept the offer and said to his wife, "It goes against all my principles. I love the game too much, respect it too much. I couldn't do it to you. I couldn't do it to the memory of my father, and I couldn't do it to myself. If I have to go into bankruptcy, something I'd hate to do, I'd do it," according to in a 1992 New York Times interview with Susan Rudolph. [9] Rudolph had cashed in his $60,000 pension fund to pay debts and he still owed an additional $100,000. [14] While he refused to seek professional help, Rudolph cut back on his gambling habit later in his life. [9] NBA officiating career [ edit | edit source ] Early years [ edit | edit source ] Rudolph was recommended by , coach and owner of the NBA's Philadelphia Warriors at the time, to then-NBA commissioner , after observing Rudolph officiate an exhibition game. [3] [4] Rudolph was hired by the NBA in February 1953, [3] midway through the 1952–53 NBA season and he became the youngest in the league. [15] In his early years with the NBA, Rudolph quickly became an established official as he worked playoff games within his first two years in the league. [16] Memorable NBA Finals games [ edit | edit source ] Rudolph officiated the 1955 NBA Finals between the Syracuse Nationals and Fort Wayne Pistons, which was notable for its actions by fans, fights between players, and attacks on referees. [17] Game 3 of the series, played in , Indiana, was interrupted by a fan who threw a chair on the floor and ran on the court to protest calls made by Rudolph and referee Arnie Heft. [17] Six years later, he made history by officiating the entire 1961 NBA Finals between the Celtics and St. Louis Hawks with his colleague Earl Strom. [13] Rudolph and Strom officiated another notable game in the 1964 NBA Finals. [18] In Game 5 of the championship series, , playing for the San Francisco Warriors, knocked out of the with a punch. [4] Celtics head coach stormed onto the court and demanded that Chamberlain be thrown out of the game. [4] The latter told Auerbach if he did not "shut up", he would be knocked down to the floor with Lovellette. [4] Auerbach countered the threat, "Why don't you pick on somebody your own size." Rudolph intervened the discussion and told Auerbach, "Red, do you have any other seven-footers who'd like to volunteer?" [4] Head of officials [ edit | edit source ] As his career progressed in the league, Rudolph took on responsibilities beyond officiating. In 1966, he was named referee-in-chief and worked alongside , who was hired as the league's supervisor of officials that year to replace Sid Borgia. [19] In this position, he oversaw areas that pertained to referee mechanics, techniques, and rule interpretations. [19] It was in this role that he authored the NBA Official’s Manual and Case Book . [13] While he served as head of officials, the NBA lost four veteran officials—Norm Drucker, Joe Gushue, Earl Strom, and John Vanak to the rival American Basketball Association (ABA) in 1969 over salary and benefits. [20] At the time of transaction, Rudolph told Strom, "(Deputy Commissioner) Carl [Scheer], (NBA Commissioner) Walter [Kennedy], and I were prepared to offer you guys the greatest contract in the history of pro basketball." [20] By the early 1970s, Rudolph successfully encouraged the league to adopt a plain gray referee uniform over the traditional "zebra" shirt to de- emphasize the presence of officials in games. [21] Final years [ edit | edit source ] By 1975, Rudolph's health condition began to deteriorate and he was forced to retire after suffering a blood clot in his lung during a 1975 NBA playoff game between the and Washington Bullets, played April 25, 1975. [3] In his final game, he had to be carried off the court. [9] On November 9, 1975, Rudolph officially ended his career as a referee in the NBA, in which he officiated more games (2,113) than any official in league history at the time. [22] Earl Strom later broke Rudolph’s record and officiated over 2,400 games in his 30-year career. [22] Post-officiating career [ edit | edit source ] Broadcasting [ edit | edit source ] Following his officiating career, Rudolph transitioned to a career in broadcasting. During the 1975–76 and 1976-77 NBA seasons, he worked as a television analyst for CBS Sports covering The NBA on CBS . [23] During his first season, he was paired with and for the 1976 NBA Finals. [23] This championship series was most memorable for a triple-overtime Game 5, which has been labeled the "greatest game" in NBA history. [24] In this game, Celtic made an apparent game-winning at the conclusion of the second overtime. [25] The game clock had expired, but Rudolph, along with Musburger and Barry, noted that was made with two seconds remaining. [25] Referee , however, decided that one second remained in the second overtime period. [24] Television commercial [ edit | edit source ] In 1976, Rudolph was featured in a Miller Brewing Company television advertisement along with then-Celtics head coach to promote Miller Lite's "Tastes Great, Less Filling" advertising campaign. [26] Rudolph and Heinsohn debated whether Miller Lite was less filling or tastes great in a bar room scene. After Heinsohn refused to agree that Lite was, first and foremost, less filling, Rudolph threw his thumb in the air and screamed, "You're out of the bar." [26] [27] This advertisement popularized Miller's campaign slogan [26] and the campaign was named eighth best of the 20th century by Advertising Age in 1999. [28] Legacy [ edit | edit source ] Rudolph died on July 4, 1979 from a heart attack in . [3] [8] Mendy and Susan Rudolph were standing outside a movie theatre entrance when Mendy collapsed. [9] After unsuccessful attempts at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he was taken to a hospital where he died an hour after arrival. [9] At the time of his death, then-NBA Commissioner Larry O'Brien said of Rudolph, "Mendy's contributions to the integrity of pro basketball are legendary." [14] Officials wore a patch with Rudolph's uniform number, 5, on their sleeves the following season after his death, the 1979-80 NBA season, to honor him. [1] No other official in the NBA has worn this number to the present day. [1] Known for his charisma, personality, and iconic stature on the court, Rudolph symbolized NBA officiating during the early years of the NBA to fans of professional basketball [1] and became the most recognizable official during the NBA's first four decades. [11] of The Boston Globe said of Rudolph, "If any man other than Red Auerbach ever earned the title of NBA institution, it was certainly Mendy Rudolph." [15] Upon retirement, he set a precedent for the standards that future referees are judged. [1] Early in his officiating career, Joe Crawford (later hired by the NBA in 1977) attended games that Rudolph worked in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and studied his style and approach. [29] Earl Strom credited Rudolph for being an influence on the development of his career in the NBA. [30] In his autobiography, Calling the Shots , Strom described Rudolph as "one of the most prominent referees because of his style, courage, and judgment. He had excellent judgment. He made the call regardless of the pressure, whom it involved, or where it was." [30] Strom later told that "Mendy Rudolph was simply the greatest referee of all time." [9] Strom was also an advocate to get Rudolph enshrined into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. [4] On April 2, 2007, Rudolph was announced as one of the seven members of the Basketball Hall of Fame's Class of 2007 to be enshrined in September 2007, [13] twenty-eight years after his death. It was reported that the length of time for Rudolph to become elected was the result of his gambling lifestyle. [31] [32] He became the thirteenth referee to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. [33] Earl Strom, Ex-N.B.A. Referee Known for His Flair, Dies at 66. Earl Strom, the fiery National Basketball Association referee who spent more than three decades calling fouls with flair, ejecting players with style and occasionally backing up his rulings with his fists, died on Sunday at his home in Pottstown, Pa. He was 66. The cause of death was a cancerous brain tumor that had been diagnosed in January, his family said. When Strom broke in with the N.B.A. in 1957, the league was a struggling, sputtering affair, as much circus as sport. The man they called Yogi fit right in and was soon as much an attraction as stars like and . Strom punctuated his calls with a characteristic series of staccato thrusts with his left hand, and even his whistle had a signature sound: "Tweet" (pause) "Tweet-Tweet." 'A Little Schmaltz' When he retired in 1990, Strom accused the image-conscious N.B.A. of trying to turn referees into robots. "To sell a call," he said, "you may have to have a little schmaltz. What's wrong with that?" Nobody ever accused him of being a robot, but schmaltz would hardly seem the word for the ingredients of a personality that resembled a mixture of vinegar and pepper with a dash of high-octane gasoline. Known for his explosive temper, Strom once refereed a game with his hand in a cast (he had broken a thumb slugging a critical fan the night before), and a national television audience was once left in suspense when the game broadcast ended as he charged over the scorers' table to grab the throat of a team official who had called him gutless for disallowing a buzzer basket. "When they went off the air, the crowd was just closing in on him," his wife, Yvonne, said yesterday, recalling that her husband (who had been pulled free and lugged to safety by Wilt Chamberlain) had made her a star of the resulting anecdote. As Strom later told it, when he placed a collect call to his wife after the game and the operator asked if she would accept the charges, she replied, "You bet I will," and then proceeded to give him a tongue-lashing that all but upstaged the hefty fine imposed by the league. 'Let Them Play' For all his showmanship and his displays of temper, Strom, who spent three seasons with the American Basketball Association, was regarded as a crack referee, one who let inconsequential fouls pass without a whistle. "I like to let them play," he once explained. "I like to let the players decide the outcome of a game." A book about his career, "Calling the Shots," written with Blaine Johnson, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1991. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Margie DeRenzis and Susan Hess; three sons, Stephen, Eric and Jonathan, and seven grandchildren. Calling the Shots: My Five Decades in the NBA by Earl Strom. Pottstown’s population on Aug. 17, 1990, was 21,000 and dropping. Then as now, the nearest major airport was 46 miles away. Not a single movie theater remained in a downtown that at night was as lifeless as the Montgomery County borough’s idled foundries. And yet on that summer night, as if transformed by some fairy godmother, fading Pottstown magically came alive. Outside an old jitterbug-era dance hall, basketball’s biggest and brightest celebrities emerged from limousines: , , , , Bill Russell, Red Auerbach, , . What made this scene at the SunnyBrook Ballroom even more incongruous was the nature of the event that attracted this royal court of court stars – a referee’s retirement dinner. It wasn’t until you learned that referee’s identity that it made sense. For more than three decades, Pottstown native Earl Strom, who died in 1994 at age 66, was the NBA’s most respected, well-known and controversial referee. He officiated 2,400 regular-season games, 295 in the playoffs, including 29 NBA or ABA finals. When he finally stepped aside in 1990, coaches and players begged him to stay. Five years later, he was posthumously inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. “You can tell a lot about a person by who comes out to something like this,” Magic Johnson said at that 1990 dinner. “And tonight, Earl, the stars among stars are here to honor you.” Thursday night in a ceremony made virtual by the COVID-19 pandemic, Strom will be honored again, this time by the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame. In addition to Strom, the Hall’s 2020′s class is headlined by , the basketball superstar from Lower Merion High who died in a helicopter crash this year. It includes former Phillies president Dave Montgomery; basketball coaches Bo Ryan and Ken Hamilton; tennis star Lisa Raymond, the Flyers' Rick Tocchet; ex-Eagles Jerry Sisemore and Vic Sears; heavyweight champion Tim Witherspoon; Olympic runner Herm Frazier; early Phillies star Cy Williams; Temple football’s Deron Cherry; boxing promoter J. Russell Peltz; lacrosse’s Cherie Greer Brown; and the three-time world champion 1910-13 Philadelphia Athletics. Curiously for an area that has produced an abundance of them – especially basketball referees – Strom will be just the second sports official named to the Philly Hall, joining longtime National League umpire Shag Crawford. “Earl wasn’t always the easiest guy to get along with,” Shag Crawford’s son, Joe, a longtime NBA ref now retired, said this week. “But he was a tremendous referee.” Early in his career, when paired with Strom, Crawford threw out Kansas City coach Phil Johnson two minutes into a game. “We went into the locker room at halftime and Earl annihilated me, calling me every name in the book,” Crawford said. “He said, ‘I like that you have guts, but you’ve got to have smart guts like me.’ ” Never afraid to make a tough call against a home team, quick to engage with angry fans or players, flamboyant and drawn to the spotlight, Strom was described by an Inquirer sportswriter in 1982 as “one of the NBA’s most resilient and controversial characters, a man who has staged a private war with his peers, fans, coaches and bosses for as long as anyone can remember.” But he was so consistently fair, decisive and unshakable that despite all those battles, his reputation on the court rarely wavered. A 1989 USA Today poll named Strom the NBA’s top referee. In a Detroit Free Press ranking, he was chosen as the best official in any sport. “Strom never hesitated to call a game the way he saw it,” reads his Pro Basketball Hall plaque. A style and reputation of his own. Born in 1927, the sports-crazed Strom was a Pottstown High classmate of future American League MVP Bobby Shantz. He started refereeing high school games in the early 1950s. In 1957, he was working a college game at the Palestra when NBA supervisor of officials Jocko Collins spotted him. “The NBA hired him and his first game was an exhibition in Coatesville,” recalled his son, Eric Strom, who will introduce his father Thursday night. Apprenticing with colorful refs like Mendy Rudolph and Sid Borgia, never backing down from a challenge, Strom quickly developed a style and reputation of his own. He kept his whistle in his hand, not on a lanyard. His foul tweets had a distinctive cadence and were punctuated by energetic leg kicks. During the 1960s, Strom was a fixture in the playoffs – and in sports headlines. He broke a thumb punching a fan during a Boston-Philadelphia Eastern Conference Finals game. Wilt Chamberlain rescued Strom from an angry postgame crowd in Atlanta. He ejected Auerbach from an All- Star game. Strom’s wife stopped going to games with him in 1968 after they were chased to their car by irate fans in Philadelphia. Two years later at the same , he punched officiating partner because the latter had overruled one of his calls. “He used to be tough early in his career,” said Eric Strom, 61, one of his five children, who now lives in North Carolina. “He had to do a lot of fighting and a lot of crazy stuff went on. But that was just how things were back then. By the time the ’80s rolled around, he had mellowed out a lot.” In 1969, Strom was earning $16,000 a year. So when the upstart ABA offered him $25,000, plus a $25,000 signing bonus, he and three other NBA refs jumped. Three years later he was back in the NBA, but not before encountering “the greatest player I’ve ever seen.” “My father was working a game and he saw Julius Erving,” said Eric Strom. “He told a Philadelphia sportswriter that Julius was the greatest he’d ever seen. The commissioner said a referee shouldn’t be talking about a player’s ability and fined him $50. Dad sent him a check for $100 and when the commissioner asked why, he said, ‘The first $50 is because I told the writer and the second is because I’m telling you.’ ” In the course of witnessing so much NBA history, Strom was on court for some of Philadelphia’s greatest pro basketball highlights. He was there for the first meeting in 1959 of Chamberlain and Russell and the last a decade later. He did Erving’s first ABA and last NBA games. He refereed Game 6 of the 1967 Eastern Finals when the Sixers finally shed the Celtics' monkey on their backs. When Philly won another title in 1983, Strom worked the clinching Game 4. Finally, early in the 1990 season, Strom announced that he’d be retiring. Players and coaches lobbied him to stay. "At the NBA All-Star Game party in Miami that year, and Del Harris [then the Detroit and Houston coaches] came up, opened their wallets and started throwing money at Dad’s feet. They said, ‘Don’t go, Earl. We’ll pay you to stay.’ “A player on the Nets, Lester Connor, told me he’d miss Dad a lot. He said, ‘When your Dad does a game, we all play harder.’ ” In retirement, Strom stayed in Pottstown, did a little broadcasting, worked some clinics, golfed at a public course near him and went to an occasional 76ers game. “After one game we walked back to the locker room and the guard wouldn’t let him in,” said Eric Strom,. “Finally Manute Bol and Rick Mahorn came out and told the guy, ‘Do you know who this is?’ ” In the winter of 1994, Strom was diagnosed with brain cancer. Six months later he died. “He was a little sad toward the end,” Eric said. “He missed it. He missed it a lot.” Earl Strom - One of Those Guys Who Runs His Own Show. When the NY Times Book Review calls an autobiography "uninhibited and enjoyable," the first thing that comes to mind, of course, is that it must be the memoirs of an NBA referee. Or a Playboy bunny. In this case, it's the former. Calling The Shots: My Five Decades in the NBA is not only Earl "Yogi" "Pied Piper" Strom's story but the story of a basektball league struggling to find its identity; the story of ballers who eked out a living in the early 50s and built small cities at the dawn of the new century; the story of 13 original rules and their subsequent interpretations and changes forced by the ever evolving basketball player. Plus, even if you don't like the book, Julius Erving wrote the foreword. How cool is that? When I write my memoirs, I want Michael Tillery to write the intro. Let's give a shout out to Blaine Johnson, co-writer, who gave Earl's voice a font.