Full Story:http://www.statesman.com/opinion/insight/confessions-of-a-central-texas-football-official-1076538.html?srcTrk=RTR_95649

By Ben Wear
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Published: 8:26 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 27, 2010

Will Muschamp and I have issues.

Muschamp, the sometimes manic defensive coordinator of the University of Texas football team, no doubt does not recall our encounter in August, or have any idea that I exist.But in my other, nonjournalistic role — as a football official — I was assigned to a UT preseason practice, working the sidelines for a short scrimmage.When the defensive end on my side jumped offsides, I threw my flag."Are you going to talk to him? Are you going to talk to him?" Muschamp barked at me as the players formed up for another play.I was confused. He wanted me to counsel his defensive player? Well, no. He was sure an offensive player had moved first."You mean you didn't see that end move?" he said, his voice rising. At this point, I was startled to see head coach Mack Brown approaching. He asked what the call was."Offsides," I said, then added lamely, "but he thinks the receiver moved." Brown nodded and walked away, leaving me unnerved by the sudden attention from two football celebrities. My face flushed.

Later I asked the guys on the first-down chains behind me if they'd seen the receiver move. Nah, they said, smiling, he's just messing with you.

There you have it: a big-time coach working over an anonymous third-year ref at an August intrasquad scrimmage, just to keep those particular coaching muscles toned.

Welcome to the life of a part-time zebra.For me, it all started with a radio ad.I was driving to Houston in early August 2007 and was somewhere near Bastrop when I heard it.The Austin football officials chapter was looking for recruits, the commercial said. Hmmf, I thought, that's interesting. But, hey, I'm probably too old (55 at the time) and, surely, I'm too late for this season. And until that moment, I had never considered the idea of being a football official.

My own football "career" had run aground when I was 12. Too skinny and too slow —an ineffective combination.

I'm not sure why now, but I went ahead and called. No, you're not too old, I was told. No, you're not too late. Come to the training class Monday, and we'll go from there.

About one week later, after a two-hour class (many more would follow during that season and the next), there I was in my bedroom, putting on the polyester striped shirt, black hat and the other bizarre regalia for the first time. Later that evening, I would flounder my way through an Austin High-Georgetown scrimmage at House Park along with other neophyte officials, with a few veterans riding herd.

It felt ridiculous, geeky, fraudulent. Me, a ref? First, a word about that word, and a few other words.

We — because now, after three years doing this, I'm no longer a fraud and can say "we" — don't call ourselves "refs." We are "officials." There is, in fact, only one referee on the field, and that's the lead official behind the quarterback, the one usually wearing a white hat. The others have different roles and titles, such as umpire, line judge, back judge and, my primary role now, head linesman.

That little flip by the quarterback to a running back on a sweep? It's not a "lateral" as you've heard your whole life, but a "backward pass." And if that running back fails to catch that backward pass, it's not a fumble. It's a "muff." Yes, that's the technical term.

When I first joined that officiating training class of about 30 folks, I, too, thought all this semantic stuff was, at best, picayune. But over time I became a member of the club, this hardy band of about 300 guys (and two women) roving Central Texas six days a week to run games for everyone from 6-year-olds playing flag football to college games. We even have an NFL official in our Austin chapter.

It has got to be the best moonlighting gig around: good exercise, weight loss (maybe), decent pay ($40 a game minimum), great fun (most of the time) and all the football you can eat. Sometimes during a game, looking at the players and the turf and the fans and maybe a Texas sunset over the west stands, I'll catch myself grinning at how lucky I am to be out there.

But it is also much harder than the people in the stands realize. I found that out immediately.

About two weeks after my first training class (the other rookies had been going to the once-a-week sessions since mid-July), I was assigned to my first real game: eighth-graders from St. Stephen's and Regents. Those "sub-varsity" games have just four officials, unlike the five for high school varsity games and the seven for college and pro games.

Five minutes before the 5 p.m. kickoff, our referee had not shown up, leaving me, another rookie and a second-year guy who had worked only a handful of games. We were basically doing rock-paper-scissors to see who would have to be ref and run the game. We even conducted the coin flip at mid-field, imitating as best we could what we had seen on television.

Trust me, officiating that game with just us three newbies would have been a disaster. At the last minute, the actual ref showed up, and we got it done. Like almost all the games I worked that initial year, it was 90 minutes of controlled terror interspersed with errors small, medium and, occasionally, large. There is almost nothing worse than being bad at something when you're 55 years old.

Several times that first year I would get back in the car after working two games — officials in their first year or two work only middle school and junior varsity games; we usually do doubleheaders, or sometimes even three or four games in an evening — and question why in the world I was doing this. My main memories of that season: withering looks from some veteran officials, and screaming coaches.

The worst are the "chocolate whistles." This is the insider term for wrongly blowing the whistle and thus stopping a play before it should have ended. Serious football fans will remember the national stir two years ago when Ed Hochuli , the NFL referee famous for looking like a weight lifter in his tight striped shirt, changed the outcome of a game because of what is technically called an inadvertent whistle. His premature exhalation negated a turnover on a fumble in the final minute.

Why "chocolate whistle?" Because when it happens you just want to eat the #@!*!! thing to make it disappear.

I've had a small box of chocolate whistles, unfortunately, though lately I've been abstaining. The worst was in my second year at La Grange , in a ninth-grade game against Bellville.

A Bellville kid intercepted a ball and had run about 10 yards when, for reasons that still elude me, I blew my whistle. He was tackled about

8 yards downfield, but the rules said we had to move the ball back to where he was when my whistle sounded.

The Bellville coach — unfortunately, I was stationed on his sideline as the head linesman — was apoplectic. "Why did you blow the whistle??!!" he yelled. All I could say was, "I screwed up, Coach." It didn't help. I was now, in his eyes, not only incompetent but also a wuss, and the rest of the game was pretty rough.

When someone intercepted yet another pass a few minutes later, I jerked my whistle downward and said aloud to myself, "Hell, no!" Which broke the whistle off the lanyard around my neck. So the rest of that half, every time I would blow the whistle and then stop, the whistle would drop to the grass and I'd have to go find it after the play. Just terrible.

Coaches, it must be said, are the hardest aspect of this job. And not just Muschamp.

Even the more civilized among them go a little bit nuts during games, especially when they fall behind. Some of them perceive holding with alarming frequency while their team is on defense. Coaches (and fans) will suspect us of being homers, even when the game is in Smithville, for instance, and the officiating crew is from Austin.

Coaches constantly edge forward into the lane just outside the sideline where the head linesman and line judge travel — territory they know is off-limits because being there could cause collisions with us — then complain bitterly if flagged for it. Many of them, especially at the middle school level, harbor misconceptions about the rules.

And they aren't shy about expressing their disgust with officials' fitness for the task before them.

"That's horrible!" is a standby, an all-purpose epithet that manages to communicate that the official not only missed the call, but likely will be unable to find his car in the parking lot after the game. Or maybe even his butt, with both hands.

One coach spent at least 10 minutes lingering behind my back at a game, muttering periodically about how I had no idea how serious this all was, how important. If so, clearly I wouldn't have made such a pathetic call.

Complicating the situation is that we officials in fact do get things wrong. The rule book is thick and lawyerly. There are 22 fast-moving players, a faster-moving football and just four or five of us, while there might be a thousand sets of eyes in the stands and a couple of hundred along the sideline. We're so close that sometimes things occur out of our field of vision. Players block our view. Often, we're just looking the wrong way at the wrong instant.

And, yes, sometimes officials, especially those of us in our first few years, are shaky about some of the rules. The saving grace there is that typically we still know more than almost everyone else in the stadium, so the 10-yard penalty step-off that should have been 15 likely will go unnoticed.

But we officials notice, often moments after the fact, and talk about it endlessly. We pore through the 260-page rule book and accompanying study guides. And fulminate about it on the drive home, and while lying in bed at night. And then probably don't make that mistake again.

The upside, aside from being able to pay off a few bills with that extra cash?

There's the unabashed guyness of it all, first of all. In those first few training classes, it struck me how refreshing it was to be in a roomful of people who loved sports and not only didn't have to downplay it but could actually indulge the interest without restraint. I enjoy the camaraderie among the officials, especially now that I'm no longer a too-often clueless trainee.

The job itself is fascinating.

Before, during and after each play, every official has 10 to 15 tasks, from counting the players, to tracking the game clock, to watching for fouls, to moving the ball seamlessly into position for the next snap. With 80 to 100 plays in a game, that's something like a thousand ways to get it right or wrong, most of which only the other officials will notice. No one ever has a perfect game, though the officials with 10 to 40 years experience — we have over a hundred of those — likely come very close.

I've gotten to know Central Texas intimately, traveling the "sausage circuit" of games to the small towns southeast of Austin mostly settled by Germans and Czechs, and to Hill County hamlets like Lometa beyond Lampasas. It hit me this year that viewed from space via Google Maps, the predominant feature of most tiny Texas towns is the football field. Can't miss it.

Then there's the social challenge of simultaneously dealing effectively with those coaches, the thrown-together chain crews of parents or bored 13-year-olds, the ball boys, my fellow officials, the fans, and school administrators.

And, of course, the kids playing the game. Even as they make endless mistakes, the younger ones, you can't help but marvel at their physical courage, their determination and resiliency in the wake of failure, and, usually, their courtesy and cooperation. I had to smile in gratitude for the parents of No. 25 , a talented running back on La Grange's seventh-grade team this fall. After each of his three or four touchdowns, he would seek me out — I was the umpire that game — and sprint all the way to me to hand me the ball for the extra point.

"Thank you, sir," he'd say each time.

And they're funny, usually unintentionally.

"Know the situation!" a pint-sized seventh-grade safety squeaked to his teammates at a critical point during a late October game, no doubt quoting his coach. "It's third and goal!" He paused and looked back at me. "Isn't it?"

Or in another game, an anguished 120-pound linebacker screamed to no one in particular as they lined up for a crucial down: "They're holding us on every play!" he said, then went on. "It's irritating!"

I stifled a laugh.

This third year, I started to get varsity assignments, in addition to all the sub-varsity work and Pop Warner games with the little dudes on Saturdays that I had already been doing. Working those Pop Warner games you often end up coaching the kids as much as officiating them. That's fun as well, and satisfying. You feel part of a huge confederation of adults, all engaged in helping young people grow up.

Mostly the varsity work for folks of my experience level are six-man games, including in my case one where the makeshift field had no goalposts, and three of them out there in little Lometa. Yes, there are only 300 or so people in the stands, and the wide-open game is closer in character to sandlot than to a big-time 5A contest. But there is a color guard, a band from the visiting team, announcers raffling off apple pies over the public address system, "The Star-Spangled Banner" before the game, and an inflatable Hornet for the players' exultant entrance. The results will be recorded for posterity, and determine who gets in the playoffs.

That sun is setting over the west stands. It's Texas high school football. They're lining up for the opening kick.

And they need us there to help make it happen.

bwear@statesman.com; 445-3698