They Called Me God

by Doug Harvey

  When I arrived in our clubhouse before the game, Steiner and Pryor saw I wasn’t wearing my protective gear and wanted to know why.

  “Because I didn’t think I was working the plate,” I said.

  “Yes, you are,” I was told.

  Luckily, our hotel was only a block or so away, so I ran back and got my gear on. I didn’t mind umpiring behind the plate at all, though I was quickly learning that a number of major league umpires couldn’t stand the pressure and dreaded it. They would walk around in a daze for three days, just terrified because they knew that soon they’d be back there again. I looked forward to the challenge.

  Toward the end of the game, the bases were loaded. San Juan went to bat trailing by a run. There was one out. A ball was hit to the shortstop, who made a nice play and threw to second, and the second baseman threw to first just as the runner was arriving. If the runner was safe, the game would be tied. All eyes turned toward Mel Steiner.

  After the ball hit the first baseman’s glove, Mel didn’t say a word. He hooked his thumb in his belt and pointed. No one could tell from his actions whether the runner was safe or out. When Mel started to walk off the field, it became clearer that he had called the runner out. With Steiner’s out call, San Juan had lost the game.

  The manager of the San Juan team was Nap Reyes, who weighed about three hundred pounds. Reyes couldn’t believe his runner at first was out, and he looked like an angry bull as he came thundering past me. Reyes and Steiner went at it as the crowd began a full-blown riot. I got about halfway to first when Reyes and Mel went to the ground and started rolling around. Now the fans were really going crazy.

  There was a hearing at the San Juan racetrack that lasted two days. It was held there because the track had the only replay machine. We weren’t allowed to go home until the hearing was over. In the end, San Juan had still lost, but Mel wasn’t welcomed back to Puerto Rico the next year.

  Mel was kind of a strange duck. We were umpiring a spring-training game in old Wrigley Field in Los Angeles. I was working the plate, Mel was at third. The bases were loaded. The batter swung and hit a ball that hit Mel right in the chest. As a result, the team at bat only scored one run.

  After the game I said to him, “What were you thinking?”

  “I had just invested some money in the stock market,” he said, “and I was wondering how it was doing.”

  “Holy shit, Mel,” I said, “you don’t think about stocks when you’re umpiring baseball.”

  “It’s only spring training,” he said. “What do I give a shit?”

  I could only shake my head.

  One highlight of my stay in Puerto Rico was getting to watch Roberto Clemente play in his home country. Clemente was God in Puerto Rico. He was a good man. The way he died was tragic. How many men would risk their lives flying food and supplies to victims of an earthquake?

  — 6 —

  We met a lot of interesting people in Puerto Rico. Sometimes it’s really great to be poor, because you appreciate everything so much. When you get to do things that ordinarily you can’t afford, they’re always special.

  New Year’s Eve was special. We had wanted to go see the pianist and entertainer Victor Borge, but the tickets were something like $75, and we couldn’t afford that. Joy was pregnant, and we were trying to save up enough to have a family. We had to pay the medical bills, because umpires in the minor leagues didn’t have health insurance. Instead, we bought roman candles and went out and shot them over the San Juan wharf. They illuminated all the rats running around.

  CHAPTER 8

  HOOPS

  — 1 —

  For twenty-seven years, I refereed basketball. It’s how I made money during the winter after the baseball season was over. I was as good a basketball official as I was an umpire. My brother Nolan and I were a team. Nolan just went into the San Diego Hall of Fame as a basketball official. I’m there for baseball. Nolan and I were probably the best refereeing crew in Southern California.

  I started in high school. I can remember one game played at Hoover High School in San Diego. Hoover High was winning by quite a lot, and the other team was getting a little rough. In games like that, Nolan and I thought it best to just let the kids play, because the outcome wasn’t in doubt.

  Bob Warner, who was the coach at Hoover High, called time, and he said to me, “Doug, come on. They’re fouling.”

  “Bob, I know,” I said. “I’ve got control of it. Just tell your kids that if they get too rough, I’ll call it. But if it’s a slight foul, I’m not going to, because you’re so far ahead. Let’s get this game over with.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  That was my approach.

  I can remember another game when I needed to take control in order to keep it fair. The game pitted Hoover High against rival Lincoln High School. In those days the schools were segregated; Hoover was all-white and Lincoln all-black. The game was at Lincoln, and few Hoover fans went. They were too afraid. I was one of the very few white faces in the game that night.

  Early in the game I was standing on the end line holding the ball when one of the Lincoln students walked by me.

  “If Hoover wins,” he said, “I’ll slit your throat.”

  I went over to the coach’s bench, watching the kid the whole way. I told the guy in charge of security what he had said, and he raced and caught the kid as he headed to the boys’ bathroom. He took him outside, and I don’t know what happened to him.

  But I could see that Hoover was being homered. The other referee, who was black, wasn’t calling fouls on Lincoln, so I took charge of the whole ball game. Normally I’d never embarrass my partner, but he was playing favorites and it made me sick. I decided that the only way the game would be fair was if I stepped in.

  Hoover won in the last seconds. The home-team fans weren’t happy.

  The security guard grabbed me and started to lead me out of the gym, when I became concerned for my partner. Lincoln had lost, and I feared that their fans might take it out on him. I raced over to where he was, only to see him laughing and joking and having a ball with the Lincoln fans.

  I hated to see something like that, but that’s the way it was back then.

  - - -

  I was also hired as a referee for the games played by California Western University, a school in San Diego. The athletic director, whose name I no longer can remember and who went on to become a general manager in the NBA, hired me.

  I refereed the California Western games, and halfway through the season I got a call from the assignment secretary, informing me that the California Western coach and AD no longer wanted me to referee their games. The problem, as I saw it, was that he wanted the referees to be homers who gave his team an advantage, and I refused to do that.

  “He says you’re too strict and you don’t give him any breaks,” said the assignment secretary.

  “That’s his fucking problem, not mine,” I said. “I’m not worried. Can you get me ball games for those days?”

  “Hell yes,” he said. “I’ll get you a game anytime.”

  That night he assigned me to a junior-college game. I went and worked it and afterward came home. My phone rang. It was almost midnight. The assignment secretary was calling about that night’s Cal Western game.

  “Doug, they almost had a riot in Long Beach,” he said. “This new referee walked out onto the court like he was the King of Prussia and told everybody, ‘I’ll run this game, and I don’t want anybody fucking with me.’ And it wasn’t long before the two teams got into a fistfight, and they almost had a riot. Is there any chance you can go back there and pick his game up tomorrow?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why the hell not?”

  In refereeing, as it is with umpiring, stature is everything. You have to have a presence on the court. You have to make the coaches and players respect you. You do it by getting the calls right and knowing the rules. You also get it by allowing the coaches to have a say without letting them be disrespectful.
Your job is to control the game. I could do that.

  The next night, I walked out onto the court. I called the coaches and team captains for a meeting.

  “Gentlemen, you know me from before,” I said. “You either play basketball or I’m going to dump you. I want you to know that in advance. I’m not going to call technical fouls. You get out of line, and I’m going to dump the troublemakers. Screw around, and I’m going to dump you.

  “Now you go back and tell your people, fuck with me, and I’ll fuck ya.”

  That’s the way I did it.

  I was a great basketball official.

  — 2 —

  One night at the end of the 1961 baseball season I received a call from Abe Saperstein, who owned the Harlem Globetrotters. The Globetrotters were coming to San Diego, and I was hired to officiate their game against the Washington Generals, the patsy team they beat almost every night. After it was over, Saperstein said to me, “You know how to do it. How would you like to go on the road with us?”

  I didn’t want to go on the road. I was on the road enough during the baseball season. It’s hard enough being away from your family for up to ten weeks at a time during the summer. Over a seven-month season, I averaged only nine nights at home sleeping in my own bed. It wasn’t until the league put a team in San Diego in 1969 that I got home more often.

  My wife kept a picture of me by the phone so that when I called, the boys could see my face. If I was on the road and one of the boys got in trouble, all their mother had to do was tell them, “I’m putting your father on the phone.”

  Then I’d straighten them out real quick, saying, “Listen, you, you better do what your mother tells you to do—or else.”

  It scared them half to death, but it worked every time.

  Saperstein must have liked my work refereeing the Globetrotter game, because he called me when he started a new basketball league called the ABL, the American Basketball League. The league featured, for the first time, the three-point goal.

  Abe Saperstein—who was from Chicago, not Harlem—said to me, “I need referees, Doug. Can you be in Long Beach in two days and work three straight days? Can you do it for me?”

  “Yes, sir, I can do that,” I said. “What about the rules?”

  “I’ll have the rules sent to you,” he said.

  In two days? I thought. Not very organized.

  I didn’t travel; rather I refereed games in Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Anaheim.

  The Los Angeles Chiefs were owned by a man by the name of Kim. In L.A., we finished a game in which the Chiefs lost. After I stopped and signed the score book, I came around a corner and I could hear this guy Kim berating Paddy Denoy, one of the other officials.

  I walked into the officials’ clubhouse, and I could see Kim yelling at him.

  “What are you doing in here?” I asked Kim.

  “I’m Kim, the owner of the ball club,” he said.

  “I don’t give a goddamn who you are,” I told him. “Get out of here.”

  “I’ll leave when I’m ready to leave,” he said.

  “You’ll leave now,” I told him.

  When he just stood there, I walked over, picked him up under one arm, and carried him a good twenty yards from our dressing room to the door.

  After the game my wife asked me, “Doug, what happened?”

  She was standing outside our dressing room, waiting for me.

  “This guy came in, so I carried him and put him outside the door and closed it,” I said.

  “Put him outside?” she said. “He flew outside. You threw him ten feet.”

  I have no recollection of any of it.

  They wanted me to work the play-offs, but I couldn’t do it because I had to get back to baseball. The ABL folded after two years of play. The winner the second year was the Cleveland Pipers, owned by a young George Steinbrenner, who later became the owner of the New York Yankees. Steinbrenner never left Cleveland, so I never saw him in action. But I understand he constantly undermined his coach, the great John McLendon, and later replaced him with Bill Sharman because he wanted someone more famous. Steinbrenner also was thrown out of a number of games for going out onto the court and arguing with the referees. I’m sorry I didn’t get to see that.

  — 3 —

  When the ABL folded after only two seasons, I went back to refereeing college ball. I was getting paid $35 a game to referee Pac-8 basketball, a league that included UCLA, USC, and the University of California.

  I was refereeing a game with UCLA and was running up the court, and I could see UCLA coach John Wooden standing there tapping his left hand with the program that he always carried. He was tapping his left hand, tap, tap, tap, tap. That meant: I’m feeling annoyed. I could read signals.

  I went down the court and came back, and he was still tap, tap, tap, tapping.

  “They’re all over Walton,” Wooden said to me. Walton was UCLA’s star center Bill Walton.

  “Okay, John. I’ll watch it,” I said.

  I went up the court as UCLA went on offense, and I watched Walton to see what was going on. He wasn’t getting hammered any more than he was hammering them. It’s a rough game. We went down the other end of the court and came back, and I could see Coach Wooden tap, tap, tap, tapping hard, and he said to me, “Harvey, they’re all over Walton.”

  Oh, this is too much, I thought to myself, and I blew my whistle. Wooden was putting the heat on me to gain an edge. I stopped the game to let everyone know what he was doing.

  I pointed at him the same way I would point at a high school kid not to do something.

  “Coach Wooden, I heard you,” I said. “I don’t need to be reminded. Now back off, or we’re going to get technical.”

  I blew my whistle and handed the ball to the player, then ran down the court, and that was the last thing he said to me that evening.

  That was the way I refereed. For the rest of the game Wooden kept tapping, but I didn’t mind it. What I didn’t want him doing was hammering me vocally. I let him know I was a little bit perturbed.

  I loved refereeing in the Pac-8. I refereed a game at the University of California at Berkeley. They were playing the University of Nebraska, and Pete Newell was the Cal coach.

  Cal had a 15-point lead, and, one by one, Newell took out his starters. Bim bam boom, there were a couple of fouls, and Nebraska hit some shots, and as the lead began to disappear he put his starters back in.

  One of his players grabbed the ball and dunked it. Back then it was against the rules to dunk. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then called Lew Alcindor) had come into the league, and the rule was passed to try to slow him down. Other players had broken backboards dunking, so the other rationale was to cut down on busted backboards.

  The Cal player had dunked, and so I waved off the points. It was one of the reasons Cal lost the game.

  After the game I had to sign the score book. The other referee headed for the dressing room. When I walked in there, I could see Newell screaming at him. He was hollering that we had fucked up the game, that we never should have called interference and waved off the basket, and we should have done this, shouldn’t have done that . . . and he was screaming.

  I tapped Newell on the shoulder.

  “Coach,” I said, “you’re in the wrong dressing room.”

  “I’ll tell you where the fuck I can be,” he said. “I’m the coach here, and I’m also the athletic director.”

  My Scotch-Indian blood began to boil.

  “You better walk through that fucking door,” I said, “or I’m going to throw you through it. And you have one second.”

  Newell was chickenshit to fight me. He took a step toward me and said, “I’ll get your job.”

  And he ran out.

  I was going to say to him, “If you can get my job, I don’t want it,” but it turned out that he did get my job. Pete Newell was a big dog. He had taken California to a national championship, led by Darrell Imhoff, who later went to the New York Knicks and was pretty
much a failure. One reason Imhoff failed as a pro was that he had been allowed to push the college centers around and score points. In the pros he went up against Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, and he didn’t stand a chance.

  They even took my job in a chickenshit way. They sent me a note saying, Your services are no longer needed. Which I thought was chickenshit. If you’re going to fire someone, fire him to his face.

  — 4 —

  The invitation to referee in the American Basketball Association came with a phone call.

  “Can you be in Dallas tomorrow night?” I was asked.

  “I could be,” I said, “but I don’t know why I would want to.”

  “Excuse me,” the caller said, “but this is George Mikan. We have just formed a new basketball league, and we have everything all set except the officials. I was told you’re a very good referee, and we need you.”

  George Mikan was one of the legends of the game. As a center with the Minnesota Lakers in the late forties to mid-fifties, he was six foot ten, 250 pounds of muscle, and so overpowering that the league introduced the shot clock and widened the foul lanes to keep him from dominating. I felt honored when I heard it was Mr. Mikan calling me.

  “The ABA will pay you seventy-five dollars a game plus expenses,” he said. Since the colleges were only paying $35 a game, I accepted, even though it meant having to go back on the road.