What’s it like to be an official in the final moments of a huge game? ‘I was dead and right’

John Clougherty doesn’t speak publicly about 1989 often, mostly because “everybody treads water when they want to talk to me about it.” That’s the thing about making the big call in the big moment: It becomes part of your life. One second, you’re officiating a game. The next, you’re making a call that might end up as a line in your obituary.

Clougherty officiated his first NCAA men’s national championship game in 1985. Yes, Villanova-Georgetown. He was on the floor for one of the greatest college basketball games ever, but no one remembers that. Nor do they remember the 1986 or ’87 or ’88 Final Fours he worked.

But then came ’89. Michigan-Seton Hall in the national title game in the Kingdome in Seattle. Ten seconds left in overtime. Michigan, down one. A rebound, a dash down the floor.

“Everybody is in transition,” Clougherty remembers. “Michigan is pushing the ball hard up the floor. (Seton Hall coach P.J. Carlesimo) is screaming for everybody to get back on defense. The players are moving fast, the game is moving fast, the coaches are moving fast.

“And (I) have to be the guy that’s totally under control.”

Michigan’s Rumeal Robinson dribbles past half court, nearly losing control at the 3-point line, then drives into the paint, drawing three Seton Hall defenders. Gerald Green is one of them. Clougherty’s whistle squeals. A reach-in foul on Green.

It’s been argued for more than 30 years since.

The game ended with Robinson, a 65 percent foul shooter, swallowing the air and making two of the most pressure-filled foul shots in NCAA Tournament history. Michigan won the 1989 national championship, 80-79.

“I would be lying if I said I didn’t lose some sleep,” Clougherty says today. “Because there was contact — nobody argued that there wasn’t contact — but was there enough contact? That’s what you have to think about. I was running (down the floor) as hard as those teams were, and I saw contact.”

And he called it.

Clougherty’s name appeared in print as the official who made the call. It was not simply a foul. It was a foul he called. In the aftermath, Carlesimo eased what could’ve been a volcanic situation. He told reporters: “John Clougherty is one of the best, if not the best, officials in the country. He saw a foul. He called a foul.”

Nevertheless, “I got beat up pretty good,” Clougherty says.

Today, Clougherty is at peace with the moment because, whether it was a mistake or not, he knows that in the moment, he made the call that was true to him. He thought it was a foul.

“You’re in the action, you make a decision,” he says. “Right or wrong, you did what you thought was the right thing. I think everyone who mattered knew that after the fact — that no one was getting purposefully hosed. It was just the play.”

So, too, was the moment earlier last month when Eagles cornerback James Bradberry snatched a handful of JuJu Smith-Schuster’s jersey. One play, one instant. A flag thrown. It just so happened to be on third down with under two minutes left in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LVII. It just so happened to seal a Chiefs win.

What does it take to make a call like that?

What does it feel like?

We decided to ask, and granted anonymity to those who asked so that they could speak freely.

Preparing for the moment

Kerry Fraser, former NHL referee (1980-2010), veteran of 13 Stanley Cup Finals, 261 playoff games and the 1998 Olympics: It started the night before the game. Into bed early, have a good dinner early, just not try to play the game before it actually — before you had to drop the puck. Don’t waste negative energy on things that you have no control over. I wanted to be calm.

The day of the game, I would get on the bike in the morning after some fruit and breakfast in the concierge lounge. I would just do a light workout. Lunch and conversation with the guys. I’d start to ramp it up a little bit. ‘Let’s talk a little bit about who we’re going to see tonight, guys. What the matchups might be.’ We’ve had our playoff meeting with the series supervisor the night before, but we’re the ones that are going to be out there, let’s go around the table and kind of have a discussion as to what we think we need to be prepared to do. Then a pregame nap, and then I would go to the rink, showered and shaved, and I would be really emotionally calm.

Anonymous college football referee who recently worked a CFP national title game: You accept (the pressure) when you step into the stripes. That kind of envisioning occurs every week. You want to keep it as much like a routine as possible when you call a national title game. The hard part with us is we had like a month and a half between games, so how do you get yourself ready? You work practices and make them as much like a game as possible.

The instinct is, you wanna show why you’re the best at what you do but, you don’t want to over-officiate.

Dale Scott, former MLB umpire (1986-2017), veteran of three World Series: You try to prepare yourselves mentally and physically for what’s going to happen, and that’s what’s in your control. But you can be completely prepared to work a big game and then s— happens anyway.

My mindset going into something like that is, I don’t lose sleep, I go through scenarios in my head, but a challenge of officiating is that every day you walk out there, no matter how big the game is, it’s the same rules and the same game you’ve been working day after day after day. You have zero idea what’s going to happen.

Dave Jackson, ESPN rules analyst, former NHL referee, veteran of 83 playoff games and the 2014 Winter Olympics: I don’t think it ever gets a lot easier. You realize the immense weight on your shoulders. And, I think you realize that the outcome of that game could very well depend on your judgment. So it’s an immense responsibility. I’ll tell you one thing, when that puck enters the net and your fingerprints are nowhere near it, it’s a big sigh of relief.

Clougherty: You do realize this. is. it.

Working in the environment

Scott: You’d hear all the veteran guys talking about the playoffs or World Series, but there’s a different feel when you walk on the field for a game in October. It’s an atmosphere that’s jacked up several notches.

John Cahill, Big East Conference head of officiating, veteran of 11 Final Fours and seven national title games: The enormity of the moment kind of gets into your head, especially when you have a timeout or a dead ball situation. It’s a little helpful when you get a TV timeout or something because you get to talk to your partners and encourage each other. ‘OK, let’s focus, make sure we see the obvious things. Let’s not put too quick a whistle on a play. Let the play develop.’ You want everyone to have a good understanding of whether or not any contact that occurs actually impacts the outcome of a play. You don’t want to be calling a ticky-tack foul at the end of a game. You don’t want to be calling something that has an impact on the end of a game. But at the same time, there are times that your hand is forced.

Fraser: There’s that feel. You have to have a feel for the game. Every game has a heartbeat. When that heartbeat gets going too fast, you’ve got to be a cardiac surgeon, you’ve got to bring it down, you’ve got to control it and there’s certain ways you can do that without all of a sudden pulling a rabbit out of your hat. Nothing bothers me more than seeing games start to unravel where the officials have let it go, let it go, and now you’re boxed in. Where do you draw the line? Where do you call the penalty? What’s it going to take to call a penalty to bring this thing back to some … The inmates are running the prison.

To make the call or not

Mike Pereira, Fox football rules analyst, former college football and NFL referee, and NFL director of officiating: The weak ones might take the weak way out because they don’t want to be part of the story. But the strong ones won’t take the easy way out. If it’s something obvious, you have to call it. It’s not fair to anybody to change your criteria in the final two minutes. Hell, why don’t we take the officials off the field and let the players decide? There’s enough gray area already that if you start playing those mind games like that, I think you’re heading down a slippery slope.

Cahill: A lot of times, the best calls are no calls. I think where you get in trouble as an official, not just at the end of a national championship, but at any critical period in a game, is if you’re too anxious to put air in the whistle. You can always put air in it a half-second later. But once you put air in the whistle, you can’t take it back. I encourage my younger officials to have a slow whistle. Be a half-second late, see the whole play, let it develop and let it finish.

Steve Javie, ABC/ESPN officiating analyst, former NBA referee (1986-2011) and veteran of 23 NBA Finals games: You can’t think it’s a foul in the last two minutes of a Finals game in a close game. You got to know it’s a foul before you blow your whistle. So that’s where you talk to yourself. ‘Is it marginal? Is it illegal contact?’ Believe it or not, all these things come in and out of your mind during those last few parts of the game.

Fraser: Don Cherry would say — put your whistle away, let the players decide the outcome of the game. I never really bought into that and I always maintained that if I avoided calling an obvious infraction, then I was, in fact, having some effect on the game. That’s what we’re there for. We’re there to enforce the rules but we’re also there to apply the rules with common sense, and good judgment.

Bo Boroski, retired college basketball referee, officiated each of the last three Final Fours: The ramifications of a no-call are no different than the ramifications of blowing the whistle. Both options benefit one team and don’t benefit the other, so in my mind, there is no difference. Oftentimes, it takes more intestinal fortitude to not blow the whistle than the other way around.

What it’s like to make the big call in the big moment

Boroski: In the Duke–Carolina game (2022 national semifinals), with 10 seconds to go in the game and Duke down three. Duke’s No. 1 (Trevor Keels) drove and was fouled by Carolina No. 14 (Puff Johnson). I waved off the bucket. I was confident in the moment that I got it right, but as I walked to the table, I could feel Coach K peering at me with that Coach K look. I remember having two thoughts as I walked to the table: I know I’m right and I hope like hell I’m right.

It’s hard to imagine how you could negotiate those two very different thoughts at the same time, but I was aware of the implications of that call, even in that moment. To this day, I still haven’t watched the entire game, but I’ve watched that play about 50 times since. Maybe I continuously watch it because it was ultimately the correct call, but if I wasn’t, I knew I’d have to move out of the country or to Chapel Hill.

Fraser: Look up Alain Cote’s disallowed goal in the Battle of Quebec in Game 5 of the 1987 Stanley Cup playoff.

A tie game, with a minute and change left in the game, and as Alain Cote is moving the puck down the side wall … cutting towards the open slot, at the same time there was two players going to the net with Brian Hayward in goal. The Nordique player hooked his skate around Hayward’s left pad. He then exerted pressure with his stick on Hayward’s upper shoulder. He dragged sideways as Mats Naslund was chasing him, and Naslund gave him a push to push him away from the goaltender. So that force exerted caused the Nordique centerman to body position moving to the right outside of the net, but he was able to drag Hayward with him and now there’s nobody in the net.

As I’m on the goal line, and I’m in great position, I could skate well, I was there ahead of the play, I’m looking and I’m going, Oh no. Please don’t score, don’t score. And I said that three times, as the puck was shot into the open net, with Craig Ludwig and Chris Chelios on their knees trying to defend the open net.

Now while they’re celebrating … I’m waving the goal off emphatically, emphatically. Michel Bergeron, if you’ve ever seen on “Hockey Night In Canada,” the shot of him standing on the boards pulling his hair out, that was from that play.

I gave the Quebec centerman a goalie interference penalty, which wasn’t really in vogue at that time. Guys were crashing the net, they were running goalies over. I gave Naslund an interference penalty as well, which was game management. I’m not going to take away the goal, put them a man in the hole.

I knew I’d be dead. I knew I was dead right. I was dead and right. The very next faceoff, Guy Carbonneau wins the draw, they go up the ice, it’s over to Kirk Muller, over to Ryan Walter, and Wally scores the winning goal on that very next faceoff.

In the old Montreal Forum, the refs came off with the Zamboni and (Nordiques CEO) Marcel Aubut, (coach) Michel Bergeron, all the media, I mean, it was a fight to get into my dressing room.

Anonymous CFP referee: If you know in your heart and have a supervisor that you agree with, that’s all you need. I spoke to a mentor in the business after (making a controversial call in a national championship game) and he said, “Welcome to the world of being an internet search. You can either crumble or take the next step in your career. Hey, you made the right call.”

Jackson: I’d never worked a Game 7 at the NHL level (until Carolina vs. Boston in 2009 conference semifinals). … Sure enough, the game went into overtime. And I remember sitting in the locker room between the third period and the overtime period going, “This figures, right? Biggest game of my career to date, and now it’s going to overtime.”

I remember saying to myself on the ice, “If it’s a legitimate penalty, you have to call it, but don’t overreact. You’ve got an extra second to make sure it’s a penalty.” The last thing you want to do is throw your arm up and go, “Oh, s—.” So, you just got to keep talking to yourself and saying, “Don’t overreact,” but you’ve got to do your job.

Scott: Any game can suddenly turn into — I mean, look at poor Jimmy Joyce. That could have happened to any of us. And (intensity) certainly is something that develops as the game goes. What you do as an umpire, whether you’re behind the plate or on the bases, you just kind of reboot yourself — let’s focus, let’s be really engaged here because this is happening, and you’re right in the middle of it.

The aftermath

Clougherty: I ran into a whole group of (Seton Hall fans) years later. There must’ve been a half-dozen of ’em, maybe more. They wanted to give it to me. But rather than respond in any way that would encourage them to get after me, I just said, ‘You know what? Let’s have a beer.’ … At the end of the day, they were like, “Hey, this guy isn’t an asshole. He’s OK.” But if I’d have fired back at them, that wouldn’t have gone well.

Scott: You can’t grow as an official, you can’t become a really good sports official if you aren’t absolutely honest with yourself. And that means you realized when you screwed up. You realized when you didn’t meet the moment — a moment you’ve probably met numerous times, but this time you didn’t. You have to acknowledge that within yourself to grow and become better.

Javie: We shouldn’t guess at any time, but unfortunately we as officials are human beings and there are times with what we think we see we blow the whistle. And then all of a sudden you look at the replay later on, you go “Darn, I thought that happened.”

Cahill: Officials obviously face scrutiny afterward, but I think one of the things that’s going to continue to creep into officiating and officiating decisions, and how they’re treated, is the impact of the legalization of gambling. There are untold numbers of dollars being bet on every event, and what happens at the end of the games is just so impactful from a gambling perspective. I don’t envy any officials who are working today. They’re in a very difficult position.

And about that Super Bowl call …

Anonymous CFP referee: In the NFL, they’re so athletic and with the timing of the progressions, those little tugs matter a lot because of the precision of the plays. That little bit really matters. And, it matters more because it’s that tug that allows the DB to stay in phase. It’s not really about holding up the receiver but it’s more to (get back the leverage and balance) to keep up with him. You see a lot of it on break routes, and that allows them to turn a little bit quicker. There are judgment calls within the spirit of the rule, in that gray area. You know the implications of throwing your flag.

I give the official all the credit in the world to have the guts to throw it. You know the moment you’re in. You know the clock situation and everything. You know your down and distance every play; you know your marks.

Fraser: He grabbed him but with the delay that was caused, with the force that he applied, would that player have been able to get to the ball that was to the end zone and almost thrown out of bounds? That I think is where the debate comes in. When you’re making that judgment, under pressure, from the position that you are in, on the field, on the ice, the sight line that you have, the proximity to the play, all of these things can affect the official’s judgment. We can sit in front of the TV and I would be the first to say, “Wow. I don’t really think that hold had an effect on the outcome of the play. I think the ball was overthrown and I don’t think he would have got there.” That would be my judgment. Just, again, armchair quarterback.

Javie: Maybe 25 years ago, they would have let that go in the NFL. Who knows? You have to just call it as you see it because they could defend it then too, if you think about it. Look at it the other way too. Let’s say that call wasn’t called. And then hypothetically with a minute and a half left, Eagles go down and maybe score a touchdown, win the game; now they go back to that play, Kansas City says, “Do you see the jersey right there? He held his jersey.” It’s hard to defend that.

Pereira: You look at that call, and I think in the broadcast booth created some of it ourselves. We immediately jumped the gun — Yeah, it’s a hold, but you don’t want to call that at this point of the game — I tried to say it IS a hold. But the emotion got going.

We teach officials that you want consistency. If it’s a hold in the first quarter, it’s a hold in the fourth quarter.

Compiled by Brendan Quinn, Michael Russo, Mike Vorkunov, Bruce Feldman, Stephen Nesbitt

(Photo illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photo: Norm Hall / Getty Images)