Quotes About Officiating

I think there's a lot of successful referees to come out of the Philadelphia area because the basketball is so good.

After being impaled by a javelin, while officiating- I'm doing fine now, just resting and hanging around.

People talk about the speed of the English game, but in Italy, referees blow their whistles very often, so you cannot build up speed. In England, referees wave play on, and so it becomes faster.

Obviously I bet on games I officiated. I passed on information based on the meetings that the referees were having, and based on what the league office wanted us to call in playoff games. With that being said, I was able to win at a high percentage when we were betting on NBA games.

Everyone talks about VAR, which is great. It will help the referees no end. But if you've got VAR in place and VAR becomes the ref, I'm not sure that's good for the game.

I find the quality of the officials in the Premier League so much better than the Championship.

English Premier League is much harder and quicker, and also, the referees are totally different because in England, they don't whistle after every small contact like in Germany.

In England, the referee doesn't blow his whistle.

The craft of officiating is taught that people come and pay top dollar to see people like Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, all the stars, and you have to make sure when you blow the whistle against those individuals that it's a foul that you basically can't let go.

We need to learn that in the Champions League, the referees are vigilant and quick to whistle.

The consistency of the game calls, I've been on both sides of it. I've been where the whistle has been in favor of you.

I check into the game and the ref cleans the whistle off, 'OK 98s coming in.' I'm one of those players that's physical and I use my fouls.

Our officials want nothing more than to be at the top of their professional game and make the correct call. That's what they do; that's their living, that's their pride, that's their joy. They don't achieve that because they happen to be human.

They lived in the temple annex, where they devoted ten years to being educated, another ten to officiating and yet another ten to instructing new recruits. They ensured the upkeep of the public hearth under the authority of their most senior member, the great Vestal (Virgo Vestalis Maxima).

Referees will make good decisions and bad ones. But when they make decisions actually affecting a game of football, it's disappointing.

I never called a balk in my life. I didn't understand the rule.

People tend to forget the genuinely lousy level of officiating that was prevalent in professional tennis when I came along. That's why, with my parents' words echoing in my ears—tell the truth; be honest at any cost—I felt I was (don't laugh) on a kind of quest to get things to improve.

The big question on everyone's mind is, 'Did Tim Donaghy fix games?' The answer is no. I didn't need to fix them. I usually knew which team was going to win based on which referees had been assigned to the game, their personalities, and the relationships they had with the players and coaches of the teams involved.

We don't tell the officials to change the standard for the playoffs, but as we all know, time and space tends to evaporate very quickly in a playoff game; there tends to be a lot more physicality and a lot more adjustments in the course of a series.

Increasingly, football fans are arguing that the game is bloated with too much down time. The officiating is clumsy.

There could probably be a penalty called on every single play. So the refs have a tough job.

I would say the referees have the toughest game to call. I would say that there's a lot of officiating done by announcers, local announcers. Sometimes you should listen to a game from both feeds, and you'd think you were listening to completely different games.

In every game, there's three teams out there. There's the two basketball teams and the team of officials. If the two teams are evenly matched, it can come down to number of possessions. If one out-of-bounds call goes the wrong way, that can be the difference.

Not only did I not like officiating his games, I was afraid at times he was going to knock my block off... there was nothing you could do to get the guy on your side... with saying that, I've talked to Rasheed Wallace in the last couple of years and he's nothing but a complete gentleman off the floor.