Word: diehl
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Every ref adds his personal flourish to his calls, especially some flamboyant types whom fans call pejoratively "hop, skip, and a jump-you're a chump refs." Nevertheless Diehl says that positioning and hand signalling have become basically uniform...
...selection procedure usually means that if there's a donnybrook in the area, you will probably find Diehl in the limelight working with a partner from New Jersey or New York, a setup which is known as a "split crew." This was the case for the televised Boston College-Georgetown hoedown on February 21, for which Diehl arrived his usual hour and a half before the opening tap-off. He had worked Harvard's five-point loss to Penn the night before at Philadelphia's Palestra...
...Diehl, good refereeing consists of a triad of intangibles he labels consistency, acceptance, and control. Hannon phrases his motto as "knowledge of the rules, good judgment, and fairness." Whatever the criteria, every official aims to have "the perfect angle" when he makes a call, which Diehl describes as having the play in full view from its inception to the time of the infraction. "There is no perfect position, you've got to work for it," he adds. For Hannon "the key to the whole thing is hustling and getting down the court...
...Diehl is consistently at loggerheads with spectators and coaches, the dual bane of the ref. He credits widespread fan misunderstanding of the game to the basketball playing boom. The result is "they're all experts. In football they blow a whistle, throw a flag, and go into a huddle. No one pretends to understand the game...
...Both Diehl and Hannon stress that college coaches are under the gun every time their team takes to the floor, so any sympathy is misplaced. "You have to keep in mind that there's a coach on the other side of the bench and it's his bread and butter too," Diehl says. Both profess immunity to the hostile bantering of coaches. "You just can't worry that the guy on the other end of the bench doesn't like your work," Hannon says. "A certain few coaches are going to bother everyone." Diehl ribs coaches who huddle their charges...