Post by FredFan7 on Dec 7, 2012 1:24:52 GMT -5
From Referee Magazine. I didn't know/forgot that Roe left the NFL on poor terms with Jerry Seeman:
Taking a Hike
Published in Referee Magazine: January 1999 | Print | Email
Copyright© Referee Enterprises, Inc.
Important note: This article is archival in nature. Rules, interpretations, citations, mechanics and/or officiating philosophies found in this article may or may not be correct for the current year.
Taking a Hike
By Jerry Grunska
At the end of the 1996 NFL season, veteran official Howard Roe, age 57, was given a choice: either accept reassignment from referee to line judge or else. He opted for the "or else." He had come to a fork in the path and he took the direction that called for hiking boots, not turf shoes. His decision to resign marked the first time an NFL referee decided to end his career rather than work a schedule from the sidelines.
Talk to Howard Roe and talk to the NFL and you quickly come to understand the complexities of this business of officiating, evaluations and management styles. You uncover strong feelings - personal feelings - that play out in little ways over time. You also come to know how officiating in the most-watched sport in America can turn you into a minor celebrity.
Roe left the relative safety and anonymity of major-college football officiating for the rarefied air of the National Football League. He did fine for quite a few years. Then Roe accepted the stark reality that it was time for him to leave. To this day the reasons why aren't completely clear, nor will they ever be, in Roe's mind.
When humorist Dave Barry turned 50, he took stock of his life and listed 25 vital things he had learned in half a century. One of those was, "There is a very fine line between 'hobby' and 'mental illness.'" Roe wasn't worried that his dedication to officiating threatened his mental stability, but he was concerned that burgeoning responsibilities in both the NFL and his position with Lockheed Martin Aeronautics were demanding a disproportionate amount of energy and time.
"Counting clinics, special Friday 'fly-ins' for referees, and a week at the Chicago Bears' training camp, plus entire weekends and Monday night assignments - all of which ate up my Lockheed Martin vacation time - I had 27 flights in one year," he said. "The air travel starts to get tiresome."
Barry also said, "You should not confuse your career with your life," and Roe was beginning to wonder about that. The illusions and disillusions came during the last several years of Roe's NFL career. He thought he'd have a shot at the Super Bowl. He said he was told that he ranked number four among referees after the 1994 season.
Jerry Seeman, NFL director of officiating, invited Roe for a chat after the 1995 season. Seeman had some concerns about Roe's progress. Roe had some concerns about not getting a playoff game that year, but he left feeling that his status was still secure. It wasn't.
All NFL referees are in competition with one another. They are graded every week, as are all other league officials, and the winner gets the top prize, the Super Bowl. When they accept the spot as crew chief, each man aspires to that headline position, but not everyone will get it. "The reach should exceed the grasp," as poet Robert Browning put it. Because of such constant exposure, because there is so much riding on many games and because of the minute scrutiny of their calls by today's slow-motion replay mechanisms, all NFL officials are subject to a huge amount of pressure.
Imagine yourself at the bottom of a bowl crammed with 70,000 distraught individuals hurling insults in unison. It is a big game with a huge outcome at stake, say the Packers and 49ers. The visitors have just returned a kick 85 yards for a go-ahead score, but there is a flag at the receiver's 20 yardline. You convene a frantic conference at midfield. "That block in the back was just a brush," one of the crew members says, hoarsely. "It didn't put the defender on the ground."
Another official speaks, eyes widening, "The runner was already upfield. The contact occurred behind the play."
You've got to let the visitor's score stand. "We'll pick up the flag," you say, knowing that a monumental howl of derision will greet your announcement and that millions of people will see that "brush" replayed on television in slow-motion with dumbstruck analysts cluck-clucking their doubts. Literally, the noise almost suffocates your ability to think. Could you summon your poise under such conditions and articulate the decision precisely? It's routine for the 16 men who head up crews in the NFL. There is no other sports officiating role like it.
Roe's rise to the referee position in the NFL was relatively smooth. "Hiya, kid," Jerry Markbreit greeted him over the phone when Markbreit learned Roe had been assigned to his crew in 1984. "You wanna be a referee before long? That's what you're gonna be." In 1989 Roe became a crew chief himself.
All told, Roe worked 265 NFL games, including two Pro Bowls, one Hall of Fame Game and a dozen other playoffs, as well as serving as an alternate at an NFC Championship game. A photo of his last crew is perched on a shelf in his office.
Roe began his officiating career at age 21 and he worked at the high school level for 17 years before Bruce Finlayson, supervisor of officials in the Big 8 (now the Big 12) Conference, spotted him at a spring college scrimmage in Wichita, Kan., and invited him to move up to the college ranks.
"Finlayson - he'd been in the pros - was like a father figure to me," Roe recalled. "His manner of dealing with you was to ask gentle questions, listen carefully and then offer suggestions. Finlayson never berated you or put you down. I've tried to copy his style in being tuned to other people."
In the NFL Roe was once asked to reprimand a crew member who had made some mistakes. "I'm not a shouter. That's not my style," Roe said. "I'm opinionated but I'm also pretty diplomatic." He agreed to counsel the offender, but to do it in a positive, supportive way; "ass-chewing" would have been foreign to his nature. Roe was lured into the banking business after several years as an educator in Wichita. His new job obliged him to transfer to Denver, and he accepted the switch because it enabled him to continue working the Big 8. But later when he was asked to relocate to Houston, he opted to stay in Colorado and look for a new job. Three jobs later Howard found himself with Lockheed Martin.
"There's that knot in your stomach," he said about being an executive downsized from a pair of companies in the '80s. "I think I've become more sensitive to the feelings of people ... because of what I've been through jobwise ... (plus) two years with four deaths in the family." Roe lost both parents, and his wife Joan had to deal with the deaths of her mother and a brother between 1994 and 1996.
Despite the knots in his stomach, he had managed a career elevation each time he found himself on the outside looking in. "I got used to the job search," he said. "It was a challenge, a game. I plugged away at companies I had targeted and simply talked my way in the door. I have a lot of confidence in myself and a ton of resilience."
His position at Lockheed Martin offered Roe an intriguing challenge. In effect he could build his own department, a fiefdom, and he'd be in control. Being in control of his own destiny was a basic ingredient for satisfaction. Now he'd be able to guide the destiny of others. "It's like running my own small business operation," he said. He likened it to preparing for a big game. In football, Howard Roe was noted for his meticulous pregame sessions and was captured practicing his signals in front of a mirror when USA Today did a feature story on his crew, at the recommendation of the league office, at Green Bay in October 1995.
People who know Roe personally and by reputation were shocked when he walked away from the NFL. What was it that occurred to precipitate his departure? Roe says he still doesn't know the answer to that question.
Roe was approached between the 1994 and '95 seasons to work in the World League of American Football (now NFL Europe), but he begged off because of his commitment to Lockheed Martin. Roe said he believes that was the point he fell out of favor with the NFL.
The following season, when he didn't get a playoff game and was summoned to Minnesota to meet with Seeman, Roe was upset when Seeman told him, as Roe recalled, to get over the recent deaths in his family. Whatever underlying currents or lingering resentments there were between the men may never be fully understood.
Roe said the Minnesota meeting with Seeman consisted of viewing about a dozen plays on video. The league sends plays with questionable calls to the crew each week, action from the crew's previous contest and some examples from other games. Officials are free to challenge the validity of downgrades, but they seldom do because they don't want to be perceived as rationalizing their mistakes. Roe said he was never told in specific terms what his alleged shortcomings were as a ref.
"Sometimes the critiques are pretty adamant," Roe said with a wry smile. "It can be a harsh management style. But the opinions of coaches and owners are thrown into the mix too, and that can be potent."
Roe went into the 1996 season believing the Super Bowl was still within his reach. At season's end, Seeman called Roe and said he'd like to see Roe move back to the line judge position for the upcoming season. Seeman also brought up the prospect once again of working in the World League. According to Roe, Seeman said he wanted to see Roe in a Super Bowl and thought that could be accomplished with the move. But Roe was a referee and he wanted the Super Bowl only as a referee. He told Seeman he would get back to him.
We all build images about our roles that may not square with someone else's view. Many of us hear the siren call of personal compliments but pay scant heed to the warnings of critical review. In Roe's case, he fastened onto the acclaim of being close to the best. The next year he could go all the way, he thought.
In 1996 Roe was also feeling that the NFL wanted more than his part-time dedication. They wanted his soul. What was it former NFL guard and Hall of Famer Jerry Kramer said about fabled coach Vince Lombardi? "He said, 'We must be devoted to God, our families, and the Green Bay Packers.' But sometimes I think he got the order mixed up." Individuals who have other dimensions to their lives may have to push those interests aside in order to dedicate themselves to the great entity.
For Roe, the great entity was the NFL and it started to feel more like a weight he dragged around than a badge of honor. You like to do a little trekking to barren mountaintops in the Rockies? Skip that for summer clinics, study sessions and a week at a team's preseason camp at a humid town in the Midwest hinterland. Want to see your daughter's ballet recital? Sorry, there's a Monday nighter in Dallas; maybe they'll be dancing in the streets afterward. In fact, we've got five months of Sundays for you to get your face on TV. It wasn't just a second commitment. Howard Roe felt he was getting the business.
So he said goodbye.
Once a month now he climbs a mountain with popular guide Dr. David Muller, a well-known Denverite who writes books about high-country hiking. Roe has broadened the scope of his personnel responsibilities at work. With his wife Joan he has soaked in some of the hot springs that abound in Colorado.
He still lifts weights at his health club, and he's pushing 36,000 miles this year on his exercycle. He and Joan attended a winefest in Palisade on Colorado's Western Slope, and they took in a balloonfest in Steamboat Springs. "Would you believe," he said, "we actually jumped in the car and wandered aimlessly over the mountains for a week, taking in the autumn colors?" This from a man whose pregame conferences in the NFL were so precise and intricate that his crewmates were in awe.
Roe's philosophy now is comparable to that expressed by prominent business author Harvey Mackay whose Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive was a best-seller several years back. Mackay wrote recently, "The only person you have to prove anything to is yourself. What you achieve as an individual, as a professional, as a family member, as a neighbor and as a member of your community is the only basis on which you can be fairly judged." Roe's wide range of living skills and interests includes conducting top-level career seminars at major colleges, plus flopping on the floor with his new grandson. His wife enrolled him in a fly fishing class, and he was just elected president of the Rocky Mountain Association of Colleges and Employers.
In the wake of his departure from the NFL, Roe left many scratching their heads, Jerry Seeman in particular. "I very much wanted Howard to stay in the National Football League," he said. "I begged him to stay."
Roe still thinks about the NFL and the people he met while he was there. He says he hasn't spoken with Seeman since the day he resigned. He also says he still doesn't know what went wrong.
"I have no desire to go back to officiating," said Roe. "I had 13 years in the league and nobody can take that away from me." Roe is still trying to make peace with the NFL, but there is a lingering irritation in his tone when he speaks of those last few seasons in the league.
Howard Roe may have misunderstood what he could have done to continue his NFL career. He says he feels that a cold and impersonal management style derailed his chances for about five more years of solid NFL contributions. The NFL, on the other hand, felt Roe's own management style needed redirection. "I'd like to see you in the Super Bowl someday, as a line judge," Seeman had told him. Roe may have put misguided faith in fanciful things, but right now he's devoting himself to a life he considers real.
Taking a Hike
Published in Referee Magazine: January 1999 | Print | Email
Copyright© Referee Enterprises, Inc.
Important note: This article is archival in nature. Rules, interpretations, citations, mechanics and/or officiating philosophies found in this article may or may not be correct for the current year.
Taking a Hike
By Jerry Grunska
At the end of the 1996 NFL season, veteran official Howard Roe, age 57, was given a choice: either accept reassignment from referee to line judge or else. He opted for the "or else." He had come to a fork in the path and he took the direction that called for hiking boots, not turf shoes. His decision to resign marked the first time an NFL referee decided to end his career rather than work a schedule from the sidelines.
Talk to Howard Roe and talk to the NFL and you quickly come to understand the complexities of this business of officiating, evaluations and management styles. You uncover strong feelings - personal feelings - that play out in little ways over time. You also come to know how officiating in the most-watched sport in America can turn you into a minor celebrity.
Roe left the relative safety and anonymity of major-college football officiating for the rarefied air of the National Football League. He did fine for quite a few years. Then Roe accepted the stark reality that it was time for him to leave. To this day the reasons why aren't completely clear, nor will they ever be, in Roe's mind.
When humorist Dave Barry turned 50, he took stock of his life and listed 25 vital things he had learned in half a century. One of those was, "There is a very fine line between 'hobby' and 'mental illness.'" Roe wasn't worried that his dedication to officiating threatened his mental stability, but he was concerned that burgeoning responsibilities in both the NFL and his position with Lockheed Martin Aeronautics were demanding a disproportionate amount of energy and time.
"Counting clinics, special Friday 'fly-ins' for referees, and a week at the Chicago Bears' training camp, plus entire weekends and Monday night assignments - all of which ate up my Lockheed Martin vacation time - I had 27 flights in one year," he said. "The air travel starts to get tiresome."
Barry also said, "You should not confuse your career with your life," and Roe was beginning to wonder about that. The illusions and disillusions came during the last several years of Roe's NFL career. He thought he'd have a shot at the Super Bowl. He said he was told that he ranked number four among referees after the 1994 season.
Jerry Seeman, NFL director of officiating, invited Roe for a chat after the 1995 season. Seeman had some concerns about Roe's progress. Roe had some concerns about not getting a playoff game that year, but he left feeling that his status was still secure. It wasn't.
All NFL referees are in competition with one another. They are graded every week, as are all other league officials, and the winner gets the top prize, the Super Bowl. When they accept the spot as crew chief, each man aspires to that headline position, but not everyone will get it. "The reach should exceed the grasp," as poet Robert Browning put it. Because of such constant exposure, because there is so much riding on many games and because of the minute scrutiny of their calls by today's slow-motion replay mechanisms, all NFL officials are subject to a huge amount of pressure.
Imagine yourself at the bottom of a bowl crammed with 70,000 distraught individuals hurling insults in unison. It is a big game with a huge outcome at stake, say the Packers and 49ers. The visitors have just returned a kick 85 yards for a go-ahead score, but there is a flag at the receiver's 20 yardline. You convene a frantic conference at midfield. "That block in the back was just a brush," one of the crew members says, hoarsely. "It didn't put the defender on the ground."
Another official speaks, eyes widening, "The runner was already upfield. The contact occurred behind the play."
You've got to let the visitor's score stand. "We'll pick up the flag," you say, knowing that a monumental howl of derision will greet your announcement and that millions of people will see that "brush" replayed on television in slow-motion with dumbstruck analysts cluck-clucking their doubts. Literally, the noise almost suffocates your ability to think. Could you summon your poise under such conditions and articulate the decision precisely? It's routine for the 16 men who head up crews in the NFL. There is no other sports officiating role like it.
Roe's rise to the referee position in the NFL was relatively smooth. "Hiya, kid," Jerry Markbreit greeted him over the phone when Markbreit learned Roe had been assigned to his crew in 1984. "You wanna be a referee before long? That's what you're gonna be." In 1989 Roe became a crew chief himself.
All told, Roe worked 265 NFL games, including two Pro Bowls, one Hall of Fame Game and a dozen other playoffs, as well as serving as an alternate at an NFC Championship game. A photo of his last crew is perched on a shelf in his office.
Roe began his officiating career at age 21 and he worked at the high school level for 17 years before Bruce Finlayson, supervisor of officials in the Big 8 (now the Big 12) Conference, spotted him at a spring college scrimmage in Wichita, Kan., and invited him to move up to the college ranks.
"Finlayson - he'd been in the pros - was like a father figure to me," Roe recalled. "His manner of dealing with you was to ask gentle questions, listen carefully and then offer suggestions. Finlayson never berated you or put you down. I've tried to copy his style in being tuned to other people."
In the NFL Roe was once asked to reprimand a crew member who had made some mistakes. "I'm not a shouter. That's not my style," Roe said. "I'm opinionated but I'm also pretty diplomatic." He agreed to counsel the offender, but to do it in a positive, supportive way; "ass-chewing" would have been foreign to his nature. Roe was lured into the banking business after several years as an educator in Wichita. His new job obliged him to transfer to Denver, and he accepted the switch because it enabled him to continue working the Big 8. But later when he was asked to relocate to Houston, he opted to stay in Colorado and look for a new job. Three jobs later Howard found himself with Lockheed Martin.
"There's that knot in your stomach," he said about being an executive downsized from a pair of companies in the '80s. "I think I've become more sensitive to the feelings of people ... because of what I've been through jobwise ... (plus) two years with four deaths in the family." Roe lost both parents, and his wife Joan had to deal with the deaths of her mother and a brother between 1994 and 1996.
Despite the knots in his stomach, he had managed a career elevation each time he found himself on the outside looking in. "I got used to the job search," he said. "It was a challenge, a game. I plugged away at companies I had targeted and simply talked my way in the door. I have a lot of confidence in myself and a ton of resilience."
His position at Lockheed Martin offered Roe an intriguing challenge. In effect he could build his own department, a fiefdom, and he'd be in control. Being in control of his own destiny was a basic ingredient for satisfaction. Now he'd be able to guide the destiny of others. "It's like running my own small business operation," he said. He likened it to preparing for a big game. In football, Howard Roe was noted for his meticulous pregame sessions and was captured practicing his signals in front of a mirror when USA Today did a feature story on his crew, at the recommendation of the league office, at Green Bay in October 1995.
People who know Roe personally and by reputation were shocked when he walked away from the NFL. What was it that occurred to precipitate his departure? Roe says he still doesn't know the answer to that question.
Roe was approached between the 1994 and '95 seasons to work in the World League of American Football (now NFL Europe), but he begged off because of his commitment to Lockheed Martin. Roe said he believes that was the point he fell out of favor with the NFL.
The following season, when he didn't get a playoff game and was summoned to Minnesota to meet with Seeman, Roe was upset when Seeman told him, as Roe recalled, to get over the recent deaths in his family. Whatever underlying currents or lingering resentments there were between the men may never be fully understood.
Roe said the Minnesota meeting with Seeman consisted of viewing about a dozen plays on video. The league sends plays with questionable calls to the crew each week, action from the crew's previous contest and some examples from other games. Officials are free to challenge the validity of downgrades, but they seldom do because they don't want to be perceived as rationalizing their mistakes. Roe said he was never told in specific terms what his alleged shortcomings were as a ref.
"Sometimes the critiques are pretty adamant," Roe said with a wry smile. "It can be a harsh management style. But the opinions of coaches and owners are thrown into the mix too, and that can be potent."
Roe went into the 1996 season believing the Super Bowl was still within his reach. At season's end, Seeman called Roe and said he'd like to see Roe move back to the line judge position for the upcoming season. Seeman also brought up the prospect once again of working in the World League. According to Roe, Seeman said he wanted to see Roe in a Super Bowl and thought that could be accomplished with the move. But Roe was a referee and he wanted the Super Bowl only as a referee. He told Seeman he would get back to him.
We all build images about our roles that may not square with someone else's view. Many of us hear the siren call of personal compliments but pay scant heed to the warnings of critical review. In Roe's case, he fastened onto the acclaim of being close to the best. The next year he could go all the way, he thought.
In 1996 Roe was also feeling that the NFL wanted more than his part-time dedication. They wanted his soul. What was it former NFL guard and Hall of Famer Jerry Kramer said about fabled coach Vince Lombardi? "He said, 'We must be devoted to God, our families, and the Green Bay Packers.' But sometimes I think he got the order mixed up." Individuals who have other dimensions to their lives may have to push those interests aside in order to dedicate themselves to the great entity.
For Roe, the great entity was the NFL and it started to feel more like a weight he dragged around than a badge of honor. You like to do a little trekking to barren mountaintops in the Rockies? Skip that for summer clinics, study sessions and a week at a team's preseason camp at a humid town in the Midwest hinterland. Want to see your daughter's ballet recital? Sorry, there's a Monday nighter in Dallas; maybe they'll be dancing in the streets afterward. In fact, we've got five months of Sundays for you to get your face on TV. It wasn't just a second commitment. Howard Roe felt he was getting the business.
So he said goodbye.
Once a month now he climbs a mountain with popular guide Dr. David Muller, a well-known Denverite who writes books about high-country hiking. Roe has broadened the scope of his personnel responsibilities at work. With his wife Joan he has soaked in some of the hot springs that abound in Colorado.
He still lifts weights at his health club, and he's pushing 36,000 miles this year on his exercycle. He and Joan attended a winefest in Palisade on Colorado's Western Slope, and they took in a balloonfest in Steamboat Springs. "Would you believe," he said, "we actually jumped in the car and wandered aimlessly over the mountains for a week, taking in the autumn colors?" This from a man whose pregame conferences in the NFL were so precise and intricate that his crewmates were in awe.
Roe's philosophy now is comparable to that expressed by prominent business author Harvey Mackay whose Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive was a best-seller several years back. Mackay wrote recently, "The only person you have to prove anything to is yourself. What you achieve as an individual, as a professional, as a family member, as a neighbor and as a member of your community is the only basis on which you can be fairly judged." Roe's wide range of living skills and interests includes conducting top-level career seminars at major colleges, plus flopping on the floor with his new grandson. His wife enrolled him in a fly fishing class, and he was just elected president of the Rocky Mountain Association of Colleges and Employers.
In the wake of his departure from the NFL, Roe left many scratching their heads, Jerry Seeman in particular. "I very much wanted Howard to stay in the National Football League," he said. "I begged him to stay."
Roe still thinks about the NFL and the people he met while he was there. He says he hasn't spoken with Seeman since the day he resigned. He also says he still doesn't know what went wrong.
"I have no desire to go back to officiating," said Roe. "I had 13 years in the league and nobody can take that away from me." Roe is still trying to make peace with the NFL, but there is a lingering irritation in his tone when he speaks of those last few seasons in the league.
Howard Roe may have misunderstood what he could have done to continue his NFL career. He says he feels that a cold and impersonal management style derailed his chances for about five more years of solid NFL contributions. The NFL, on the other hand, felt Roe's own management style needed redirection. "I'd like to see you in the Super Bowl someday, as a line judge," Seeman had told him. Roe may have put misguided faith in fanciful things, but right now he's devoting himself to a life he considers real.