Post by FredFan7 on Jan 8, 2013 23:44:34 GMT -5
Courtesy of Referee Magazine
GRID IRON MAN
By Tim Sloan
All arms and angles on the field, chomping on his whistle like a two-day-old stogie, Bernie Kukar looks like he could be the crew chief at any small-town Friday night game. And that bright yellow flag hanging out of his pocket? It's old school, just like the man himself. Despite the fact that everything about him screams "down to earth," Kukar is in the rarified air of the NFL, a member of a very select club of white hats who have taken charge of two Super Bowls.
You never really leave the Iron Range. If you've grown up there, the will to succeed and the heart you develop stays with you for life. And because of that, the NFL has Bernie Kukar.
Kukar, 65, is in his 22nd year as an NFL official and 15th as a referee. He's a veteran of two Super Bowls as a white hat and is second on the league seniority list behind Gerry Austin. That's a huge accomplishment for a person who grew up in the backwaters, 60 miles north of Duluth, Minn. Kukar's story is one of perseverance and provides a compelling challenge to the notion that the biggest fish come from the biggest ponds.
When asked about his easy-going nature, Bernie shrugs and says, "Hey, I'm from northern Minnesota. I'm from the Range. We don't forget where we came from."
Bernie Kukar grew up in Gilbert, Minn., a dot off US-53 about halfway from Duluth to International Falls. It's in an area known as the Iron Range because of its primary contribution to the American economy. The Range is a rugged region of forest and rock where people tend to live because that's where they always have and because what the raw iron returns as income makes it hard to consider much else. Kukar says living there takes a strong spirit and a do-what-it-takes mentality. He is no exception. His father died when he was 13 and the family moved in with his father's parents. He went to Gilbert High School and kept attending Gilbert even after his mother moved the family to Biwabik, about 10 miles up the road, past McKinley. Nowadays, Gilbert is a big hockey hotbed and the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame is only a few miles away, but in the mid-1950s, you played football and basketball if you went to Gilbert.
Bernie excelled at both sports and was also a member of the National Honor Society. As graduation approached, he was scouted by the University of Minnesota-Duluth and even got some sniffs from Minnesota and Notre Dame. In those days, a scholarship from Duluth was hardly a wheelbarrow full of money and Kukar's English teacher got him thinking in another direction. His mentor was a graduate of St. John's University, run by the Benedictine monks in Collegeville, Minn., near St. Cloud. Academics were - and still are - a big deal at St. John's, and the school happened to have a pretty good football coach, too, by the name of John Gagliardi. Gagliardi now holds the NCAA record for most career wins. St. John's was Bernie Kukar's way off the Range.
He played one-platoon football at St. John's as a cornerback and quarterback, then later a running back. He also made team captain as a junior guard on the basketball team and is seventh on St. John's all-time scoring list in that sport. He was a special kind of athlete but not special enough for the pros and so he started looking for a real job.
As a senior in 1961, he and a friend went to see the Minnesota Vikings' inaugural game at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington. Fran Tarkenton threw for four touchdowns and ran for a fifth as the Vikings beat the Chicago Bears, 37-17. But the team that Kukar noticed most that day was the one in the striped shirts.
"I decided right there that I wanted to be an official," Kukar says. "I thought it would keep me close to the game after I graduated." He left St. John's with a degree in math and went to work initially for a computer company based in the Twin Cities. His career eventually led to work in sales for a company that manages employee benefit plans, and he additionally owned and operated a wilderness camp for boys in northern Minnesota. He is retired from all of that now.
He started refereeing high school football and basketball in 1961, but it took him 23 years to reach the NFL. He made it to Division III football in 1965 and then Division II in 1969, where he worked for another 11 years. All of it was within the conferences scattered across Wisconsin, Minnesota and into the northern plains. The Big 10 hired him in 1980 and he was a side judge for four years before reaching the NFL in 1984. He also worked Division II and III basketball and, in 1969, was paired with a coach-turned-referee named Jerry Seeman, who had moved to the Cities from Wisconsin. Seeman was a football official, too, and made it to the NFL in 1975, later becoming its director of officiating from 1991-2001. The two continued to call basketball games together until 1990, but Kukar found out a lot about the NFL early on through Seeman.
As his college football career developed in the Big 10, Kukar quietly applied to the NFL. Seeman was aware of that but Bernie's wife and college sweetheart, Mary, didn't really find out until after Bernie told her he'd been invited for an interview. "In the back of my mind, I always had the goal of making the NFL but in the area up where I was living early on, I wondered whether it was really reachable," he says. "Then, when I finally reached Division I, I thought, 'Maybe I really do have a shot.'"
Seeman and Kukar spent a lot of time on the road together and got to know each other well. "Being around Bernie," says Seeman, "you could tell he had the attributes to be a very successful official. He was mature, worked very hard at the rules and he had good people skills."
Mary Kukar will vouch for that. "I got the comment early on when I first got to know Bernie that his friends admired him," she recalls. "He was good at forming relationships then and he still is."
"I think I have a pretty good grasp of what football's about and I have a personality that controls situations," Kukar reflects. "Being in the sales industry, you deal with company presidents to people in the office so you have to know what buttons to push to get things done."
Once in the NFL, Kukar worked from 1984-90 as a back judge. He missed the playoffs his first season and then worked a playoff game or the Pro Bowl every other year of his career except his first as a referee, in 1991. Many officials can recall their first NFL game in exquisite detail but Kukar is different; he's pretty sure it was Houston and New Orleans. "I think I do best at remembering highlights of games," he shrugs, "and I guess there weren't any in that game."
He was a crew chief for a lot of his college career and entertained becoming a referee after he made the NFL. "At that time, Art McNally (then the NFL's director of officiating) always gave you the option of applying to work a different position and I put down that I would like to referee," says Kukar. "Then some guys started to retire and Art asked me if I still wanted to work. Jerry Seeman took over the job the same year I became a referee in '91.I had a lot of experience refereeing and thought I would be more comfortable. I thought I could use some of my other talents and take six other guys with different personalities and blend them into a cohesive unit. In any crew, you get one guy that's a schoolteacher in New Hampshire and another that's a horse rancher from Mississippi and you've got to find out what works with each of them."
The managerial approach has worked out well for Kukar, who was the referee of the Broncos-Falcons Super Bowl in 1999 and the humdinger Rams-Patriots game in 2002. He was also the alternate in 1996.
Kukar says an NFL referee can make his mark by how effectively he sorts out the mess that sometimes occurs. "There are times when the officials on the field will have differing opinions of what happened on a play. I have to listen to all sides with guys saying two or three or four different things and use their input to decide what to do. You have to show the crew that you're the guy in charge and you're going to make the decision. You have to be able to read and know your crew and you can tell by looking into their eyes that they really don't know what they're talking about all the time.
"I think if you asked a lot of guys on my crews they'd say that I don't frighten them and they can come clean with me." Get past the appearances and get the call right is Kukar's credo, something he put to the test during last season's Sunday night opener between Kansas City and Denver. In that one, KC attempted and missed a 63-yard field goal as time expired in the first half.
"(Before the field goal attempt) we'd had a penalty that should have been marked off, making it a 58-yard attempt. As we were running off the field, (Chiefs quarterback) Trent Green came up to me and said we didn't apply the penalty on the play before," Kukar begins. "So, I asked around and it turned out we hadn't. I knew we shouldn't replay a down but it seemed to be the right thing to do.
"So I told everyone we were going to do it again and we chased the band off the field and got everybody out of the dressing room. Then they missed again from 58. Mr. Pereira (the current NFL director of officiating) wasn't very happy about what I did, but it seemed to me that the officials made the mistake and it was unfair to penalize the teams."
Mary was with Bernie in Denver and waiting for him in their room when he got back to the hotel. Ever the loving wife, she asked, "What the #$%$ was that about?" as he strode through the door. "Bernie just rolled his eyes and said, 'That was a mistake,'" Mary recalls. "He said people told him he couldn't change the call but he said, 'Oh, yes we can.' That's Bernie. He says that about a lot of things."
How about that flag sticking out of his pocket? Few football officials still carry them that way. "Well, I'd wear it in my belt if I didn't have so many damn other things hanging there," says Kukar. "We've got the microphone, the replay buzzer, my beanbags. ... It's a lot of stuff stuffed into a belt. In fact I tried wearing it new-school style for a couple of games but I kept reaching for the wrong thing and I was just a mess out there. Pereira said, 'Stick that damn flag in your belt; it's hanging out for the world to see.'" Kukar laughs, "I told him you take all this electronic equipment off me and maybe I will."
The flag is just one of many ways folks know Bernie is on the field any given Sunday. He's tall and lean with the types of elbows and knees that give him a perpetual akimbo appearance when he throws a gangly arm to signal a first down or whistles for the kickoff.
An NFL study recently showed that referees cover about 6.4 miles on average in a game, chasing around super-athletes in the splendor of their youth. So, how does a 65-year-old do it? Kukar is 6'1" and 180 pounds. During the season, he'll take Monday off then ride his bike on Tuesday, "To get the kinks out," he says. Wednesday is some bike riding and one to two miles of "something between a walk and a jog" that he continues for the rest of the week. He likes to hunt and play golf, and in the offseason he's into skiing - both alpine and cross-country. "Mostly, I work around the house and don't sit down for more than five minutes in the day," he says.
During the season, the Kukars live in their house way up on the north shore of Lake Superior. Mary says, "The hardest thing for Bernie is being away. The traveling he's not excited about. Four or five days a week, though, he's able to be Bernie the husband."
The Kukars met in college and Mary went on to be a high school physical and health education teacher for 35 years. She was a pretty good athlete, too, and refereed high school basketball for a number of years. Mary says that she and Bernie talk a lot about the NFL but more often it's about the profession than the games themselves.
"I think he knows that I know what he's talking about because I know the game and his crew. I supply support and some common sense. I agree with him when I think he's right and I tell him when I think he's wrong sometimes." That doesn't sound like a resentful bride.
"When I was younger," she recalls, "I talked to younger wives who totally objected to the time their husbands spent away refereeing. I told them it was a perfectly beneficial recreational thing and better than hanging out in the bar. My advice to them was to get to understand the sport." Mary admits it was tough in the early days when Bernie was off working games while she had a job of her own and was tending to four children, with no guarantee of him ever making the NFL. "I didn't really wish he didn't do it because we were always a sports family," she says, "and when he got to the Big 10 and then the NFL, he was actually gone less."
Bernie has always made a point of paying the family back with as many of the perks as he can provide. He's taken his family to the Super Bowl and other events and Mary is a frequent companion on the road. Kids can show a resentment of their father's career choice by doing anything but follow in his footsteps, but that isn't the case with the Kukars' four children. All were into sports in a big way and Samantha, 33, is in a sales career like Dad was, while youngest daughter Maggie, 30, is a media coordinator for the Minnesota Wild NHL team. (Maggie says Bernie needs to work on his voice on the wireless mic.) Eldest daughter Katie, 37, works for a magazine and son Matt, 25, is a salesman who's just completed his third year working in the Arena2 league, regarded as one step up the ladder to the NFL. He's also a St. John's grad.
Matt says it helps that his dad is an NFL official in terms of his own learning curve, "But it also puts a bigger bull's eye on your back. There's a bigger expectation of you." Matt would like to make the NFL, "but there are so many guys trying to make it. My next goal is to make it to the Arena League and then Division I and then we'll see where it goes."
With his youngest son already following in the old man's footsteps, does Kukar ever think of hanging up his whistle? "I think he thinks about retiring more than anything," says Mary. "He's not senile yet and his crew doesn't want him to retire. He always says, 'When I know I'm not enjoying it anymore is when I'll quit.'"
"I just take it one season at a time," says Bernie. "The league has given me no indication it's time to go. (Referee) Gerald Austin is at the same point as me and I always tell him I'm going to last one day longer than him."
There's that perseverance again. You never leave the Range.
Tim Sloan lives in Le Claire, Iowa, and referees high school football and basketball. He previously umpired baseball and officiated football and soccer at the college level.
GRID IRON MAN
By Tim Sloan
All arms and angles on the field, chomping on his whistle like a two-day-old stogie, Bernie Kukar looks like he could be the crew chief at any small-town Friday night game. And that bright yellow flag hanging out of his pocket? It's old school, just like the man himself. Despite the fact that everything about him screams "down to earth," Kukar is in the rarified air of the NFL, a member of a very select club of white hats who have taken charge of two Super Bowls.
You never really leave the Iron Range. If you've grown up there, the will to succeed and the heart you develop stays with you for life. And because of that, the NFL has Bernie Kukar.
Kukar, 65, is in his 22nd year as an NFL official and 15th as a referee. He's a veteran of two Super Bowls as a white hat and is second on the league seniority list behind Gerry Austin. That's a huge accomplishment for a person who grew up in the backwaters, 60 miles north of Duluth, Minn. Kukar's story is one of perseverance and provides a compelling challenge to the notion that the biggest fish come from the biggest ponds.
When asked about his easy-going nature, Bernie shrugs and says, "Hey, I'm from northern Minnesota. I'm from the Range. We don't forget where we came from."
Bernie Kukar grew up in Gilbert, Minn., a dot off US-53 about halfway from Duluth to International Falls. It's in an area known as the Iron Range because of its primary contribution to the American economy. The Range is a rugged region of forest and rock where people tend to live because that's where they always have and because what the raw iron returns as income makes it hard to consider much else. Kukar says living there takes a strong spirit and a do-what-it-takes mentality. He is no exception. His father died when he was 13 and the family moved in with his father's parents. He went to Gilbert High School and kept attending Gilbert even after his mother moved the family to Biwabik, about 10 miles up the road, past McKinley. Nowadays, Gilbert is a big hockey hotbed and the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame is only a few miles away, but in the mid-1950s, you played football and basketball if you went to Gilbert.
Bernie excelled at both sports and was also a member of the National Honor Society. As graduation approached, he was scouted by the University of Minnesota-Duluth and even got some sniffs from Minnesota and Notre Dame. In those days, a scholarship from Duluth was hardly a wheelbarrow full of money and Kukar's English teacher got him thinking in another direction. His mentor was a graduate of St. John's University, run by the Benedictine monks in Collegeville, Minn., near St. Cloud. Academics were - and still are - a big deal at St. John's, and the school happened to have a pretty good football coach, too, by the name of John Gagliardi. Gagliardi now holds the NCAA record for most career wins. St. John's was Bernie Kukar's way off the Range.
He played one-platoon football at St. John's as a cornerback and quarterback, then later a running back. He also made team captain as a junior guard on the basketball team and is seventh on St. John's all-time scoring list in that sport. He was a special kind of athlete but not special enough for the pros and so he started looking for a real job.
As a senior in 1961, he and a friend went to see the Minnesota Vikings' inaugural game at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington. Fran Tarkenton threw for four touchdowns and ran for a fifth as the Vikings beat the Chicago Bears, 37-17. But the team that Kukar noticed most that day was the one in the striped shirts.
"I decided right there that I wanted to be an official," Kukar says. "I thought it would keep me close to the game after I graduated." He left St. John's with a degree in math and went to work initially for a computer company based in the Twin Cities. His career eventually led to work in sales for a company that manages employee benefit plans, and he additionally owned and operated a wilderness camp for boys in northern Minnesota. He is retired from all of that now.
He started refereeing high school football and basketball in 1961, but it took him 23 years to reach the NFL. He made it to Division III football in 1965 and then Division II in 1969, where he worked for another 11 years. All of it was within the conferences scattered across Wisconsin, Minnesota and into the northern plains. The Big 10 hired him in 1980 and he was a side judge for four years before reaching the NFL in 1984. He also worked Division II and III basketball and, in 1969, was paired with a coach-turned-referee named Jerry Seeman, who had moved to the Cities from Wisconsin. Seeman was a football official, too, and made it to the NFL in 1975, later becoming its director of officiating from 1991-2001. The two continued to call basketball games together until 1990, but Kukar found out a lot about the NFL early on through Seeman.
As his college football career developed in the Big 10, Kukar quietly applied to the NFL. Seeman was aware of that but Bernie's wife and college sweetheart, Mary, didn't really find out until after Bernie told her he'd been invited for an interview. "In the back of my mind, I always had the goal of making the NFL but in the area up where I was living early on, I wondered whether it was really reachable," he says. "Then, when I finally reached Division I, I thought, 'Maybe I really do have a shot.'"
Seeman and Kukar spent a lot of time on the road together and got to know each other well. "Being around Bernie," says Seeman, "you could tell he had the attributes to be a very successful official. He was mature, worked very hard at the rules and he had good people skills."
Mary Kukar will vouch for that. "I got the comment early on when I first got to know Bernie that his friends admired him," she recalls. "He was good at forming relationships then and he still is."
"I think I have a pretty good grasp of what football's about and I have a personality that controls situations," Kukar reflects. "Being in the sales industry, you deal with company presidents to people in the office so you have to know what buttons to push to get things done."
Once in the NFL, Kukar worked from 1984-90 as a back judge. He missed the playoffs his first season and then worked a playoff game or the Pro Bowl every other year of his career except his first as a referee, in 1991. Many officials can recall their first NFL game in exquisite detail but Kukar is different; he's pretty sure it was Houston and New Orleans. "I think I do best at remembering highlights of games," he shrugs, "and I guess there weren't any in that game."
He was a crew chief for a lot of his college career and entertained becoming a referee after he made the NFL. "At that time, Art McNally (then the NFL's director of officiating) always gave you the option of applying to work a different position and I put down that I would like to referee," says Kukar. "Then some guys started to retire and Art asked me if I still wanted to work. Jerry Seeman took over the job the same year I became a referee in '91.I had a lot of experience refereeing and thought I would be more comfortable. I thought I could use some of my other talents and take six other guys with different personalities and blend them into a cohesive unit. In any crew, you get one guy that's a schoolteacher in New Hampshire and another that's a horse rancher from Mississippi and you've got to find out what works with each of them."
The managerial approach has worked out well for Kukar, who was the referee of the Broncos-Falcons Super Bowl in 1999 and the humdinger Rams-Patriots game in 2002. He was also the alternate in 1996.
Kukar says an NFL referee can make his mark by how effectively he sorts out the mess that sometimes occurs. "There are times when the officials on the field will have differing opinions of what happened on a play. I have to listen to all sides with guys saying two or three or four different things and use their input to decide what to do. You have to show the crew that you're the guy in charge and you're going to make the decision. You have to be able to read and know your crew and you can tell by looking into their eyes that they really don't know what they're talking about all the time.
"I think if you asked a lot of guys on my crews they'd say that I don't frighten them and they can come clean with me." Get past the appearances and get the call right is Kukar's credo, something he put to the test during last season's Sunday night opener between Kansas City and Denver. In that one, KC attempted and missed a 63-yard field goal as time expired in the first half.
"(Before the field goal attempt) we'd had a penalty that should have been marked off, making it a 58-yard attempt. As we were running off the field, (Chiefs quarterback) Trent Green came up to me and said we didn't apply the penalty on the play before," Kukar begins. "So, I asked around and it turned out we hadn't. I knew we shouldn't replay a down but it seemed to be the right thing to do.
"So I told everyone we were going to do it again and we chased the band off the field and got everybody out of the dressing room. Then they missed again from 58. Mr. Pereira (the current NFL director of officiating) wasn't very happy about what I did, but it seemed to me that the officials made the mistake and it was unfair to penalize the teams."
Mary was with Bernie in Denver and waiting for him in their room when he got back to the hotel. Ever the loving wife, she asked, "What the #$%$ was that about?" as he strode through the door. "Bernie just rolled his eyes and said, 'That was a mistake,'" Mary recalls. "He said people told him he couldn't change the call but he said, 'Oh, yes we can.' That's Bernie. He says that about a lot of things."
How about that flag sticking out of his pocket? Few football officials still carry them that way. "Well, I'd wear it in my belt if I didn't have so many damn other things hanging there," says Kukar. "We've got the microphone, the replay buzzer, my beanbags. ... It's a lot of stuff stuffed into a belt. In fact I tried wearing it new-school style for a couple of games but I kept reaching for the wrong thing and I was just a mess out there. Pereira said, 'Stick that damn flag in your belt; it's hanging out for the world to see.'" Kukar laughs, "I told him you take all this electronic equipment off me and maybe I will."
The flag is just one of many ways folks know Bernie is on the field any given Sunday. He's tall and lean with the types of elbows and knees that give him a perpetual akimbo appearance when he throws a gangly arm to signal a first down or whistles for the kickoff.
An NFL study recently showed that referees cover about 6.4 miles on average in a game, chasing around super-athletes in the splendor of their youth. So, how does a 65-year-old do it? Kukar is 6'1" and 180 pounds. During the season, he'll take Monday off then ride his bike on Tuesday, "To get the kinks out," he says. Wednesday is some bike riding and one to two miles of "something between a walk and a jog" that he continues for the rest of the week. He likes to hunt and play golf, and in the offseason he's into skiing - both alpine and cross-country. "Mostly, I work around the house and don't sit down for more than five minutes in the day," he says.
During the season, the Kukars live in their house way up on the north shore of Lake Superior. Mary says, "The hardest thing for Bernie is being away. The traveling he's not excited about. Four or five days a week, though, he's able to be Bernie the husband."
The Kukars met in college and Mary went on to be a high school physical and health education teacher for 35 years. She was a pretty good athlete, too, and refereed high school basketball for a number of years. Mary says that she and Bernie talk a lot about the NFL but more often it's about the profession than the games themselves.
"I think he knows that I know what he's talking about because I know the game and his crew. I supply support and some common sense. I agree with him when I think he's right and I tell him when I think he's wrong sometimes." That doesn't sound like a resentful bride.
"When I was younger," she recalls, "I talked to younger wives who totally objected to the time their husbands spent away refereeing. I told them it was a perfectly beneficial recreational thing and better than hanging out in the bar. My advice to them was to get to understand the sport." Mary admits it was tough in the early days when Bernie was off working games while she had a job of her own and was tending to four children, with no guarantee of him ever making the NFL. "I didn't really wish he didn't do it because we were always a sports family," she says, "and when he got to the Big 10 and then the NFL, he was actually gone less."
Bernie has always made a point of paying the family back with as many of the perks as he can provide. He's taken his family to the Super Bowl and other events and Mary is a frequent companion on the road. Kids can show a resentment of their father's career choice by doing anything but follow in his footsteps, but that isn't the case with the Kukars' four children. All were into sports in a big way and Samantha, 33, is in a sales career like Dad was, while youngest daughter Maggie, 30, is a media coordinator for the Minnesota Wild NHL team. (Maggie says Bernie needs to work on his voice on the wireless mic.) Eldest daughter Katie, 37, works for a magazine and son Matt, 25, is a salesman who's just completed his third year working in the Arena2 league, regarded as one step up the ladder to the NFL. He's also a St. John's grad.
Matt says it helps that his dad is an NFL official in terms of his own learning curve, "But it also puts a bigger bull's eye on your back. There's a bigger expectation of you." Matt would like to make the NFL, "but there are so many guys trying to make it. My next goal is to make it to the Arena League and then Division I and then we'll see where it goes."
With his youngest son already following in the old man's footsteps, does Kukar ever think of hanging up his whistle? "I think he thinks about retiring more than anything," says Mary. "He's not senile yet and his crew doesn't want him to retire. He always says, 'When I know I'm not enjoying it anymore is when I'll quit.'"
"I just take it one season at a time," says Bernie. "The league has given me no indication it's time to go. (Referee) Gerald Austin is at the same point as me and I always tell him I'm going to last one day longer than him."
There's that perseverance again. You never leave the Range.
Tim Sloan lives in Le Claire, Iowa, and referees high school football and basketball. He previously umpired baseball and officiated football and soccer at the college level.