August 17, 2007 -- The former head of the NBA referees union and a league official for 26 years yesterday said rogue referee Tim Donaghy was able to slip through the cracks because refereeing has gotten worse and cited the final shot of Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls career as an example where a player's reputation prevented a proper call.
Mike Mathis, who retired in 2001, said Donaghy's guilty plea in federal court to betting on games he officiated and supplying inside information to mob affiliates, came as "a stick of dynamite" to the league. But Mathis said, "another stick of dynamite should be utilized (to) clean the entire officiating office and start from scratch."
Mathis, who had been snared in the NBA officials' airline ticket scandal in the late 1990's, has been loudly critical of NBA officiating. Mathis charged too many supervisors are unqualified and that referees are hired based on who, not what, they know.
Though angrily denouncing Donaghy's actions, Mathis referenced the pivotal shot in Game 6 of the 1998 Finals by Jordan against the Utah Jazz that gave the Bulls their sixth and final championship in the Jordan era. Many observers maintain Jordan committed an offensive foul, but it was not called because of Jordan's stature and reputation.
"Refereeing has gone downhill," said Mathis, who runs the Mathis Foundation that works with and supplies scholarships for foster kids in Cincinnati. "Remember when Jordan hit that winning shot? I'm going to give you exactly what the commentators said: 'What a great move by Michael.' Was that a great move or was that an offensive foul? There was no question it was a push-off. No buts about it. The only buts you can have is, 'Well, it was Michael Jordan.' That was a defining moment.
"The video tape would never lie," Mathis said. "Here's what could have happened. The referee makes the call and it's, 'No, no. How could he do that? It was Michael Jordan.' "
If what Mathis called "funny stuff" went on in games Donaghy worked, it likely went unnoticed because of the level officiating has hit.
"(We) accept unbelievable, mediocre and bad officiating," Mathis said. "The commentator says, 'He must have seen something we didn't.' No, he didn't. It's either he's guessing, he's incompetent or there's some funny stuff going on."
Donaghy admitted to federal officials that he often supplied inside information to gamblers, alerting them to what referees were working particular games. He said he was aware how some referees interacted with certain players.
"The first thing I went through was shock," Mathis said when he learned of Donaghy's transgressions. "Then I got angry. Then I said, 'What caused this?' I'm not talking about the gambling, I'm talking about the deterioration of the refereeing that has allowed this to go undetected. . . . If he was doing the funny stuff, I'm not saying he would have been caught but we might have had a chance, because all of a sudden he's standing out by calling all these calls."
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