Short answers, pulled from the story.
Earl "Yogi" Strom was an American professional basketball referee who worked 29 years in the NBA and three years in the ABA. He officiated 2,067 NBA games, 295 playoff games, 7 All-Star Games, and 29 NBA and ABA Finals, and was posthumously inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1995.
Earl Strom was posthumously inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1995, the year after his death on the 10th of July, 1994.
Earl Strom was nicknamed "The Pied Piper." He was known for making foul calls with a distinctive "tweet-pause-tweet-tweet" whistle pattern, for ejecting players and coaches with flair, and for refusing to let home crowd pressure sway his decisions - his road team win percentage of 42.9 percent was the highest among NBA referees.
Strom left the NBA in 1969 because the ABA offered significantly better compensation. The ABA agreed to pay him $25,000 per year plus a $25,000 signing bonus and a full health and pension plan. The NBA's offer of $16,000 came with no pension, no family hospitalization, and no long-term disability coverage.
In December 1972, Strom filed a $275,000 breach of oral contract suit against the NBA after supervisor John Nucatola reneged on a handshake agreement to reinstate him for the 1972-73 season. The NBA reinstated Strom in exchange for dropping the suit, and he signed a contract before the 1973-74 season.
Strom officiated the 1965 Eastern Conference Finals game in which John Havlicek's steal preserved the Celtics' victory, doing so with a broken hand from an altercation the night before. He also refereed the first and last NBA games played between Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, and was on the court for five of the nine NBA Finals series that went to seven games.