Earl Strom

• 1. Introduction

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  Earl "Yogi" Strom walked onto an NBA court for the last time on the 12th of June, 1990 - Game 4 of the NBA Finals between the Detroit Pistons and the Portland Trail Blazers. In the final seconds, Trail Blazers guard Danny Young launched a half-court heave that would have sent the game to overtime. Strom waved it off. He had seen it land after the buzzer. That decisive, unblinking call was vintage Strom: a man who spent 29 years in the NBA ensuring the game was played correctly, no matter who was watching, no matter whose fans were booing. How did a baker's son from Pottstown, Pennsylvania get an angry mob saved by Wilt Chamberlain, ejected a mascot for the first time in NBA history, and end up posthumously elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame? The answers begin long before he ever blew his first whistle.

• 2. Pottstown Roots

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  Max Strom, an Orthodox Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant from Austria-Hungary, worked as a foreman at a bakery in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Into that household, on the 15th of December, 1927, Earl was born - the youngest of seven children, five boys and two girls, raised in a kosher home. One of his classmates at Pottstown High School was Bobby Shantz, who went on to become a major league baseball pitcher and American League MVP. Strom played football, baseball, and basketball in high school, and that appetite for sport never left him.

  After finishing high school in 1945, he joined the United States Coast Guard toward the end of World War II. He returned from service and attended Pierce Junior College in Philadelphia, graduating in 1951. He played for a local semi-professional basketball team in his early twenties. A referee's off-hand remark during a heated argument changed his trajectory: "Look, you're not much of a player, and you've got a pretty good mouth on you, so why don't you think about taking up refereeing?" Strom took the advice. He officiated high school games for nine years and college games in the East Coast Athletic Conference for three years before the NBA came calling.

  In 1952, he married Yvonne Trollinger. The couple had five children. Starting in 1956, Strom worked at General Electric in customer relations throughout his first stint in the NBA - a "day job" he kept precisely because NBA officiating did not yet provide enough financial security for a family.

• 3. Building a Career

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  Jocko Collins, supervisor of officials, extended Strom an invitation to join the NBA ahead of the 1957-58 season. Strom absorbed the craft by watching experienced officials like Mendy Rudolph, Norm Drucker, and Sid Borgia. By the end of his third season, he was already being assigned playoff games - an unusual honor for a referee so new to the league.

  In 1961, Strom and Rudolph made history when they officiated the entire NBA Finals between the Boston Celtics and the St. Louis Hawks. It was the only time in NBA history that the same two officials worked every game of a Finals series, a situation that arose because the two teams could not agree on any other officials. Strom was assigned to referee every seventh and deciding game in a playoff series during the first six years of his career - a mark of extraordinary trust from the league.

  In 1959, Strom refereed the first NBA game in which Wilt Chamberlain played against Bill Russell. He also called the last game those two played against each other, ten years later. He was teaching younger officials all along the way. Early in referee Joey Crawford's career, Crawford ejected a coach just two minutes into a game. At halftime, Strom berated Crawford with, as the source puts it, "every name in the book," before telling him: "I like that you have guts, but you've got to have smart guts like me." Strom was designated crew chief in 1967 and 1968, responsible for scouting officiating crews, rating referees, and developing less experienced ones.

• 4. Altercations and Flash Points

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  During the 1965 Eastern Conference Finals between the Boston Celtics and the Philadelphia 76ers, the seventh game came down to five seconds on the clock. The 76ers trailed 110-109 and had the ball. John Havlicek tipped the inbound pass thrown by Hal Greer, and Celtics radio announcer Johnny Most delivered his most famous call: "Havlicek stole the ball! Havlicek stole the ball!" Through all of it, Strom had officiated the game wearing a cast on his broken hand - broken the night before when he punched a fan during an altercation at another game.

  In Memphis, Tennessee, in the mid-1960s, a call Strom made against the St. Louis Hawks brought Hawks general manager Irv Gack to the scorer's table at halftime with the words "gutless bastard." Strom reached across the table and grabbed Gack by the shirt. Fans started coming down from the seats. Wilt Chamberlain, playing for the Philadelphia 76ers, stepped across the table, picked Strom up, and said, "C'mon Earl. Let's get the hell out of here."

  In 1970, at a game between the Texas Chaparrals and Denver Rockets in Denver, a fan came onto the court after Strom confronted him for using profanity. Strom threw two punches before police took the fan away. The ABA fined him $250. Not long after, the ABA fined him $50 for praising Julius Erving to a Philadelphia reporter after an exhibition game. Strom sent $100 to ABA Commissioner Jack Dolph: "The first fifty dollars is for the fine and the second fifty dollars is because I'm tellin' ya' he is the greatest."

  In 1974, Strom ejected Chicago Bulls head coach Dick Motta. As Motta left the court, the Bulls mascot Benny the Bull charged onto the floor and made obscene gestures at the officials. Strom ejected him - believed to be the first time a mascot was thrown out of an NBA game. In 1982, Utah Jazz head coach Frank Layden deliberately verbally abused Strom to get himself ejected from a game his team was losing badly. Strom saw through it and refused, telling him, "I know what you're trying to do, Frank, but if I've got to stay out here and watch this shit, so do you."

• 5. The ABA Years and the Fight to Return

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  In August 1969, NBA Commissioner Walter Kennedy offered Strom a salary of $16,000 for the first time - a contract covering all 82 games. The NBA still offered no pension, no family hospitalization, and no long-term disability coverage. The rival ABA, which had started in 1967, offered all of those things. Strom, along with officials John Vanak, Norm Drucker, and Joe Gushue, met with acting ABA Commissioner Jim Gardner. The ABA agreed to Strom's terms: $25,000 per year, a $25,000 signing bonus, and a full health and pension plan. Their departure triggered reform in the NBA; regular officials gained contracts, salaries increased significantly, and medical and pension plans were put in place.

  Strom earned more than twice as much in the ABA, but grew disenchanted with the league's smaller arenas, thinner attendance, and the absence of the big-name players he fed off officiating. After three seasons, he reached out to NBA Commissioner Walter Kennedy in 1972 to discuss returning. He received informal assurances and a handshake agreement from supervisor John Nucatola on a $25,000 NBA salary starting with the 1972-73 season. No contract was signed. When Strom tried to follow up, Nucatola delayed. Drucker, then supervisor of officials for the ABA, told Strom bluntly: "They know you're going back and they told me not to assign you any more playoff games."

  Strom filed a $275,000 breach of oral contract suit against the NBA in December 1972. The league's motions to dismiss and for summary judgment both failed. Faced with legitimate legal exposure, the NBA reinstated Strom in exchange for dropping the suit. He signed a contract before the 1973-74 season - on his terms.

• 6. Authority and Its Limits

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  During the 1977 NBA Playoffs, twenty-four of the league's regular referees went on strike seeking collective bargaining rights, an arbitration clause, life insurance to age sixty-five, severance pay, and increases in salary and playoff pay. Strom and referee Richie Powers were the only two who did not strike. Strom's reasoning was straightforward: he had a contract, and a strike would violate it. After fifteen days and two rounds of the playoffs, the referees union, the National Association of Basketball Referees, was recognized as a bargaining agent. Playoff salaries rose from $150 a game to $750, $850, and $950 for the final three rounds. While officiating a playoff game between the Portland Trail Blazers and Denver Nuggets during the strike, Strom was notified after the game that a death threat against him had been phoned in to McNichols Arena at halftime.

  Strom's relationship with the NBA front office was persistently difficult. He was suspended from the 1976 NBA Finals between the Boston Celtics and Phoenix Suns after Game 2, following Suns complaints about foul disparity - the Celtics had attempted 58 free throws to the Suns' 44 in the first two games. In 1979, he was suspended for the remainder of the playoffs after criticizing Bulls management in his newspaper column and being involved in a separate shoving match with a fan in Phoenix. He was required to apologize to Bulls president Jonathan Kovler and agreed to stop writing the column to keep his job. A $2,000 fine and playoff suspension followed a profile in the Philadelphia Inquirer in the early 1980s in which details about Strom's habits - talking with spectators, visiting pressboxes for coffee - drew league disapproval despite the article having been approved in advance.

  In 1985, Dallas Mavericks owner Don Carter entered the officials locker room to accuse Strom of having a vendetta against coach Dick Motta. During the 1986 NBA Playoffs, Hawks coach Mike Fratello entered the officials locker room after being attacked by a fan. Both incidents cost Strom fines. After Game 4 of the 1987 NBA Finals, Red Auerbach confronted Strom in the hallway and declared, "That was the worst officiated game I ever saw!" Strom replied, "Arnold, you're showing all the class I knew you always had."

• 7. Legacy and Last Whistle

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  During the 1989-90 NBA season, a USA Today poll of coaches and players named Strom the league's top official, with 83 out of a possible 193 votes. A Detroit Free Press survey of 500 people spanning players, coaches, general managers, broadcasters, writers, and fans chose him as the best official in the NBA and the top official across all four major North American professional sports leagues - ahead of Bruce Froemming in baseball, Jim Tunney in football, and Andy Van Hellemond in hockey.

  Strom retired having officiated 2,067 NBA games over 29 years and 295 total playoff games. He refereed five of the nine NBA Finals that went to seven games, in 1966, 1969, 1978, 1984, and 1988. Philadelphia 76ers statistician Harvey Pollack tracked road team winning percentages by official throughout Strom's career. Strom had the highest percentage of road team victories in the league at 42.9 percent - a direct result of his refusal to let crowd noise or home-court pressure influence a call.

  Strom had advocated for instant replay on buzzer-beaters and three-point attempts. The NBA adopted instant replay for end-of-period field goal attempts at the start of the 2002-03 season. He had also long opposed the introduction of a third official, first for one season in 1978-79 and later when it became permanent from the 1988-89 season onward.

  After retiring, Strom worked as a television color commentator for the Los Angeles Clippers from 1990 to 1991 and published a book, Calling the Shots: My Five Decades in the NBA. He was involved in a celebrity golf tournament hosted by Penn State University and coached at a basketball tournament run by Larry Bird in Indianapolis, Indiana. He wrote columns for the Reading Eagle and the Chicago Sun-Times. It was through that column that his wife Yvonne noticed grammatical errors while preparing to type it - errors that led to a diagnosis of malignant brain tumor. Surgery began in January 1994. He could not overcome the effects of the cancer and died on the 10th of July, 1994.

  The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inducted him posthumously in 1995 - the same year the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association's Pottstown Chapter created the Earl "Yogi" Strom Sportsmanship Award, given annually to an area school displaying outstanding sportsmanship.