It’s a sad thing : the ACC apparently doesn’t even realize that it is killing its own brand. The ACC is a basketball conference first and foremost, and despite expansions designed to enhance football, the heart and the soul of the nearly seventy year old league is hoops. And the ACC is killing hoops, little by little by destroying rivalries with scheduling and…dare I say it…its referees. Increasingly it is obvious to all but fans wearing blue-tinted glasses that they aren’t going to get a fair shake from the zebras in charge of the games.
This is not wholly an NC State perspective. As a Clemson fan recently told me shortly after Karl Hess unceremoniously asked two distinguished former Wolfpack players to leave the arena earlier this year that he was not surprised. “I hate seeing him come out on the floorl anytime Duke or Carolina is in town. That’s when we all know it’s us against them.” And by them, he meant Karl Hess: “he’s never seen a Tar Heel or a Blue Devil do anything wrong when the chips are down.”
Similar comments have been echoed by Maryland, Virginia and Georgia Tech fans. “Is he (Hess) on the Mike Krzyzewski Show up there?” he asked. “Might as well be if he isn’t.”
Anyone forty or older can remember an ACC where anything could happen and probably would…no game was one to be taken for granted, and it didn’t matter if an undefeated first place team was playing on the road with a team in dead-last, they were at major risk of getting upset. And it happened, too.
One of the hallmarks of the old ACC were the officials: they were often as big a celebrity as were the coaches or players, and most knowledgeable ACC fans could name them on sight.
Take Lou Bello, for example. “Lou was all referee and part clown,” “Bones” McKinney, Wake Forest University’s basketball coach from 1958 to 1965, said about Bello. “He had as good a judgment as anybody refereeing during my time. When I saw him walk out on the court, I was not concerned. I knew I would get as good a shake as anybody.” Bello would make the tough call and take the heat for it, and actually seemed to revel in doing it…and as often as not, that call would go against a powerful ACC team jockeying to be in position to make a run at the national championship.
Bello told me once that he tried his best to be “color-blind” when it came to uniforms, and that he saw players, and not the school’s name on the front of the jersey. That was during a short run as a sports anchor on television here in the Triangle, one that brought Bello to my school to talk to us about his time on the hardwoods. Most people loved Lou Bello, he was funny, he was memorable and most importantly, he was fair. “If he thought he hurt {a coach with a missed call}, it would hurt him afterward,” McKinney said in the former referee’s obituary. Coming from a coach, that’s high praise — and Lou Bello deserved it.
There are other referee’s names in the lore of the ACC, Lenny Wirtz, who it is said in jest that Dean Smith would have sent to the gallows if he could have, and too many others to mention. Fans will often remember those old school referees as “the worst of the worst,” mainly because they would unflinchingly make a call when one was deserved. That fans of all of the schools in the original ACC remember them pretty much the same way serves as testament to their integrity. Games were decided by the players, and that helped to make the ACC the best basketball circus on the planet, NBA included.
Now, not so much. The regular season has largely lost its luster and quite frankly, any ACC game is no longer referees have their mind made up towards giving the Blues all the breaks and just when they look like they are on the ropes, anything questionable on the team looking to upset them is going to be called. That’s not just State, it’s Clemson. It’s FSU. It’s UMD. And so forth.
Sure, Dean Smith, Lefty Driesell, Bones McKinney, Norm Sloan and other well-established coaches would work over the officials, and a Lefty temper tantrum was a thing of beauty…but the games were called a lot more fairly and without apparent bias. Nowadays, tales like this are all too common:
So, is it true? Does Duke really get all the calls?’ ” former Duke player Andre Sweet mimics. “I’m like, ‘Of course, it’s true. It’s Duke.’ It’s Mike Krzyzewski. The refs were afraid of him. He could get you calls that no one else could get. That’s part of playing for Duke.”
One has wonder what an old-school ACC referee like Lou Bello would have made of that. It wasn’t that Bello didn’t have to deal with strong personalities, after all, Bones McKinney once installed a seat belt on his part of the Wake Forest bench in order to cut down on the number of technical fouls he received. Norm Sloan and Left Driesell could melt someone’s hair with their temper. And Dean Smith would yap non-stop at the heels of a referee as they went by.
And presumably, he did so without telling a coach to “shut the #$% up” when a coach inevitably gave him the business for a call the coach didn’t like. Or by “studying tendencies” of teams. Or by making proclamations that “UNC doesn’t foul as much” (perhaps after studying tendencies?) No sir, Lou called ’em like he saw them, and he did so with a smile on his face most of the time.
Too bad there aren’t referees like Bello around the league any longer, because the ACC is less for it. StatefansNation has shown a statistical discrepancy between the Royal Blues and the rest of the conference, national columnists have recently called ACC referees into question with crucial calls or non-calls, and the league has said nothing in public in reply. Perhaps they don’t need to: their silence says more than any rationalization that John Cloughtery — a former official himself — can ever offer. That silence says: sit down, shut up and take your medicine.
Too bad that medicine is helping to kill the best sports league around. No one likes playing poker against a stacked deck, and even the perception of such a thing can sour the taste in any fan’s mouth. That’s a perception that is becoming an apparent reality not to just ACC fans but also to objective national commentators and it is leaving heads shaking everywhere.
