General Ronald Johnson has not even moved to New York yet to start his job as the NBA's first-ever senior vice president for referee operations, but already a lot of us are a little dazzled by that "General" part of his title.
"The General." Try saying it a few times. It's powerful! You can't help but believe that his title alone might clean up this mess. (I have fallen prey to its charms. Check the headline here, where you will also find his biography.)
Having The General at the helm implies something about toughness, accountability, and a firm shaking of things by the shoulders. It's as if some part of us wants to believe that he'll be some kind of Rambo of referee righteousness.
Under military guidance, referees will rise early, to bugles. Referees will be doing push-ups. Referees will have shiny shoes, well-made beds, and close-cropped hair.
With The General on patrol, presumably referees will never again meet underworld figures named "Baa Baa" and picking up bags of illicit cash, which would mark a big improvement over the 2006-2007 season.
And who wouldn't agree with Mark Cuban, as quoted by Howard Beck in The New York Times?
"I'm thrilled," the Dallas Mavericks' owner, Mark Cuban, said in an e-mail message. Hiring Johnson, he added, was "the exact right move."
"He has managed professionals who work in high-stress conditions," Cuban wrote. "He is outside the politics of the N.B.A., and he has a diverse management background."
NBA fans have been dissatisfied with the referees since the beginning of time. That's the nature of fandom.
But things have gone notably south of dissatisfied for many NBA fans of late.
It strikes me that in recent years, thanks to a bona fide referee corruption scandal, some blatantly bad calls in big situations, and the reality of the DVR generation -- which lets no bad call slip by unnoticed -- NBA fans are hyper-aware of every mistake a referee makes.
Let's be honest, however. While there may be terrible games now and again, NBA referees still do, in my estimation, a better job than the referees in any other basketball league. (Take your Tivo to the NCAA, to Europe, or to high school games! Nothing makes the NBA look better.)
But that doesn't mean there aren't problems, especially when it comes to broken trust.
When Tim Donaghy's lawyer filed papers with the court accusing the NBA of essentially rigging a key playoff game, unscientific web polls showed a very high percentage of fans -- one poll showed as many as 92% -- were inclined to believe the claims.
That's The General on the left, in Baghdad in 2004 with US Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, then the head of U.S. ground troops in Iraq. General Johnson oversaw billions of dollars of reconstruction.
(Sabah Arar/Getty Images) |
Time to call in an alpha dog. Get me The General!
I spent twenty minutes on the phone with The General last week. It was great to get a first-hand sense of what he is like.
First things first: The General would like to be called "Ron."
And having reflected on the conversation for several days, I am quite certain that says a lot. My civilian notion that The General would breathe fire could not have been more wrong.
Ronald Johnson may prove to be magnificent at his new job. But nothing that he said to me on the phone made me think of Rambo.
First of all, he was not even the alpha dog of his own introductory media session. The NBA arranged phone interviews for reporters with Johnson accompanied by his boss, the NBA's president of operations, Joel Litvin.
I had a bundle of questions prepared for Ronald Johnson, and they almost all boiled down to: What are your ideas about building trust in NBA referees among fans? (Some examples: How can we build trust among referees? How can we bridge the gap between fans who are armed with nearly live instant replay, sometimes from multiple angles, and referees who have none of that? How can fans get a better sense of the professionalism of the current referees?)
Litvin saw to it that Johnson did not field one single question along those lines, handling them all himself.
I generally liked Litvin's answers, to be honest (more on that in a minute) but I don't think Rambo would have let a lawyer steal his thunder. I didn't get the sense Ronald Johnson was a guy coming in to shake anybody by the shoulders. Not yet, anyway.
When Johnson talked, it was all process. The phrase he uttered more than any other was "Lean Six Sigma."
The General idea had me thinking we might speak of referees with lean six packs. But lean six sigma?
That's one of those things -- it's a business management strategy -- that may work like gangbusters. But that's not a vision of better refereeing. That's a process for corporate efficiency.
Johnson literally did not say one thing about what a rehabilitated referee corps might look like. If he has vision, he's keeping it to himself.
Johnson said that he'd been an NBA fan his entire life. "I tend to cheer for the team where I'm living at the time," he explained. Lately Johnson has been near Washington D.C., so he added: "I like Gilbert and the Wizards."
"But as an employee of the NBA," chimed in Litvin, "he's now a fan of all thirty teams."
That was kind of a joke. But it was not all that funny.
Johnson admitted that even he has been one of those guys in the stands questioning the referees.
When we got into what can be done to make a guy like that trust the referees more, first Litvin jumped in, and then I asked Johnson about a quote from David Stern in the press release announcing Johnson's hire. Stern cited Johnson's "engineering expertise in areas such as systems analysis, processes, and operations."
What was that about?
The two pages of notes I took based on Johnson's answer to that question are thick with corporatese. And honestly, I can't say I understand all of it. Some phrases: "Ability to take real world problems ... explain in simple terms ... impact performance ... Department of Defense ... Lean Six Sigma ... referee processes ... Lean Six Sigma ... practical experience ... tens of thousands of employees ... most not soldiers ... like the business world ... leadership ... knowing about people ... how to motivate people ..."
This answer ended with Johnson pointing out, in a moment of pleasing humility: "The Commissioner did not pick me because of my knowledge of the game."
Nevertheless, I found myself hungry for some "simple terms" to solve the "real world problem" that lots of NBA fans think, fair or not, that referees are crooked. Maybe, given this one of the Johnson's first days on the job, that's asking too much.
I asked a series of questions about transparency and fans trusting referees. Litvin answered them all, and the heart of all of his answers are in the vague quote: "That's a challenge for us, and one we're ready to address."
We got a little sidetracked talking about Ronnie Nunn, who had been the head of referees. Litvin said that one of the reasons Johnson's position had been created was to give Nunn -- a retired referee -- more time to be on the road, to work hands-on with officials.
We discussed the fact that Nunn used to go on television to explain controversial calls. I felt those kinds of exchanges gave fans a chance to at least appreciate the seriousness of the approach of NBA referees, and in some cases could be wholly enlightening. There is often more going on than is obvious from the stands, or your living room.
But no regular method to hear the referee's side of the story really exists anymore, especially as there has been precious little in the way of post-game explanations of referees.
Litvin seemed to agree, and, significantly, said: "Expect the referees to be more available to the media. There are all kinds of ways we can do a better job getting the fans to know the referees better, and to increase the image of officials."
When can we expect those kinds of changes? "I would think," said Litvin, "the start of next season."
Then I had several more questions about transparency. I am a one-trick pony.
One concern I had was that when referee Joey Crawford was suspended indefinitely more than a year ago (he has since been reinstated) for blowing up at Tim Duncan, Commissioner Stern said part of the reason for the harsh punishment was that Crawford had had similar incidents in the past.
And that struck me as a little strange.
The implication was that Crawford had entered the game somewhat on thin ice, compared to the rest of the referee crew. This was a big game! He was being trusted to be impartial. Yet we, as fans, had no sense from the League that there would be any reason to question his ability to do the job.
In fact the League always says, essentially, that its officials are the best in the world yadayadayada. Then, occasionally, one will be exposed as a rotten apple, and then the League will kind of trash them, as Stern did a little with Crawford, and a lot with Tim Donaghy.
Don't we all know, intuitively, that referees are all human, and fall all over a broad spectrum of quality? Don't we know that some are considered good enough to work playoff games, and others not as good? Isn't this "they're great, they're great, they're great ... he's terrible" approach guaranteed to be imprecise? Isn't there a more credible way to talk about these things?
Litvin gamely took on the question, but ultimately concluded that he wasn't at all sure that "opening personnel files to public scrutiny was the best course of action."
At that point, things were winding to a close, but Johnson had not spoken for quite some time.
I tried to think of what question I could ask that would get a Johnson response, as opposed to a Litvin one, this being a "meet Ronald Johnson" media event and all.
I asked Johnson what he would be doing next.
He talked about all kinds of friendly, human things. You can't help but like the guy. (The last thing Ronald Johnson said, as we signed off the call, was "see you at the stadium," and I hope I do.) He talked about working hard. He talked about moving to New York. He talked about meeting the staff, most of whom he had still never even said hello to.
"I want to touch people," he said. "To shake hands. I'll meet them all this summer, in parts, and piecemeal. I have met some folks in the office. I left voice-mails for some of them. I called a couple of them, because it was their birthday. ... I'm excited at the opportunity to make a difference, to be a part of something that matters. I left one world-class organization, the U.S. Army, to join another, the NBA. That's a dream come true, even I don't know all the names yet."
Color me cautiously optimistic. The NBA is taking real action to bring real credibility to referees. I don't think anyone knows much about what that might look like, but increased transparency is high on the agenda.
We didn't get The General as we had imagined him. But we did get someone working to fix something that has been bugging just about every NBA fan. I'm willing to be patient for at least a little while to see what the League can come up with to inspire confidence in referees.
