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BY RICK WOELFEL
52 December 2014 We’re Most Proud Of Referee Magazine | Stories 124| REFEREE
For two football officials unjustly arrested in the middle of a playoff game, justice came in the form of dropped charges, a mayor’s apology and the resignation of a rogue cop.
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eferee James Radcliffe and line judge Chris Gambino began that Friday night doing what they loved: officiating a football game. By evening’s end both would be in jail, charged with public intimidation after an encounter with a police officer on the field. It sounds like a horrific nightmare, save for the fact that it actually happened. The incident raises questions about how much support officials can realistically expect from security personnel in dealing with a perceived safety issue — and the issue of law-enforcement officers overstepping their authority.
PART I Radcliffe and Gambino were part of a seven-official crew assigned to handle the varsity contest between Mandeville High School and host St. Paul’s on Oct. 11, 2013, in Covington, La., a New Orleans suburb. Both had years of officiating experience. Radcliffe, who hails from Metarie, La., works college games in the Sun Belt, Conference USA, Southland and Southern States conferences. He also works college softball. Gambino, who resides in River Ridge, works college games in the Gulf South Conference. It’s safe to say neither man had ever dealt with a situation like the one they would encounter that night.
Late in the third quarter Mandeville had a drive going deep in St. Paul’s territory. At that point the chain crew told Gambino that some fans were causing problems for them along the sideline. “The chain crew came to me,” Gambino recalls. “We were down close to the 13 yardline. They said, ‘Chris, people are messing with us.’ I said, ‘Well, define messing.’ They said, ‘They’re pushing on us.’ I said, ‘Fine.’ We were in a good drive. I said, ‘I’m not going to stop the action, I’m not going to stop the drive. When it’s over with I’ll take care of it.’” One play later, a timeout was called. That’s when Gambino turned around and saw spectators in the restricted area off the sideline, which, by rule, is off limits to players and coaches, let alone spectators. Also in the restricted area was a Covington police officer, Lt. Stephen Short. Unbeknownst to the officiating crew, Short had a son playing for Mandeville and the people Gambino wanted off the sideline were Short’s friends and acquaintances. “I turned around,” Gambino says, “and there were about 10 people in the restricted zone on the side of the field. I see the uniformed officer standing right there, so I say, ‘Well, this is a piece of cake.’ I said, ‘Officer, I need to get these people either behind that security fence or into the stands.’ At which time he looked at me and said, ‘I’ll take care of back here. You turn around and watch the game.’ “I thought maybe he didn’t hear me, so I repeated myself. ‘Officer, I need to put these people either behind the security fence or into the stands.’
Exactly the same words. That’s when he said, ‘I’ll take care of what’s going on back here. You turn around and watch the game.’” By that point Gambino was concerned about the risk of injury to a player or a member of the chain crew, and of course the attendant liability issues. Attorney Alan Goldberger notes that the issue of extraneous personnel in the sideline area is a legitimate concern for officials in terms of not only game management but also the risk of liability exposure. “It’s bad enough if the people on the bench area are supposed to be there,” Goldberger says. “If they stray out of (the bench area), that’s a problem. If they interfere with the game, that’s a problem. If somebody runs into them, that’s a problem.” With all that in mind, Gambino approached Short again. “I (spoke to him) a third time,” he recalls. “To which the officer repeated himself, and that time laced it with some profanity. “I must have had a shocked look on my face because in 29 years I’ve never had any pushback from the uniformed officers. He looked at me and said, ‘If you open your mouth again, I’m going to place you under arrest.’ I really must’ve had a shocked look on my face and he just continued on. He said, ‘And lose that smirk on your face or I’ll haul your ass out of here right now.’ “I figured about that time I wasn’t going to get the assistance from that guy, so I started to backpedal,” Gambino continued. “I wasn’t going to turn my back on him, and then he started pushing
PHOTO ILLuSTRATION BY MATT BOWEN
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LOUISIANA LOCKUP
During the booking process, police took mugshots and fingerprints of Jim Radcliffe (left) and Chris Gambino. They were handcuffed throughout much of the ordeal. Police confiscated their pink whistles as well as other equipment and their uniforms.
forward toward me, and he put his finger in my face and he said, ‘Are we done here?’ I nodded my head yes. He said, ‘No, let me hear you say it. Are we done here?’ I thought, ‘Oh boy, this is getting bad.’ So I said yes, and I just continued to backpedal, turned around to the field.” Gambino said a crewmate had heard the exchange and informed Radcliffe. “Jim said, ‘What’s the problem?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m trying to control the crowd, they’re messing with my (chain) crew, and that officer just threatened to arrest me,’” Gambino related. “He said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I’ll take care of that,’ and he walked over. “As I turned, Jim was getting into the white on the side of the field (the two-yard belt that serves as a working area for officials on the sideline), and I see the officer take his right hand and point it in his face and reach for his handcuffs. That is before the first word ever came out of Jim’s mouth. It kind of went bad from there. Real bad,” Gambino said. The situation quickly reached a flashpoint when Radcliffe tried to intervene with Short.
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“As I came over, (the crew) explained to me that there was some problem with some fans that were interacting with the chain crew,” Radcliffe said. They were “having a physical pushing match or whatever. “I walked over to the sideline and had a police officer come at me to explain to me in no uncertain terms that my job was between the lines and his job was everything outside the lines. “At that point I told him, ‘I need you to get those people on the other side of the fence. You need to help me do that,” Radcliffe recalled. “He reiterated with a couple of adjectives that my job was on the field and his job was out there. I said, ‘Well, then I think you need to get on the other side of the fence along with those people,’ and then he immediately started to read me my rights. “After he read me my rights, I put my hands behind my back and I said, ‘Cuff me.’ I said, ‘If you’re going to do it, cuff me. Let’s go all the way. Cuff me.’” Radcliffe admits he did say something he wishes he hadn’t. “He wouldn’t put handcuffs on me, so I
did call him gutless. Then he called five of his partners over and I got the five-person, two-thumbs-underthe-armpit escort out of the stadium, through the visiting stands. Radcliffe said he was eventually placed in handcuffs and searched — they “made sure my pink whistle wasn’t a weapon,” he said — and he was placed in a police car. As he sat waiting and wondering what would happen next, Radcliffe said he heard an officer say, “I’m going to go get the other guy.” A few minutes later Gambino joined Radcliffe in the squad car and they were transported to Covington jail. The incident delayed the game 25 minutes. During that time, the rest of the crew discussed the possibility of walking off the field in support of their comrades. Not to mention the fact that Radcliffe and Gambino were the drivers that night; the crew was in essence stranded 30 miles from home. But the game did resume with St. Paul’s winning, 20-3. Bryan Greenwood is the president of the Louisiana High School Officials Association. He works football at the high school level and also
works college games in the Sun Belt and Great American conferences. Greenwood feels it was important that the game be finished, despite the circumstances. “If we had not finished that contest on a Friday night, a district ballgame with 3,000-5,000 people in the stands, if we’d shut it down in the third quarter, what do you think would have happened first thing on Monday morning?” he says. “The Louisiana High School Athletic Association (LHSAA) would have launched a big investigation to find out exactly what happened, what went wrong, why that police officer interfered with the contest. “What do we claim as officials that we’re there for?” he says. “We always say we’re there for the kids, right? We’re always there for the kids. … There was debate among those five as to what to do. At the end of the day a veteran official said, ‘Look, let’s finish the game. We’ll get out here and sort that thing out,’ and they did it.” Radcliffe applauds his crewmates for the way they handled the situation. “The guys from the crew did what they thought was the right thing to do,” he said. “The game got played,
the game got finished, and come to find out afterward they did a lot of things to try to find out where (police) had hidden us, and just a lot of things. “The guys on the crew were looking out for us. Like I said, it’s another story about them completing the game. The crew finished it, they did what they were supposed to do, and I’m proud of the guys that were in my crew.” Not everyone in officiating circles agrees with those sentiments. Goldberger, an authority on legal matters relating to officiating, contends the rest of the crew should have refused to continue the game, in large part due to the liability issues that were created by the crew working shorthanded. It is his contention that the Mandeville-St. Paul’s game should not have been resumed after Radcliffe and Gambino were arrested; that the five remaining officials had an obligation to their crewmates that superseded any obligation to complete the contest. To be sure, Radcliffe and Gambino were in an extremely vulnerable position; handcuffed in the back of a police car and in the company of officers who had already displayed a willingness to overstep their authority. Radcliffe and Gambino were charged with public intimidation. Sometime around 1 a.m. Saturday they
were transferred from a city jail to a parish (county) facility. Still wearing their officiating uniforms, they were taken to a holding area where at one point they were surrounded by more than 60 catcalling inmates. “It was like something from a horror movie,” Gambino recalls. It was sometime after 4:30 a.m. Saturday before the pair were released after each posted $250 bond. At least part of the delay was that their wallets and IDs were in their bags in their dressing room at the stadium. “I was angry,” Gambino says. “You’re humiliated, you’re mad, you’re kind of shocked. You don’t know why that took place, but it did. That lasted with me for a couple of days.”
PART II As the sun rose on Saturday, accounts of Friday night’s events were spreading through the sports world in general and the officiating community in particular. Radcliffe, who arrived home from his night in jail at 6:30 Saturday morning, got a call a half hour later from his father in California, who had seen an account of the incident on ESPN. Ironically, Radcliffe, who assigns non-varsity games for his association,
THE STRAIGHT STORY
BARRY POOLE
Chris Gambino and James Radcliffe shared their story at the NASO Sports Officiating Summit in Albuquerque, N.M. During a session moderated by NFL official and then-NASO board member Jeff Triplette, the two officials spoke publicly for the first time about their ordeal. They were joined by Bryan Greenwood, president of the Louisiana High School Officials Association. The audience reacted to the officials’ story with a variety of emotions. When Radcliffe acknowledged that he called police Lt. Stephen Short “gutless” for not initially handcuffing him at the
time of the arrest, some in the crowd applauded. Radcliffe’s statement that the police checked to “make sure my pink whistle wasn’t a weapon,” elicited laughter. And when Triplette suggested the men deserved a standing ovation, the attendees didn’t hesitate. Radcliffe and Gambino were visibly moved by the gesture, Radcliffe wiping away a tear. Gambino and Radcliffe left New Mexico with a more formal acknowledgement of their professionalism. During the Celebrate Officiating Gala, both men received an NASO Great Call Award.
Panelists (from left) Bryan Greenwood, Jim Radcliffe and Chris Gambino at the NASO Summit.
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the Greater New Orleans Officials Association, was back on the field on Saturday, not once but twice. On Saturday afternoon he was working a varsity game as a line judge when he was approached by one of the coaches. “He says, ‘Can you believe those idiots that got arrested?’” Radcliffe recalls. “I said, ‘No, Coach, I can’t believe that.’ He said, ‘Who was it?’ I said, ‘Well, Chris Gambino.’ He says, ‘OK, I know Chris.’ And I said, ‘And me.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’m kidding. I’m kidding.’” As the weekend progressed Radcliffe started getting calls from fellow officials. “I got calls from all over the country,” he recalls, “from softball umpires I had worked with, from coordinators I had known, from football officials that I have had the pleasure to meet, just all these different people. It was awesome and it made me feel better.” One of the calls Radcliffe received came from Jeff Triplette, NFL referee and then-chair of the NASO board of directors. “Jeff happened to call me and I was blown away,” Radcliffe says, “because he’s not the president of all sports officiating, but he’s a pretty big deal to me and I look up to him. “Jeff just talked to me and made me feel better about the whole thing. I got calls after that from Barry (Mano, NASO president), and from Alan (Goldberger),” Radcliffe added. “It really made me feel the support of NASO and my officials around the country because I wasn’t on an island. All those relationships that I had grown over the years, it was great to have these people have your back and have faith in you because they know what kind of person you are and they know what you’re about. “Nobody wanted to talk about the details,” he continued. “They just wanted to say, ‘Hey Jim, if you need anything call me, I’m there for you, we’re there for you, my group’s there for you.’ No one can know how awesome that is.” On the Monday following the game, Radcliffe and Gambino met with representatives of their
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Covington Police Chief Tim Lentz (left) and Mayor Mike Cooper announce that charges against Radcliffe and Gambino had been dropped.
association and other interested parties, including Keith Alexander, the assistant executive director of the LHSAA. The get-together was one part informational meeting, one part strategy session. Those involved wanted to present the officials’ version of events, in no small measure because they were being portrayed in some media accounts as two officials who had “gone rogue.” On Monday evening for instance, a Baton Rouge newspaper published an article in which Covington interim police chief Jack West, who participated in the arrests, claimed that witnesses would support the police account of the incident. “Somebody had to educate these people as to what our jurisdiction is,” Greenwood said, “and that was our whole point. “These cops exceeded their authority, took our authority upon themselves for the safety of the game, and that was what we had to defend.” The association drafted a statement that was released to the media through NASO, asserting the rights of game officials to exercise control over a contest. In the days that followed, Greenwood also appeared on a
number of radio talk shows. “I was still in defense mode just trying to get our side of the story out for these guys,” he said. By that time, however, the tide of public opinion was turning in the officials’ favor. On Tuesday, the day after Greenwood and NASO issued their statements, West was no longer Covington’s police chief. His replacement, Tim Lentz, contacted Radcliffe by telephone, offered an apology and told him that the charges were being dropped. Lentz and Covington Mayor Mike Cooper also spoke at a press conference. Lentz said Lt. Short violated several department policies during the incident. Lentz said Short “failed to seek alternatives to physical arrests” and failed to exercise reasonableness, and failed to consider the surrounding circumstances. The arrests, Lentz noted, made national headlines and exposed the police department to potential liability. The Greater New Orleans Officials Association demanded that Covingington Police Department personnel not be allowed to handle security at any game to which its members were assigned. That request was withdrawn after the charges against Gambino and Radcliffe were dropped. In addition, Radcliffe and Gambino retained an attorney to safeguard their interests in the matter. On Dec. 30, 2013, Short was suspended for 10 days and demoted from lieutenant to the rank of sergeant. West, who had had a long career with the Covington police force, retired the next day. Short appealed his suspension at a disciplinary hearing on May 5, 2014. He retired from the Covington police force the following day. More than a year later, the events of Oct. 11, 2013, have left impressions on those involved. Gambino recalls leaving the jail in the predawn hours. “They pushed us out at 5:00 in the morning,” he says. “They kind of just escort you out the door, and you turn around and they throw you that cellophane bag with your hat and your stripes, whistle,
TIMES-PICAYuNE /LANDOv
LOUISIANA LOCKUP
and everything that means a lot to me. They just throw it to you, ‘Get out, we don’t want to see you.’” Freedom didn’t make Gambino any less angry. “My first inclination, we were out there and there was a 55-gallon trash can, and I was very tempted just to drop (the bag with his officiating belongings) in the can and walk away. I was that disgusted at that point,” he said. Gambino has regrets that have nothing to do with the incident itself. “The thing that bothered me the most is that I failed to prepare my wife and my kids properly before I left the house,” he said. “In college, we have game day notices that we send to the schools and the officials — where you’re going to be, the AD’s phone number, everybody in the crew’s phone number. But I left that house just thinking that nothing’s ever going to happen, and it did. “It bothered me because I failed to protect them,” he said. “That’s what I took away from that most. So I don’t leave the home now without a piece of paper with a magnet on the refrigerator that says, ‘This is Dad’s game that week. This where I’m going, phone numbers, everybody on the crew, cell phone for everybody on the crew. It’s just a good, safe practice that everybody knows what’s going on.” The incident involving Radcliffe and Gambino encourages an examination of the working relationship between officials and security personnel, who may be law-enforcement officers or security guards who are employed or retained by a school or school district. Alexander encourages officials to meet with game administrators and security personnel as part of their pregame routine and establish a relationship. “Know that a relationship with that game day administrator is important,” he says. “If you see a security personnel prior to the game, get a rapport with them, introduce yourself.” Alexander contends that “99.9 percent of the time police officers are our best friends in the contest. They’re a neutral party, they’re going
to get us on the field, off the field, they’re going to keep fans from throwing bottles at us, they’re going to make sure we get to our vehicle safely, and they’re going to get us home 99.9 percent of the time. “So law enforcement is not to be thrown under the bus. But we did have a rogue situation, a rare situation,” he added. But confrontations between officials and law-enforcement personnel, while not common occurrences, are by no means unheard of. More than two decades ago, Stanley Guffey was officiating a high school basketball game in Oklahoma when an on-duty police officer named Eldridge Wyatt came onto the court to confront him. When emphatically told to leave the floor, Wyatt responded by arresting Guffey and physically removing him from the court. Shortly afterward Wyatt’s superiors persuaded him to release the official from custody. Guffey returned to the floor to work the final 30 seconds of an overtime game. Guffey later sued Wyatt in federal court for violation of his civil rights and was eventually awarded $5,000 in damages plus $80,000 in attorney’s fees. Goldberger later wrote about the case for Referee. In light of recent events that have occurred outside the sports arena, that last point is a sobering reality. Certainly officials should constantly strive to achieve good working relationships with those who help administer their games; that includes athletic directors, principals and game managers and certainly law enforcement personnel. But as officials should always be aware that while we have an objective, detached view of a contest, not everyone we come in contact with will share that philosophy, even those who are expected to do so. Bottom line, even when working with those who theoretically should be our allies, officials need to be on their guard. Rick Woelfel, Philadelphia, is a freelance writer and softball umpire. *
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