|
|
 |  |
|
 |   |
EVENTS
Fantasy Central Inside Game Video Plus Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities 
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE | |
The hurry-up ump When time matters, Jim Quirk is on your sidePosted: Wednesday November 28, 2001 5:19 PM
Jim Quirk is my hero. Who is Jim Quirk? He's the umpire attached to Tom White's officiating crew. And what's so special about that crew? It's fast ... faaast. It's the fastest in football. You wonder why that's so important. Well, the early game on Sunday starts at around 1:02 p.m. Eastern time, and then the late one goes off at either 4:05 or 4:15. The average time for a non-overtime NFL game is three hours, six and a half minutes, so you can see that if you're trying to pick up one of the 4:05 games, the chances are that you're going to blow the kickoff. Why not just switch off the early game? Well, what if it's tight, what if it's thrilling, what if you're a chart freak as I am? You need the entire contest, and then you need some breathing room between games, even if it's only a minute or two, and when you blow a kickoff it just screws up everything. Unless the first game happens to belong to Tom White's crew . Then you breathe easier. Tom is a rather elderly looking gentleman, grey-haired, dignified, not the kind of person you'd figure is given to speed. But when you watch his crew in action you notice a blur, racing over to the sideline to grab the ball coming in from a runner who has gone out of bounds, sprinting back to the huddle to get the ball spotted, clapping his hands, c'mon let's go, wind the clock, keep it moving. That's Jim Quirk. As quick as his name. Maybe he's in the middle of one of those officials' huddles that can take forever. Offside penalty? They decline? OK, call it, let's get going. The referee makes the major decisions and the announcements, but the umpire keeps the game moving. He's the liaison, the whipper and prodder, the heartbeat. During the six years Quirk worked on Johnny Grier's crew, that one was the quickest in the NFL. There's no mystery to it. "Instead of walking to the sidelines on an out-of-bounds play, I sprint," Quirk says. "Some guys just wait for the ball to be thrown back to them. I sprint to it. In the huddle, you try to resolve conflicts as quickly as possible. The most disconcerting thing can be that series of conferences. You try to keep 'em as short as possible. You don't want to interrupt the flow of the game. If a team has a drive going, that'll break the momentum. "If you have to calm or defuse a situation on the field, you try to get it done in a hurry. You do everything you can to keep a game moving ... keep it moving, moving." Writers don't get to talk to NFL officials very often. You need special clearance from the Director of Officiating, Mike Pereira. And they hold onto your wife and kids as hostages to guarantee that you're not setting the guy up for a hatchet job. Hatchet job? You don't do a number on your heroes, and Jim Quirk, as I've already explained, is my hero. When I talked to him a few weeks ago, every game the Tom White-Jim Quirk crew had worked came in under three hours, the only crew that could make that claim. Usually you'll get only three or four sub-threes throughout the league on a weekend. The league average at that point was around 3:06, not counting OT. White's was 2:52 and change. When does this really matter? Playoff time. The league simply will not change its format of three and a half hours between the early and late game, which always runs the risk of flirting with the dreaded overlap. It has happened a few times. An overtime contest and you're sunk. The best you can hope for is that the White-Quirk team gets an early game, so that even if it goes into OT, you're still working off a sub-three-hour cushion. I mean, which would you rather have, knowing that another playoff contest is following closely, a guy who's keeping things moving, or one of those Bob McElwee or Jeff Triplette eternally long officiating huddles? Let's see now, that was a foul downfield, right? Did you call it? Oh, you didn't. Well, OK, now what we have here is ... So I asked Jim Quirk if the fact that all his games were under three hours meant as much to him as it did to me, a chart freak, a time freak, and freakish in lots more ways, too. "Absolutely," he said. "I didn't know it until now, but I'm very proud of that fact. I'm proud that we worked a Monday night game in 2:47. I'm very conscious of the time of our games. Let's say that I feel the same way about it that you do." You might notice Jim Quirk during a game. Iron grey hair, stiff neck, 61 years old, tough, Billy Cowher -style jaw, drill sergeant written all over him. A former guard and linebacker at the University of Delaware, a workout buff, a devotee of the mountain bike ("I hate jogging"). "I wouldn't be a referee because I love being an umpire too much," he says. "Some people think that we just stand behind the defensive line, turning our heads from side to side. Well, I sprint around a lot. If you've got a Jerome Bettis bearing down on you, you'd better learn to move. "Let's face it, I work my rear end off. I'm exhausted after a game. And if it's on artificial turf, my legs don't start coming around until Wednesday. But I guess it's the frenetic pace that I love. I was in the bond business for 35 years, on my feet all day, screaming at people. And I loved that, too." Quirk has had some memorable moments on the field. There was the Sunday night Miami-Detroit game in 1997 when he took a Scott Mitchell spiral on the jaw and hardly blinked. "A glancing blow," he says. "I watched the tape of the game and the camera was right on me and you could see me saying, 'Ah ----.'" (Sorry, can't repeat it. Four letters. Not nice.) There was the Bears-Rams game in 1999 when Quirk dove into the middle of a fight and hauled out 275-pound St. Louis tight end Jeff Robinson by the waist and flung him to the ground. "Hell of a tackler, isn't he?" Rams coach Dick Vermeil said to Robinson. "As the game was winding down," Quirk says, "Robinson came over to me and said, 'Would you mind if I have my picture taken with you?' This year I was talking with their guard, Adam Timmerman, at one game, and I asked him about it. He told me Robinson had the blown up picture on the wall of his den." Quirk was also involved in a landmark replay decision. Green Bay-Chicago, 1989, when the Packers won, 14-13, on a 14-yard jump pass from Don Majkowski to Sterling Sharpe with 32 seconds left. Quirk, as line judge, had a clear line of vision on the play and he ruled that Majkowski's body had crossed the line of scrimmage, nullifying the play. But the replay official, Bill Parkinson, relying on the view supplied by a fixed camera on the roof of the stadium, said that the ball was still behind the line. He reversed Quirk's call and gave the Pack the victory. It took him four minutes and 54 seconds to reach his decision. Many things followed. Next year the rule was changed to include a passer's body being across the line, not only the ball, in determining an infraction. And a two-minute time limit was imposed on any replay ruling. And for years the Bears' media guide, when listing that game, had an asterisk next to it, with the notation, "Replay ruling." And supervisor of officials Art McNally decided to retire. "He told me he was out to dinner with his wife and daughter the following week," Quirk says. "He had seen the tapes of that play a million times and he was still reviewing it in his mind, sitting there at the table. "He said his daughter wanted to tell him something. 'Dad,' she called. No response. 'Dad, Dad.' Still nothing. He was totally unresponsive. "Finally she said, 'Dad, where are you?' "'In Green Bay,' he said. He told me at that point he knew it was time to quit." And at 61, does Quirk have any plans of quitting? No, he says, but he wonders if one day he'll suffer the same fate as his mentor, longtime head linesman, Jerry Bergman. "Jerry made a famous call in a Miami-Buffalo game in the 1970s," Quirk says, "disallowing a Mercury Morris fumble after he'd been flipped on his head, which led to the Dolphins winning the game. "Well, they hung Jerry in effigy in Buffalo seven years later. And one woman wrote him from Buffalo, 'Mr.Bergman, you did something that I've been trying to do for years. After your call, my husband said he'd never watch another game.' "And then someone wrote to him in Pittsburgh, where he lived, and addressed it, 'Blind as a Bat, Pittsburgh.' "Would you believe that the letter was delivered?" Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL for the magazine and CNNSI.com. His "Inside Football" column and Mailbag appear weekly on CNNSI.com. To send a question to Dr. Z, click here. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
