Left to right, high school football officials Mark Hammond, Charley Paterniti, Cappy Caprino and Howard Brown in the Jamestown Stadium furnace room following a high school football game, likely in the 1960s.
My dad, Mark Hammond, was a longtime Western New York high school football referee and a great one. He tried his best to convince me to follow in his footsteps, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
As I neared the age of 17 after the so-called but personally elusive Summer of Love in 1967, I took the football officiating class offered by our local board, the Southwestern Chapter of the New York State Certified Football Officials Association.
It was a multi-week event and I was clearly the youngest one of maybe a dozen county candidates. Some were older local football fans who had no interest in throwing flags for a few bucks on the weekend. They were there to have a better working knowledge of the high school rules, different back then in many subtle ways from the college and pro games on television.
After a lot of studying and home tutoring, I passed the course as a so-called junior member and worked with my dad in some local Dunkirk-Fredonia Midget Football League doubleheaders on fall weekends.
My job was strictly as a linesman, calling the occasional false start or offsides penalty. Wasn’t a fan. Bored.
Bill Hammond
Decided not to join the chapter the following year when I reached legal age.
Football just wasn’t my game. I knew none of its intricacies. Didn’t know an A gap from a hip pad. Bashing helmets play after play in the rain or in the mud or even in the snow wasn’t my idea of fun.
And don’t get me started on high school football coaches, an utterly obnoxious and vain male subset of macho, slogan-spewing sadists. Oops, got started.
Of course, there were exceptions back in the day. Dave Ball at Fredonia, Archie Bradley at Silver Creek and longtime Jamestown assistant coach Tom Phillips all quickly come to mind. True gentlemen.
I was much more interested in refereeing basketball and umpiring baseball, my two favorite sports.
A congenital birth defect involving a defective spine had kept me off the football field and wrestling would have been a no-no as well, had it been around at the time.
Sure, I played some sandlot tackle football as a kid. But it was against the advice or knowledge of my friendly family physician and fire-breathing family matriarch, a registered nurse known for standing up to egotistical doctors barking orders at timid young nurses and aides in Brooks Memorial Hospital. Mom wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything.
Most of my sandlot football was the two- or three-kid per side, two-hand touch variety in the street.
It was usually me and my talented younger by 13 months brother, Tom, along with athletic Deer Street neighbors Dan Alessi and Dave Polechetti and an ever-rotating cast of younger players.
We often used a fist-sized mini football. Whichever team had Alessi usually won.
And when the gang went to fellow Mindszenty Monarch Jack Anderson’s home to play sports, it was time for “Thelen,” an offense versus defense take on tackle football in honor of workhorse Canadian Football League fullback Dave Thelen. Jack would invariably hand off the ball to a Thelen stand-in, the notoriously hard-to-tackle Dave Szczerbacki or the immovable Tom Murray, and points were awarded to the offense for first downs and defense for stopping them. Mom would not have been pleased watching that brutal game unfold on a side yard.
I did play some intramural football. I was a center as a freshman at SUNY Fredonia for Colonial Jack’s South Shore Lakers until I tore the cartilage in my right knee. Our team did very well in the playoffs without me.
Then I played the same position in the early years of the Dunkirk Touch Football League for the Columbus Club. We even won the playoff title one year in a memorable overtime game.
I retired once our children were born and I got tired of waking up sore until Wednesday from a Saturday battle with massive defensive linemen who played in high school and college and even the pro ranks. Like Dick “Animal” Kaczor. A Cardinal Mindszenty High School legend, “Kotch” was basically unblockable and unstoppable when motivated.
When asked to referee city touch football league games by Dunkirk Recreation Director Bob Patterson after that I respectfully declined.
I decided that one football referee in the family, the one inducted into the Chautauqua Sports Hall of Fame inaugural class in 1982, was more than enough.
Happy birthday, dad.
***
DO YOU have a favorite, funny, weird, best or worst memory of amateur sports refereeing, playing or spectating? Drop me a line at mandpp@hotmail.com and let’s reminisce.
Bill Hammond is a former EVENING OBSERVER Sports Editor.
-
- Left to right, high school football officials Mark Hammond, Charley Paterniti, Cappy Caprino and Howard Brown in the Jamestown Stadium furnace room following a high school football game, likely in the 1960s.
-
- Bill Hammond
