Metro Pulse/Cover/The Football Issue

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Brooks Makes Book
Former Sports Illustrated writer Brooks Clark's patented SEC preview and predictions for the season ahead.

Big John Meets the Press
Mike Gibson gets some face-time with big Vol on campus John Henderson at UT's Media Day feeding frenzy.

Going Long
Just in case Brooks is wrong, Adrienne Martini consults some more dependable sources (like a Magic 8-Ball).

Referee Reveries
Mike Gibson sits down with some of our more experienced local referees to find out what wets their whistle.

Stranger in a Strange Land
Katie Allison Granju recounts the horror of discovering that, despite your best efforts, your son has turned out to be a football fan.

Bert Ackermann SEC football joke no. 1:
Q: What does the average Mississippi State football player get on his SAT?
A: Drool.

Bert Ackermann SEC football joke no. 2:
Q: How do you get an Arkansas cheerleader into your dorm room?
A: Grease her hips and push.

Bert Ackermann SEC football joke no. 3:
Q: Why did the University of Tennessee choose orange for its school color?
A: Because fans can wear it to the game on Saturday, hunting on Sunday, and to pick up trash on the side of the road during the week.

Bert Ackermann SEC football joke no. 4:
An out-of-town football fan, a backwoodsy fellow, tools into Nashville in his pickup truck one Saturday with the intent of watching his hometown school play football. Confused by the city's streets, he parks next to a Vanderbilt fan walking down the sidewalk, rolls down his window and asks, "Excuse me, can you tell me where the stadium's at?" The Vandy fan looks down at him sourly, raises up, puffs out his chest and haughtily announces, "Sir, here at Vanderbilt we do not end sentences with prepositions." The fellow in the pickup scratches his head, thinks a moment, then replies, "Awright then—can you tell me where the stadium's at, asshole?"

For the men in the stripes, the game goes on long after college.

by Mike Gibson

The game's been rough on Bert Ackermann. He's suffered broken ribs on two separate occasions. Twice, he was knocked unconscious. He broke his ankle once, and hit the ground "so many times, I couldn't begin to count."

In an Alabama-Auburn game a few years back, a hurtling linebacker dove over a pile of bodies and collapsed Ackermann's knee. The joint was "blown completely out," the tibia plateau broken in eight places and the tibia stem in three. The leg was reconstructed with replacement parts from a cadaver and required nearly a year of rehabilitation.

Reminiscing from the dubious comfort of a swivel chair in his West Knoxville office, Ackermann takes a measure of pride in that litany of traumas, accumulated over 32 years at every level of competition. And he's quick to add that his playing career was no picnic, either.

Like most of the fellows who wear the stripes, recently-retired SEC football official Ackermann was possessed of an organic love of the sport of football that just wouldn't let him move quietly from the field into the stands when his career as a linebacker/offensive center (in the "old days" of one-platoon football) ended the fourth game of his senior year at the University of Tennessee.

"I went through a real serious dissatisfaction, really a mild depression," Ackermann says of the injury, which occured in the UT-Boston College game of 1964. Then one day in the summer of '65, Ackermann ran into two local high school officials of his acquaintance, and told them of the emotional fall-out he suffered in the wake of his injury. The men asked Ackermann to attend a meeting at Regas Restaurant the following Monday evening.

"They didn't tell me what the meeting was for, but I wasn't going to pass up a free dinner at Regas," chuckles Ackermann, a moon-faced fellow with beefy forearms and imposing shoulders, sturdy remnants of his playing days. "It was an organizing meeting for the year's high school officiating association, and I ended up joining the organization and attending their introductory officiating program."

Former UT defensive back ('75-'77) and current SEC official Eddy Powers, product of a football family, echoes that "football's in your blood. If you grow up in a family raising tobacco, you raise tobacco.

"When I finished playing, I thought I could sit in the stands and watch a ball game. I was wrong. My second year out of the game, I had to do something."

And local tax attorney and former SEC referee Mack Gentry tells of signing on as B-squad coach at West Point in the '60s after lettering three years as a tackle at UT. When his unit lost nine of 11 games his second year of coaching, he decided there were other, more viable ways of maintaining his gridiron connections.

"My law degree started looking pretty attractive at that point," Gentry laughs. "But I wanted to have some kind of involvement with the game, and officiating seemed to be what was left."

Like the players themselves, fledgling officials usually enter the profession at lower levels of competition, then apply and sometimes "audition" for positions in successively more advanced leagues. "It's a gradual process," says Ackermann, who took only three years to earn a spot on an SEC crew, by virtue of a tireless work ethic that drove him to officiate as many as 15 kids' league, junior high and high school games in a week.

"You start with the pee-wee grass cutters, then junior high school and high school and small colleges...when you get up to junior high, you get to wear a uniform, and you feel like you're the biggest shit in the world," he laughs.

One thing most fans pay little heed is the fact that the seven football officials in a college or professional game have distinct responsibilities, and most newly-christened officials eventually choose one of the seven positions and cleave to that role for the duration of their career.

Gentry was a referee, the only white-hat on the field, the gentleman stationed in the deep offensive backfield, whose job it is to count the offensive players, stay mindful of illegal motion or improper formations in the backfield, and follow the quarterback as he moves behind the line of scrimmage.

Ackermann was a linesman, stationed at the line of scrimmage opposite the press box, and charged with overseeing the down measurement crew as well as heeding infractions along the line of scrimmage.

And Powers works on a regular SEC crew as a field judge, the official who holds court in the defensive backfield opposite the press box and who keeps the 25-second clock while tracking potential downfield infractions.

All of the officials follow the play and "clean up" when the ball departs their area of primary responsibility. "The idea is to keep the play 'boxed'," Gentry explains. "There's always a diamond of officials around the ball. It's a game in and of itself, keeping the play within a perimeter of six officials."

A physically challenging game, at that; SEC officials are required to pass a small battery of fitness tests prior to each season in addition to a 100-plus question rules exam, a gauntlet that includes a timed 1.5-mile run and a series of agility drills.

"It's a good excuse to push away from the table, to keep myself from becoming a TV couch potato," says Powers. Now in his early 50s, Powers works out with a personal trainer at a local health club four days out of the week, and maintains a running schedule that includes jogging as many as six miles through the hilly neighborhoods of Walker Springs in West Knoxville.

The average human being can process and differentiate visually discreet incidents within 10 to 15 milliseconds of one another; a good official, says Ackermann, can discern events as little as three milliseconds apart. "The receiver makes a catch and his foot touches in bounds; but which happened first?" he offers. "It's an innate capability. If you have it, it's because God made you that way."

And officials know when they've screwed the pooch. Every SEC game is viewed and filmed by a former official seated in the pressbox, who shares his observations with each active zebra after the game. The game film and evalutations are mailed by the Sunday evening following a Saturday game, and by Tuesday afternoon, SEC supervisor of officials Bobby Gaston, in Birmingham, Ala., has digested the input and prepared critiques of each performance.

He has also, by that time, assembled an hour-long feature film of "lowlights," a collection of blown calls and officiating no-nos that all of the officials view in the four-hour meeting that precedes every Saturday game. "Every week, you're waiting in agony to see if you made the film," Ackermann says. "If you make one too many lowlight reels, you're gone the next season. The scrutiny is pretty intense.

"But it's a challenge, and a really good official loves

to make that split-second call—like a good player in a pressure situation," he adds. "If you ever find yourself

saying, 'I'm glad I didn't have to make that one,' you're over the hill."

Officials occasionally face hazards far worse than embarassment or banishment from the league, however; Ackermann remembers two occasions when his crew was nearly submerged in waves of angry fans following emotional games. "It was a Mexican stand-off," he says of a near-riot at a game that took place during his tenure as a high school official. "Highway patrolmen came and made a circle around us, stood there for 20 minutes 'til the riot squad and a paddy wagon came."

At a Florida-Florida State game in the early 1970s,

a contest in which the Gators scored a narrow last-second victory over their intra-state rivals, someone locked the gate through which the officials were to have escaped to the safety of a police escort waiting outside the stadium tunnel.

"The fans all came yelling at us, and the only thing we could do was climb the chain-link fence and over the barbed wire on top. We were already exhausted from the game, and it was all I could do to get over."

Another of the parallels that exist between football players and the men who police them is that both groups will eventually see their performance degraded, their enthusiasms dulled by the ravages of age and experience.

Gentry's plans for retirement were set in motion about four years ago when, already tiring of his long-time sidelight, he got a singular opportunity to indulge his other part-time passion, spending several months in Colorado with a well-regarded horse trainer. Soon thereafter, he left the college game and now spends spare time riding any of the six quarter horses he houses in a barn on his rugged and thickly-forested West Knoxville property.

"I got to where I didn't feel I had the best of attitudes, and I didn't feel I was doing it was well as I wanted to," Gentry says, seated in the living room of his beautifully-appointed rancher. "I like the system less now; there's a little more questioning of authority. But maybe I'm just showing my age."

Powers seconds the notion that the job has gotten more difficult, on several fronts. "The athletes are bigger and stronger and faster now, 300-pounders running faster than 250-pounders did 10 years ago.

"It's a problem, because I'm always working with 18- to 22-year-olds, but I'm getting older. I don't have a turnover rate."

Powers isn't quite ready for the retired refs' home, however; he applied for a position with the National Football League three years ago, and now works about four NFL-Europe games every season. Just like a college or professional prospect, he was scouted, interviewed and then selected as a top-20 "finalist" from among 800 applicants.

"What will happen remains to be seen," Powers says. "I'm in the right position. Now I'm just waiting for some guys to quit, retire or get fired."