Meet Barry Mano: 'One Breath Of Scandal Freezes Much Honorable Swear'

CEP COMPLIANCE & ETHICS PROFESSIONAL

JUNE 2020

MAGAZINE

a publication of the society of corporate compliance and ethics

BARRY MANO FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SPORTS OFFICIALS, RACINE, WISCONSIN, USA

One breath of scandal freezes much honorable sweat (p10) What legal teams should know about CCPA supplier readiness (p16)

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The tough Corporate Sanctions Act is on Germany’s horizon (p22) A look at the French Anticorruption Agency’s updated compliance officer guidelines (p26) California’s new human trafficking legislation requires higher employee training standards (p32) This article, published in Compliance & Ethics Professional, appears here with permission from the Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics. Call SCCE at +1 952.933.4977 or 888.277.4977 with reprint requests.

Cover Feature

‘ONE BREATH OF SCANDAL FREEZES MUCH HONORABLE SWEAT’ Meet Barry Mano

Founder and President of the National Association of Sports Officials in Racine, Wisconsin, USA

an interview by David D. Dodge

Barry Mano (bmano@referee.com) was interviewed by David D. Dodge (david@sprtsoc.com), Founder and CEO of Sports Officiating Consulting LLC, based in Carlsbad, California, USA. 10 CEP

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DD: Nearly four decades ago you

founded the National Association of Sports Officials (NASO) and have served as its president over that period of time. What led you to establish NASO?

BM: I founded Referee magazine in late 1975. Four years later, I began NASO. The association was formed as a 501(c)(3) educational association to provide benefits and services for sports officials. Nobody was paying much attention to the needs of the men, women, and young people who made organized sports possible.

At its inception, NASO provided its members with an insurance protection program unheard of before that. To this day, NASO’s liability and assault protection insurance program is renowned within the officiating industry.

Over the past 40 years, NASO has built itself into what most call the “leading advocate on behalf of sports officials” on the planet. We are proud of carrying the mantle.

DD: Can you share the mission

of the organization and how it has evolved through the years?

BM: NASO has evolved over its years to best serve its members and the industry it has helped create. That evolution has been required because of some major changes, including:

1. The professionalization of operations from local officials’ associations all the way into the pro leagues. Sports officiating operations used to be an afterthought. Today they are forethoughts.

2. The proliferation of technology used to assist and evaluate officiating performance. This has enabled sports officials to be more effective and

efficient. At the same time, technology has brought burden to officials. It has made the officiating product line fully public and with that has come unreasonable analysis and expectations — especially for officials at the high school and youth levels.

3. The demand for integrity in approach and function by sports officials. Today, sports officials are required — are mandated — to ascribe to and act to the highest ethical standards. There is no wiggle room here.

DD: NASO includes officials

from across sports and from amateur to professional levels.

Are the integrity risks the same or do they vary?

BM: The job of a sports official,

any sports official, is this: to ensure that the game is played by the rules while emphasizing fairness and safety and doing so in a manner that enhances the stature of sports officiating. That is our definition, and we must abide by it. The integrity risks are fundamentally the same for anyone in sports officiating. But they become much more public at the higher levels of sport, the levels that have more broadcast interest.

Integrity risks also get heightened when there are gambling interests involved. A primary example would be trying to bribe a sports official to sway the calls. Most officials get minimal compensation and thus have to exercise a commitment to integrity to resist the temptation to do something that violates the code stated above. We can be proud that, in the long history of sports officiating, there have been less than a handful of documented cases of officials violating the trust placed in them.

DD: Sports officials are, in their

own very real way, compliance officers. They make sure the rules are followed. They make the calls when rules are broken. What’s the key for sports officials for keeping it fair?

Officials are in the enforcement division, not in the legislative division. We do not get to make rules up as we go along.

BM: Well-put question. Yes,

in their way, sports officials are compliance officers. We have to have a reverence for the rules.

They define how the owners of the game want the game to look.

Those owners turn to us and ask us to shape that game to that end.

Officials are in the enforcement division, not in the legislative division. We do not get to make rules up as we go along. Yes, we are accorded some latitude in enforcing rules in select situations, but beyond those, we are to adhere to what the rules say we must do.

We are to do that without fear or favor. We are to ensure that, first, we comply with the policies and practices of officiating and, second, that the participants comply with the rules of the contest. Sports officials have “compliance” written all over them.

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DD: What is the key for

maintaining the credibility of the officials so that players, coaches, and fans all believe that they are making the right calls, or, if a call is blown, it was by accident and not as a result of something nefarious?

BM: The motives for what

sports officials do will always be questioned. That is the nature of the world in which we find ourselves. People question authority, and that is how it should be in a free society. Within that free society we have sports as we know them. In turn, those that own the games must have “believability of outcomes” for those games to sustain a fan base, and for playoff and championship games to have meaning. All of that rests on the shoulders of sports officials. Without us, the games become just recess. I like to say, “The rules are just ink on paper without us.” That has never been truer than today.

The credibility of officials is not just the responsibility of the officials themselves. Those that build, manage, and direct officiating staffs have an inviolate responsibility to ensure that that credibility is tended to and that its well-being is of paramount importance in the management structure.

By the way, this discussion should not turn on the rightness or the wrongness of calls being made.

It is deeper than that. It is exactly when an incorrect call is made that the owners of the game must step up to ensure the world knows the mistake was simply that: a mistake and nothing nefarious. I would like to see this aspect given much more attention within organizations that rely on officials for their well-being.

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DD: Like compliance officers,

undertaking to be liked. It really does not matter, in that sense. In fact, if you are a sports official at your core, you come to love it when fans boo. Our assignment is not a popularity contest. It is to know the rules and get the plays called correctly. If those become the core values you have as a sports official, then the rest becomes background noise. Learn to tune that out or learn to use that to feed your desire to do the job even better, with more courage and conviction.

This undertaking is not for the faint of heart.

been instances of active sports officials accepting money to affect a game one way or the other.

Each of those instances was damnable and hurt the reputation of officiating in general. Here in the USA, we have been relatively free of such things — except in the celebrated case of former NBA referee Tim Donaghy. The key element to keep in mind is this: It is nigh impossible for an official to improperly sway a game to a desired end, because everything they do, at the highest levels, is monitored and captured on video for review. What officials do have is access to information about the games. They know about player injuries or other such things.

Gamblers like that information because it can affect the line. Thus, sports officials and leadership have to remain ever vigilant to sidebar conversations and innocent chatter with anyone. They have to remain on guard when the topic is sports.

DD: Betting on sports is a big risk

DD: What steps has NASO taken

officials often need to make unpopular decisions. Even if they make the right call, half the people are unhappy. How do you ensure that officials aren’t swayed by that equation and also can maintain a positive sense of self, despite being unpopular a lot of the time just for doing their job?

BM: We are not in this

area for officials. Over a decade ago, a National Basketball Association (NBA) official was found to have been involved in a gambling ring, which has become the subject of a movie. In November 2014, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver suggested in a New York Times Opinion, in a sharp pivot for the NBA, that sports betting in the US should be legalized and regulated.

What was your reaction to Silver’s piece, and what’s happened since then?

BM: Long have people bet on

sporting contests, and long have those in officiating been wary of a potential incursion of gambling interests into the officiating process. Worldwide there have

to encourage its member officiating leaders to form sports officiating integrity programs?

BM: NASO has become the

leading officiating organization when it comes to endorsing an integrity program for officials.

NASO has created its Integrity Resource Center (IRC). Our board of directors has led our way down this path. The IRC has been instrumental in raising the consciousness of our board and of our approximately 27,000 members to the importance of integrity and compliance as factors required today in sports officiating. Until this time, “integrity” was a buzzword and a byword. Now it is squarely in our sights, on our minds.

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Former NBA referee Tim Donaghy’s untoward episode with providing information to sports bettors so shocked and hurt us that NASO decided that something formal needed to be done to get INTEGRITY written out in capital letters for officials. The IRC is doing that on a daily basis. The IRC brings juried and proven materials from the wide world of compliance and integrity and imports them into officiating. We have and are creating unique materials aimed at what sports officials are required to do. We have heightened the awareness of what is at stake, what is at risk.

The fact is that while most officiating organizations have implemented only a hodgepodge of integrity program elements, scant few have developed formal, comprehensive, effective programs similar to those found in other businesses and industries. Our board has adopted the Minimum Standards for an Effective Integrity Program for Sports Officiating along with the Getting Started Guidebook: Developing and Establishing an Effective Integrity Program for Sports Officiating. As the industry of sports officiating matures, we would expect officiating organizations to develop integrity/compliance programs similar to those found in other industries.

DD: What are some of the other risk areas for sports officials, and how do you suggest they be managed?

BM: Well, there are personal risks, such as financial and reputational.

All I can say here is that since officiating has become a “public good,” I always urge those that officiate to conduct themselves

as a public person. They have to understand that, for us, nothing is really personal anymore. If we cut corners or do something dodgy in our personal lives, that will come out, and that will affect not only that person, but all of us in this undertaking. I know that what is being asked of the men and women who officiate is stout and demanding, but there it is. You join this undertaking, you have to be willing to hold yourself to an incredibly high ethical standard — and those are not just words on paper. I like to quote Baltasar Gracián, a seventeenth-century Spanish philosopher, when considering the specific topic of conduct as it relates to being a sports official: “One breath of scandal freezes much honorable sweat.”

don’t get to “make things up.” They couldn’t if they wanted to in the age of review and replay.

With regard to revenue calculations figuring into the officiating equation, the only place that might happen — and I say this a bit tongue in cheek — is in Texas, where high school football officials have their game fees tied to a percentage of the gate revenue.

But then, the fans are already in the stands, so any call made would not be made as a revenue enhancer.

As for keeping officials focused, well, this is the business of focus, with a capital F. Officials must learn the rules — know them and the scads of permutations that exist — by heart and then apply them in a matter of seconds.

DD: In business, management

If we cut corners or do something dodgy in our personal lives, that will come out.

often finds it difficult to discipline the top performers, and there is a lot of pressure on compliance officers to go easy on them since these are the people who bring in the revenues. I imagine in sports there is a lot of similar pressure on officials to penalize star athletes less, since fans want to see the stars, and team owners want those stars because they bring in fans. How do you keep officials focused on the rules and not on the attendance effects?

BM: Another good question, one

that emanates from a general, yet wrong, belief that officials coddle various players or favor the home team, etc. The statistics clearly demonstrate the myth of that.

Officials have all they can handle to call what they believe they saw in real time, much less having some extra time to skew calls. Officials

DD: Scandals in sports seem to

be on the rise over the past several years. Why do you believe that sports organizations, including their officiating departments, have been slow to develop formal integrity/compliance/ethics programs — programs that have proven effective in preventing CEP 13

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over the years. I take some solace in that fact.

Today, the vast majority of sports officials at all levels are subject to background checks.

Those working “big money” sports have their financial assets/ transactions — as well as other personal things — frequently monitored. If you like to go to Vegas to roll some dice, you might not be a candidate to work pro or college games. These controls and checking mechanisms are as they should be. NASO embraces them.

DD: What advice would you

give to corporate compliance professionals who have to make tough calls as well? They aren’t doing so with players and coaches screaming at them or millions of people watching on TV. Still, it can be a very tough job.

BM: Well, learn to love making wrongdoing in so many other businesses and industries?

BM: Good question. It might be

that over history, the integrity of officials was presumed. It is really not something that I ever remember being emphasized nor even discussed at any of my meetings with the conferences I refereed in. It was presumed our integrity was set in concrete.

I might also opine that the history of officiating is one steeped in the fact that for most officials, they know/feel they are eminently replaceable. You had to be on your best behavior, because getting replaced was always a real possibility. While that reality was unsettling to officials, I think it also had the effect of keeping everyone on their best behavior and avoiding relationships and 14 CEP

interactions that could call their character into question.

Then as sports proliferated, as sports betting grew, and as officials became much more visible, concern was raised that the “old way of compliance” might not be the best way of compliance.

The owners of the games and the fans wanted assurance that all was on the up-and-up, and that sure has been the fact — except in a very few cases. Those cases instantly became worldwide sensations. That fact in itself told me just how good we have been over all the years. A couple cases of officials acting badly, and they became so noteworthy. The media channels filled and sated themselves with the coverage.

Thus, bad events actually demonstrated just how clean we have been (and continue to be)

tough calls. Officiating teaches three primary skills, skills for a lifetime I might add: fairmindedness, decisiveness, and accountability. These three come with the territory, and if you want to shrink from them, find another line of work. This isn’t for you. Learn to tune out the noise that is expected (from fans) and accept the noise that is required (coaches/players acting unhappy but within boundaries).

Officiating is public, it is noisy, it is often grossly unfair, but there it is. Get over it. Put the whistle down and hit the beach or keep blowing it with courage and conviction. The paths are clear.

Don’t try to merge those two. It doesn’t work.

DD: Thank you, Barry, for

sharing your experience and insights with our readers. CEP