THE TOM O’NEILL’S CAREER REACHED THE HIGHEST LEVELS. NOW, HE IS STEPPING AWAY ON HIS OWN TERMS.
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t’s difficult for an official working a national championship game to avoid the spotlight. But during the opening minutes of the 1997 NCAA men’s basketball championship game, Tom O’Neill found himself nearly invisible — and it was more than his nerves could handle. “I went the first five minutes of the game without putting air into the whistle,” O’Neill recalled about Arizona’s overtime win against Kentucky. “Nothing happened in front of me. I didn’t have a foul; I didn’t have a ball go out of bounds; I didn’t call a timeout. … I started to sweat a little bit. I said to myself, ‘I don’t care what happens … the next foul or violation I see, no matter where it’s at, I’m calling it.’” Fortunately, O’Neill’s first call of that game was a foul in his primary area. That national title contest concluded his 20th year as a Division I men’s basketball official. Now 24 years later, O’Neill has hung up his lanyard for the last time. For parts of six decades, he worked in more than 20 NCAA D-I conferences. By his count, he tallied more than 3,300 D-I games, which he believes is more games than any other official in NCAA men’s basketball history.
“I want that record,” said O’Neill, whose high profile came mainly through his work in the Big Ten, Big 12 and Southeastern conferences. “College basketball has seen a lot of very good officials, and the number of games we work is one way we are judged. I worked hard to become one of the best officials, so that record is important to me. It’s a distinctive mark of longevity doing something I love.” Before his extensive foray into officiating, the native of Calumet Park, Ill., played baseball for Northern Illinois University. He graduated with a degree in physical education in 1967, began a teaching career in Chicago’s south suburbs and started calling grade school basketball games. At home, he and his wife, Vickie, were raising their three sons, Richard, Tom Jr. and Michael. O’Neill resigned from teaching in 1979 to become the director of recreation for Calumet Park. He also took over as the boys’ basketball assigner for the South Inter-Conference Association (SICA), a conglomerate of nearly 30 high schools in Chicago’s south and southwest suburbs. “I wanted to help improve officiating,” O’Neill said of the
assigner’s job he held for 25 seasons. “I provided SICA with the best officials in the area. Some SICA games had Division I officials working. They weren’t big-time D-I referees at that time, but they were guys with significant college experience. I’d argue against anyone in Illinois who believed their conferences had better officiating than SICA.” O’Neill’s first D-I game was at Eastern Illinois in 1977, and nine years later he made officiating his full-time occupation. He has worked as many as 112 games in a season, crisscrossing the country from New York to Florida to Minnesota to Texas to Colorado to California. Building his frequent flyer miles from November through March gave him plum assignments, but it came at the typical expense of family time. While O’Neill monitored post play and airborne shooters, his wife managed their sons’ increasing load with school and extracurricular activities. “Tom’s travel schedule was a lot,” Vickie, Tom’s bride of 52 years, said. “Having to get three boys back and forth by myself and be there with them was difficult because I couldn’t be in two or three places at once.”
REFEREE
BY MARCEL KERR
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