Cycle of Life

By Peter Jackel

Recently retired NBA referee Ron Olesiak has had a heck of a wild ride. Going nose-to-nose with the NBA’s greatest players on the grandest stage, that’s nothing. A harrowing tour of duty in Vietnam and years later overcoming throat cancer, now that’s something. Ride along …

Amid the contentious swirl within Philadelphia’s Wachovia Center, a swirl that often whips into unbridled fury in this notoriously ill-tempered city, Ron Olesiak was facing off one night against 76ers All-Star guard Allen Iverson, with whom he had long had an uneasy relationship.

It’s a business where millionaire athletes are used to getting their way, but Iverson wasn’t getting his when he fell to the floor after a jumper and didn’t hear Olesiak blow his whistle. Iverson glared. A possession later, Iverson was fouled and awarded free throws, but no way was that going to mollify him.

“Goddamn, Ron!” Iverson shouted as he walked to the 76ers’ bench for a timeout just after the foul. “Every time I have you, I don’t play well and we never win when you’re refereeing. I just can’t stand you as a referee!”

For someone whose ears had been rung by the terrorizing sound of enemy gunfire penetrating the fuselage of his Huey helicopter in some godforsaken Vietnam battlefield, Olesiak had experienced infinitely worse. Nevertheless, emotions were sparking within him like downed power lines in the street as he pondered what — if anything — he was going to do about it.

As Iverson walked to the free-throw line, assertiveness won out over passiveness in a tug-of-war within Olesiak and he stepped forward.

“Allen, do you remember what you just told me?” Olesiak said.

“Absolutely!” Iverson responded with contempt.

“Why don’t you and I start over?” Olesiak said as he extended his right hand. “My name is Ron Olesiak.”

Confused, Iverson half-heartedly extended his hand as players from both teams watched that theater of the weird.

“Allen Iverson, it’s a pleasure meeting you,” Olesiak said.

A truce was struck in the City of Brotherly Love that night and it endured through the 2008-09 season, Olesiak’s 21st as an NBA official, after which he retired from the league.

“Whenever I had him in a game after that, it was always very cordial,” Olesiak said. “He said, ‘Hi, Ron.’ He never gave me a hard time about anything.”

But then, that’s what Olesiak, 62, has been about as an official during his 39 years in all levels of the sport.

“What he did was he got the game back to a level where it was supposed to be,” retired NBA official Jess Kersey said. “He put the fire out with Allen Iverson and then Allen Iverson had a different outlook on Ron Olesiak and, possibly, some other officials.”

Come to think of it, that’s what Olesiak is as a human being. As the physically imposing, yet kind-hearted neighborhood leader in Logan Square on Chicago’s near north side in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Olesiak took out bullies with punches and destroyed cliques with compassion.

If you wanted to hang out with Olesiak, you were never too young, too weak or too awkward. You were always welcome. Handshakes started with him years before the one he used to disarm a temperamental superstar.

“He’s got a will of iron and a heart as big as the Grand Canyon,” said John DiGangi, a boyhood pal who still calls him one of his best friends. “When we were growing up, there were the big kids and the little kids and when the younger kids said, ‘Can I go with you?,’” it wasn’t uncommon to say, ‘No, no, you’re too little. You don’t belong.’

“Ron never, never was for that. He always said, ‘Everybody gets to play’ and ‘Everybody gets to come with.’”

That compassion extended into Olesiak’s life as an NBA referee.

“If you got sick on the road, he would make sure that you got taken care of, that you got the proper medication,” Kersey said. “Ron was always on my phone or on my recorder or calling my cell checking to see how I was doing. You couldn’t find a better partner.”

To know Olesiak for even a few minutes is to genuinely like the man. Still weakened by chemotherapy and radiation treatments after getting diagnosed with throat cancer in December 2007 — the man never took a single drag on a cigarette in his life — Olesiak offers the same firm handshake he once offered Iverson.

Only the setting is not the emotionally charged Wachovia Center, but rather the subdued confines of the rear of Uke’s Harley-Davidson dealership in Kenosha, Wis., near the Wisconsin-Illinois border. The former soldier first came to this place from his 15-acre estate in Lake Villa, Ill., in early 2008 to buy a Harley just for the hell of it as he stared mortality straight in the eyes and, true to his nature, formed a lasting bond with the salesmen.

Sitting at a table for an interview, Olesiak immediately connects with his interviewer with compassionate eyes and a welcoming demeanor. It’s as if you’re a kid from Logan Park and Olesiak is inviting you to tag along.

Olesiak is anything but a boastful man, but dig inside his memory and remarkable stories are revealed. He doesn’t necessarily like to tell them, but, hey, you’re his friend now. You have a story to write? Sure, he’ll talk.

He’ll talk about being raised in the upstairs of a neighborhood grocery store that his grandparents owned and looking out for kids in the semi-tough surrounding streets. Olesiak never looked for trouble, but anyone who tried his considerable patience long enough was going to pay a price.

“I would never back down from a fight,” Olesiak said, uttering a defiant personal creed that came particularly into play when he was diagnosed with cancer. “I remember being 12 years old and there was this big kid in eighth grade beating up on this little sixth grader. I pulled this kid off and said, ‘What are you doing? You’re 100 pounds heavier than this little kid and there’s nothing he can do to you.’ … I said, ‘I’m more your size. If you want to do something, let’s do it.’”

One day, Olesiak and his friends saw the 1962 film The 300 Spartans in a Chicago theater. It’s a film dismissed with a one-and-a-half star review in Leonard Maltin’s movie guide nearly 50 years later, but for Olesiak, it offered a symbol of brotherhood that endures to this day among his friends.

“We called ourselves the Spartans. We loved that movie when we were kids,” he said. “It was 300 Greeks against a million. So whenever a gang wanted to start something, all they would say is, ‘Hey, we’re Spartans.’ Those gangs knew I was the guy who protected them and they would back off.

“I had many, many fights with those people and never lost. So they just let us do our thing.”

It led to peace in the neighborhood, at least from the Spartans’ perspective, because of their kind-hearted enforcer.

“To this very day, everyone clearly remembers if you bring up the issue of the Spartans, it’s a very meaningful thing,” DiGangi said. “Ron was a major, major instiller in the group that you never give up, we can conquer the odds and it’s really important for us always to stick together.

“As it turned out, he and I talked about this as he was battling his cancer. I’d say to him, ‘Boy, you’re really a Spartan.’ He’d laugh a little and a smile would come to his face.”

But you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Olesiak. In what he considers to be the one truly regrettable incident of his life, he used that punch of his for the wrong reason.

“It involves a friend of mine, actually,” he said. “We’re all in the schoolyard and he said something that really pissed me off. And this kid was not a fighter. I … walked away and he repeated what he said. All I remember is reacting to it and I turned and punched him in the mouth. He held his mouth and he ran home.

“As I looked on the ground, there were five of his teeth laying there. I picked them up and put them in a handkerchief. I took them over to his house and tried to say I was sorry. His mother slammed the door in my face.”

Yes, that’s the Ron Olesiak that could sometimes emerge.

“Now that you told me that story, I’ll tell you a Danny Crawford story,” said NBA official Dan Crawford, who worked a summer league with Olesiak in Illinois in the late 1970s. “Ronnie and I refereed a game on the north side of Chicago and we were leaving to referee a game on the opposite side of the city at Triton (College). Ronnie said, ‘Just follow me.’

“So I’m following Ronnie and a guy cut in front of him. So we stop, Ronnie gets out of his car and he’s banging on this guy’s window, trying to get this guy to get out of the car. I’m sitting in my car and I’m saying, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ I wasn’t going to tell you this story, but once you told me that story about him knocking somebody’s teeth out, that’s Ronnie Olesiak!”

In the late 1990s, Olesiak was among the 16 NBA officials accused of tax evasion. He and the other officials were charged with failing to report as income the difference between first-class plane tickets issued by the NBA and coach tickets they decided to use. 

But that verse from Paul Anka’s song My Way, the one that says, “Regrets, I’ve had a few/But then again, too few to mention/I did what I had to do/And saw it through without exemption” seems so right with Olesiak’s life. Yes, there were some regrets, but first and foremost, he was always a Spartan with a heart that beat with compassion.

Never was Olesiak more of a Spartan than when he was drafted by the Army as a 19-year-old kid in 1966, was reluctantly trained as a medic and shipped off into the height of the Vietnam War in February 1967. The stakes had been raised. As much as he was a hero back in Logan Square, the reality was that he was susceptible to dying like anyone.

But Spartans don’t back down. Damn right Olesiak was as scared as anyone, but that didn’t stop him from dodging bullets. A man who rarely goes to church yet maintains frequent dialogue with his maker relied on prayer to get him through. And his prayers never went unanswered during his time in Vietnam, which he fulfilled by May 1968.

“When you end up trying to pick somebody up or drop somebody off in a hot LZ — a hot LZ is where there’s gunfire — you get very scared and you’re always concerned, but you’re focused on your job,” Olesiak said. “The most frightening moment was when we were picking up a group of soldiers that were in the field and they were all shot up. We were trying to get them out of this hot LZ and we took heavy fire. The helicopter I was in had bullet holes all over, the engine was smoking and I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God, we’re never getting out of here.’

“Luckily, the pilot was very, very good and we got the people on board. I just remember taking off and looking back at this smoke and all I’m thinking is we’re going to blow up any minute. When we hit the ground, we all jumped up and got away and the helicopter just started on fire.”

In the old neighborhood, Olesiak was always there for his pals. In the faraway jungles, he was that same person. Just as he used to look out for Spartans, he was willing to risk his life for a young soldier overcome by fear.

“We were in the same barracks together and we were talking one night,” Olesiak said. “He said, ‘You know what? I don’t feel right about this mission. I really don’t want to go. I can’t do this.’ … We talked for about an hour and a half and the bottom line was I said, ‘Listen, I don’t have to work tomorrow in the dispensary. If you get it cleared, I’ll take your shift.’ He got it cleared and I ended up taking the mission.”

On a date that might have ended up on Olesiak’s gravestone, he had a relatively uneventful mission. And a fellow soldier who had real combat trauma was able to have a needed mental breather because a pal was willing to risk his life on his behalf.

Little could Olesiak have realized that a time would come in his life that was more terrifying than riding in a ticking bomb of a helicopter. And it started not amid combat in Vietnam, but in the confines of a trainer’s room in the Target Center at Minneapolis after a game in December 2007.

Olesiak had been dealing with a cold for a couple of weeks and he couldn’t help but be concerned by an ominous bump on his throat. He finally had it checked out.

“The team physician thought I might have a touch of strep throat,” Olesiak said. “He said, ‘I’m going to give you an antibiotic and if this doesn’t go down by morning, you go see your own physician.’”

It couldn’t have been much since the straight-laced Olesiak had never smoked a cigarette, sipped alcohol or indulged in drugs in his life. But when the truth was revealed during a doctor’s visit the next day, it packed a wallop so much more devastating than one of Olesiak’s punches.

“I’ll never forget after I got in to see him and he’s poking around and he said, ‘You know what? With my years of experience, I’ve got to tell you I think you’ve got cancer. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m going to send you to an ears, throat and nose specialist who deals with this stuff.’”

Life had thrown such a changeup to a man who once excelled at softball. From the Pied Piper of his streets as a boy to a young soldier in Vietnam to a respected official in the NBA, Olesiak found himself fighting for his life and facing daunting odds no matter how favorable they were on paper.

And Olesiak started intensifying his dialogues with his maker.

“When they start talking about life and death stuff like I heard when I was a young kid 20 years old going to Vietnam, you’re trying to compare the things,” he said. “I think I did this and survived this and this maybe seems a little easier. You can’t control either. If you’re in Vietnam and you’re being shot at and you’re walking through rice paddies, you can’t control what’s going to happen. The best thing you can do is pray and hope you survive it and be a little smarter.”

He endured 12 weeks of horrible chemotherapy treatments. But that was nothing compared to the radiation treatments, which lasted seven weeks.

“If you can picture taking a nice pink steak and putting it on a grill and forgetting about it, my nice pink throat when I started chemo ended up being a charred piece of meat after 35 treatments,” Olesiak said. “By the end of the second week, you have the worst sore throat you thought you ever had and it just gets worse from there. You can’t even really drink water. You can’t eat anything. My diet was protein shakes.”

But being a Spartan means overcoming the odds. It meant not only beating this thing, but returning to his physically demanding job by the start of the 2008-09 season.

“When I think of Ron Olesiak, I think of the word, ‘survivor,’” said NBA referee Dick Bavetta. “He’s a survivor of battle missions in Vietnam, a survivor of 21 years in the NBA with the rigorous travel schedule and the physical wear and tear and, finally, a survivor from being a cancer victim to being cancer free after countless hours of chemotherapy and radiation.

“Ron is inspirational to other cancer victims and to people in every day life who face their daily challenges. Ron Olesiak is a true hero to all of us. It’s another test that God gives and he’s passed the test. A lesser man would really not have been able to endure everything he’s gone through.”

Instead, Olesiak emerged from it a stronger man, just as he did from the faraway battlefields of Vietnam.

“I’ll tell you one thing — he’s a strong man to come back from what he went through,” Kersey said. “He is a survivor in many, many ways.”

And not only does he plan to survive, he’s determined to thrive, though his NBA officiating ended with retirement this past summer.

Olesiak said he retired due to the travel and because the collective bargaining agreement that expired this year made it beneficial to do so.

“I still love refereeing,” he said, “so I am going to attempt to do (NCAA) Division I ball. … If not, I’ll work some local college, Division II or III, and enjoy some time with my family.”

Olesiak was also hired as an NBA officiating observer.

As gifted as Olesiak is on the hardwood, it has never defined him.

No, what truly defined Olesiak was the big-hearted kid who walked the streets of Chicago, the brave soul who dodged enemy gunfire in Vietnam and the value-driven husband and father who lives in Lake Villa, Ill.

Just ask Olesiak’s second wife, Pam, a United Airlines stewardess who is 16 years his junior. When they met on a flight from Chicago to Atlanta in March 1997, shortly after Olesiak went through his divorce, Pam was so taken by Olesiak she gave him her number before the plane touched down.

Within four years, they were married and Olesiak raised her two young sons, Carmen and Andrew, with the same conviction with which he once raised his own son, Ron, who is 42, and officiates small college men’s basketball games.

“He is the best father,” Pam Olesiak said. “I think that’s what made me want to marry him. He’s such a good role model with young boys.

“I guess we had the same ideas about discipline and things like that. Actually, he’s a little more lenient than I am … but he’s a good guy. A very good guy.”

Kevin Freeman seconds that. When Freeman, the 23-year-old friend of Carmen and Andrew, had to move out of a place at which he was paying modest rent in the summer of 2008, Olesiak offered him a place to stay at his house. But this was no free ride.

“I asked him, ‘How much did you pay rent?’” Olesiak said. “He said, ‘$280 a month.’ I said, ‘Do you have a savings account?’ and he said, ‘No.’

“I said, ‘All right, this is stipulation one: I’m going to let you have the $80, but I want $200 every month put into a new savings account in your name and, every month, I want to see the deposit.’ He’s been depositing $200 every month and when it got to $1,000, he said, ‘I want to thank you. This never would have happened if you didn’t force this on me.’

“The other stipulation was he had to help out with chores around here.”

It’s called tough love and Olesiak is a master at it.

“He pretty much treats me like his two sons,” said Freeman, whose parents were divorced when he was two. “He’s almost like a father-like figure to me. … If there were more people like Ron, there would be a lot fewer problems in the world.”

Unfortunately, the Ron Olesiaks in this troubled world are in short supply. But Olesiak plans to be around for the long haul after recovering from his cancer and he underscored that during the depths of his struggle.

That’s why he bought a red Harley Sportster and learned to ride a motorcycle for the first time in more than 30 years — even after his weight fell from 220 to 164 after treatments.

“It was a flashback from my younger days when I used to ride motorcycles all the time,” he said. “I just cannot believe I let 30 years pass without driving one of these again.”

Trust Olesiak when he says he’ll never make that mistake again.

“What I learned through my life is that if there’s something you would like to do or think about doing, you should not think twice about it,” he said. “I do believe there might not be a second chance. So if I have to pass on advice to anybody, friends or family, I’d say, ‘Don’t think back on it. Do it.’ It’s something you’ll think back 50 years from now that, ‘At least I did it and I did it because I wanted to do it.’”

Peter Jackel is a longtime sportswriter from Racine, Wis.