“We’ve learned … Hitting people over the head with a two-by-four doesn’t do anything but knock them out, and then they wake up and they’re mad.”
Referee: How did you get into the officiating publishing business?
Mano: My dad Rudy was a referee, and we used to go to the games with him, my older brother and I. And then in high school refereeing became my part-time job. My dad was also an assignor for a lot of high schools, so I started with a full high school varsity schedule. And I was so good that I excelled at that level and kept getting games from the assignor (laughs).
Then, in 1973 a magazine started in Milwaukee called Astronomy. I said, “Wow, that’s a great idea.”The only thing that existed in those days was Sky and Telescope and I could only read the captions because everything else was so technical I couldn’t handle it. At the same time, we’re all refereeing in the Mano family and getting beat up in the newspapers just like everybody else.
And literally one day in April of 1975, I’m driving around in my car, and this entire thing is sitting there on the dashboard: A magazine, an association, conventions, books, videos … I didn’t know about cyberspace yet, but everything else was there. We started out with eight investors and then proceeded in the next three years to lose more money than you want to know. In today’s money we probably lost $750,000.
Referee: Was Referee in danger of going under?
Mano: Absolutely. I wasn’t able to pay myself for more than three and a half years — not a single paycheck. My wife Jean is a teacher and she was working to support us.
Referee: What was the general reaction from governing bodies to Referee when you started?
Mano: By and large, fear. They thought that we were going to tell our side of it and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. And I was certainly in that mode. I get very interested in how officials are being treated. How is it possible that a supervisor can stand up in front of the room and say, “If you don’t like something, then there’s the door.” I hated that. It’s like we’re on a plantation and the master is up there talking to us serfs. That’s one of the reasons I started the magazine.
Referee: Did that approach rub a lot of people the wrong way?
Mano: Sure. But in retrospect I think we had to rub them the wrong way in some measure. We weren’t here to be a house organ. There were big problems in officiating. There are still problems today, but back then we had no voice. Nobody was telling our side of it. Referee came into existence to do that. And we did that with too much abandon.
It raises the hair on the back of your neck if you look at some of the stuff we published in years past, like when we would call some high school rules committees bozos or dummies. We used strong terminology. Officials say that kind of thing all the time privately, but we did it publicly. It wasn’t smart. But it was who we were back then.
Referee: Was there a story at some point that put Referee on the officiating map and made people sit up and take notice?
Mano: The whole thing with the major league umpires strike back in ’79 was pretty big. We did that story and actually had some affection for the umpires who came in and took the place of the big league umpires. And, boy, there was some hell to pay when we did that. And we had other stories in the sports columns that damaged our relationship with the NFHS because they’re the rulesmaking body.
We felt — rightly so as you look back — that certain rules weren’t well constructed and enforcements weren’t well thought out. Well, we put that in print and went after it. But we’ve learned in our wisdom that there’s a way to go about those things. Hitting people over the head with a two-by-four doesn’t do anything but knock them out, and then they wake up and they’re mad.
Referee: How is Referee different today?
Mano: Today we talk to the governing bodies in advance, and they value our opinion. We can still get to the same goal, but we’re essentially walking down the road together. All the organizations in this country and in different parts of the world know that we’re here on behalf of officials. That’s who we care about: what officials need and what they do. Those organizations respect us for that. And today they work with us strategically and they ask our opinions. In the old days, they didn’t, because we were hitting them over the head with that two-by-four.
Referee: What do you see on the horizon for Referee in the next five, 10 or 25 years?
Mano: We’ve created a brand, and so extending that brand into other areas makes sense and that’s what we will do through cyberspace, strategic alliances with various organizations — all those things. We also have to be very mindful that we can damage that brand by letting our guard down with respect to the editorial content of this magazine.
We have to have wisdom about our standing in the community of officials. In some measure we helped to create that community. There was nothing else like Referee. There still isn’t. Today we have the Internet, which can have a community building effect, and we will strongly be in cyberspace as we move forward in 2001 and 2002. When we started, referees were not talking to each other. Not that they didn’t want to. But there was no mechanism.
One of our challenges in the beginning was to convince people that there is commonality in what we do as officials across all sports and all levels. People say, “I work just football so what do I need Referee magazine for?” If you don’t understand that you can learn from a basketball referee — forget the x’s and o’s — then this magazine can’t help you. I’ve learned tremendous amounts from hockey refs and football refs and baseball umpires, and I never worked those sports. That’s the strength of the magazine.
Referee: How do you balance that role of community leader with being a publisher?
Mano: It’s a big challenge. We are not solely journalists. We are part and parcel of this community. And because of our standing people ask us for advice. We’re chugging along putting a story together, and then all of a sudden this person that we’re reporting on wants our opinion. Being officials, we have some empathy. I don’t have any easy answer because there is no easy answer. We know there’s a line we won’t cross journalistically, but being part of the community you can’t just say we’re the L.A. Times covering the Dodgers. It’s not that way.
Referee: What is the biggest misconception about Referee?
Mano: The assumption is that we know everything there is to know about officiating. It’s amazing. People think we know the intricacies of every sport. And that’s OK for them to feel that way. It tells you the power of the magazine and it’s position in the world. But we have to let people understand quickly what it is we know and what we don’t know. We don’t know everything. We’re a great forum. We’re a conduit. We’re a network.
That’s what has developed way beyond the magazine. When you can bring people like (Sports Illustrated columnist) Frank DeFord and (NBA Director of Officials) Ed Rush and other people like that together and talk about stuff, that’s tremendous. That’s a real source of pride that goes well beyond the pages of the magazine.
