By Dan Ronan
bob Delaney, a retired NBA referee and the Southeastern Conference special advisor for officiating development and performance, is one of the officiating industry’s foremost leaders in mental toughness, trauma and perseverance. All his adult life has been about those three traits.
The 2003 NASO Gold Whistle Award recipient was once again front and center, this time at the 2024 NASO Sports Officiating Summit in late July in Atlanta, speaking to attendees about the importance of leadership, mind health, surviving trauma, tenacity and perseverance. He is an in-demand public speaker, discussing leadership, motivation and mental health issues. He travels the globe to deliver a message of self-healing and support.
“I was good at doing undercover work,” Delaney said, referring to his time as an undercover New Jersey state trooper as part of a yearslong investigation into a crime syndicate that eventually saw the arrest of more than 30 organized crime figures. “I would wear the recording device where you would wear a cup, and I had on/off switches in my pocket, microphones under my armpits. I did over 300 recordings with mob guys that way.”
Delaney revealed that lifestyle took a significant toll on his mental and physical health.
“I was good at doing (undercover work) then, but I’d get two miles down the street after leaving them and have to pull over and throw up my guts,” he said. “Find the first gas station I could find, because I had diarrhea. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, my bed was soaking wet. I didn’t tell anybody that. I was afraid. I was embarrassed, I was ashamed.
“So, you make believe everything is OK. Those are the stories and that’s the hope of this. The reason I called (my book) Surviving the Shadows, we all have shadows in life, but never be afraid of a shadow, because in order for a shadow to exist that means there’s light nearby, so it’s our responsibility to ourselves and each other to get to that light.”
In the aftermath of his harrowing experience, Delaney began officiating high school and college basketball. He later rose to the Continental Basketball Association, the NBA’s minor league at the time, before being hired full-time by the NBA in 1987.
Being on a basketball court, managing the game, enforcing the rules — officiating became Delaney’s therapy as he dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“I became a student of what this thing called post-traumatic stress was, but at the same time, the only thing that was making sense to me is that I had to get back on a basketball court,” Delaney said, emphasizing how important basketball was to him as he moved out of police work and into a new career. “I didn’t know what I know about post-traumatic stress today, but I knew that a basketball court was inner peace for me. Inner peace, I think, comes to all of us who officiate. You get between those lines and all of a sudden there’s an inner peace because whatever else is going on in your life, you’re focused on the task at hand.”
Leadership can become a part of a person’s life at a young age, according to Delaney, and it develops in stages, using successes and failures to develop the skills necessary to grow. There is always a new challenge and finding new ways to attack a problem and find solutions is what inspires Delaney.
“Today, if you ask somebody about resiliency, they will say it’s either bouncing forward or bouncing back,” Delaney said. “The only thing about bouncing back, if you’re not in a good place to begin with and you bounce back, you’re only going to another bad place.
“I break it down into three sections. One is a confrontation to the reality has to take place. We have to confront the reality. But I don’t like the word confront. I think it’s abrasive, I think it’s almost like a negative word, we’ve got to confront something. So, I use ‘care-frontation.’ We’re going to confront because we care, so if you combine the words, it’s a care-frontation. Try it with your referees. When they miss a call, say we’re going to have a care-frontation about this call that you just missed. It changes the whole demeanor of the conversation.
“The second part is a search for meaning. You have to understand what we’re doing. But I would also add in that while we all have our own religious beliefs, there’s a spirituality to resilience.
“The third part is FIA. Flexible, innovative and adaptive. We need to be flexible, innovative and adaptive in how we approach moving forward with resiliency.”
Delaney explained how he came to realize he was suffering from PTSD and how he worked to recognize triggers.
“I was a student at the Harvard Global Mental Health Recovery program,” he said. “Dr. Richard Mollica is the director. He has a very simple statement. He said that trauma is inescapable in life. We all have it. You can go around this room, and some of you, I hope that I’m not triggering with this conversation of bringing back thoughts. But understanding why those thoughts can trigger us is important. Knowing dates on a calendar, sights, smells, sounds can bring us back because what happens is when the mind gets in a relaxed state that traumatic event is playing again like a movie in our head. That’s the reason that we have nightmares.”
Delaney believes there is a way to use the trauma one has experienced and build on it to heal and develop more resilience.
“Nature gives healing if we allow it,” Delaney said. “Nature allows us to heal. I’m not going to go tree hugger on you, but I would offer to you is if you watch animals, and walk through the woods, and hear the sounds, and allow that kind of inner peace to come, that’s something that sports officiating does for you, but you also need to have that kind of relaxation for the inner peace, and it has to happen on a consistent basis.
“I also refer to it as mind health. The reason I use the phrase mind health — I believe that when we say mental health that it conjures up the mental illness, and that subconsciously people start thinking of mental illness and then we’re afraid to have these conversations. So, we have to create environments that allow for these conversations to take place.”
Delaney’s quest for healing has led him to help others and write about his experience. His book on the topic, Surviving the Shadows: A Journey of Hope Into Post-Traumatic Stress, was published in 2011.
“It’s the stories of military members, law enforcement, civilians, who have gone through traumatic events, and what it does to them,” Delaney said. “I would underline to you that the intellectual readiness part of understanding post-traumatic stress, while we think of it always as emotional and psychological, there is a physiological aspect to it.”
Delaney spoke of going through a difficult medical situation years ago. His doctor took many blood samples; upon receiving the results, the doctor, who was unfamiliar with Delaney’s story, asked him if there were extended periods of his life where he was under high stress.
“He said, like exposure to the sun can show up as cancer 30 years later, exposure to prolonged periods of stress can show up in medical issues down the road,” Delaney said.
Delaney closed his session with a story about how he met World War II veteran Richard Overton during a Veterans Day Ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in 2013.
He related the experience to improving mind health and moving forward.
“Had I lived during the time that Mr. Overton served, he and I would’ve drank from different water fountains,” Delaney said. “He and I would’ve used different restrooms. Yet he fought for me. He fought for me and my family, he fought for you and your family. … I expressed that gratitude immensely, and I went on and on, and probably too much because at one point he grabbed my hand a little tighter, he pulled me closer, and as he winked his eye he said, ‘I can still do more.’
“That photo is in my office. It reminds me every day that I can do more. I can do more to be a better husband, a better father, a better grandfather, at all the titles that I have. But I also can do more to take care of me. Self-care does not mean selfishness. Self-care is about taking care of you so that you can be the best you can be to make this world a better place.”
Dan Ronan is a Washington-based journalist and a retired Division I baseball umpire and small-college basketball referee.
