In a 40-year officiating stretch, Jon Bible hit some mighty high peaks — seven College World Series assignments as a baseball umpire and three Big 12 championship game assignments as a football referee. He also skimmed some deep valleys — his firing from the NFL in 1996, being called a scab and losing friendships for working the 1984 AL Championship Series as a replacement umpire. It was a wild ride, but Bible had few regrets.
Turning the door knob that autumn evening in 1980, the confused 30-year-old man proceeded tentatively into the guest room of his comfortable split-level house. His emotions churned as violently as the wind during a West Texas thunderstorm as he approached the aging woman in bed.
Focusing his weary eyes on his recently widowed mother, Harriett, tucked under the covers that cool night in Austin, Texas, Jon Bible sat at the foot of her bed. There was so much that had been left unsaid the previous spring when his beloved father, Hollis Ulysses Bible, was wasting away in a vegetative state following a devastating stroke. And this only child could not contain his emotions any longer.
He just had to know.
His eyes welling with tears, Bible started shaking.
“Mom, was he proud of me?” said Bible, struggling mightily with the gravity of the moment to utter those words.
What might have been said would now forever be left unsaid and Bible just had to have a release after experiencing so much the previous nine months in 1980.
On Jan. 22, Jon’s famous uncle, Dana Xenephon Bible, had died after a stroke.
On June 9, one day after Bible had triumphantly returned from Omaha following his second straight College World Series assignment, Hollis Bible ran out of fight following his stroke in April.
And as Jon Bible attempted to reconcile himself to all that had happened that emotionally charged night a quarter century ago, he looked into his mother’s eyes for some sign of assurance. Of validation. Of comfort.
“My dad and my uncle both, they just had people’s respect so much,” Bible said. “From the time I really got serious about officiating, that was something I really wanted. I’ve really worked for that.”
What he saw through his misty eyes was the tear-blurred image of Harriett Bible responding to her son’s emotion by quaking with emotions of her own. Mother and son cried into the night.
“We just sat there bawling and she said he was proud of me and all of that,” Bible said.
How could his parents not be proud of Bible, who has packed about as much into his nearly 56 years on this planet as one can imagine?
This is someone, after all, who earned two undergraduate degrees as well as a Master’s and a law degree from the University of Texas. This is someone who once served as an assistant attorney general for the state of Texas and now works as a professor of undergraduate law at Texas State University-San Marcos.
Bible is someone who willingly pulled out of what appeared to be a fast track to becoming a major league umpire for the sake of his new marriage in the early 1970s. Ten years later, Bible finally had a brief stint in the major leagues, working as a replacement umpire during the 1984 AL Championship Series.
And this is someone who has been assigned to seven College World Series, served as the national coordinator for NCAA baseball umpires from 1990-96, was an NFL side judge from 1994-96 and has found contentment and much success as a football crew chief in the Big 12 Conference.
“He’s been very successful in his vocation and he’s been very successful in two avocations — baseball and football,” said Randy Christal, a fellow Big 12 crew chief and Bible’s best friend.
Add basketball to that as well, which Bible officiated at the high school and small college levels from 1972-86. He’s also been a longtime Referee contributor.
The common denominator for so much of what drives him in officiating and his profession goes back to 1980, when Bible found himself having to digest such a large serving of life.
And to this day, the spirits of those two great men he lost within six months of each other reverberate within his soul, haunting him, inspiring him and challenging him.
D.X. Bible was an obvious source of inspiration, having succeeded under the bright lights of major collegiate sports. The legendary coach at Nebraska, Texas and Texas A&M is credited with being the first in his field to use film as an evaluation tool. And he remains one of the giants of the old Southwest Conference, with a 135-50-12 record in 21 seasons with Texas and Texas A&M.
“Growing up, I really saw how former players and people around him just respected him so much,” Bible said. “They called him ‘Mr. Bible’ and ‘Coach Bible’ and as a kid I just thought that was cool. And I wanted that.
“When I got going in officiating, that was important to me.”
As for Hollis Bible, he was a more subtle, yet a more substantial source of inspiration. In stark contrast to his brother, Hollis lived his life well out of the bright glare of collegiate sports, starting his own engineering firm in Houston while the Great Depression was in full force and pouring his guts into the place for the rest of his life.
“My dad worked his butt off his whole life and never really made that much money until toward the very end of his life,” Bible said. “I want to say four or five years before he died, there was this one big contract with the Navy that paid off and all of a sudden, he and mom had some money.
“He was going to quit, and he and mom were going to travel all around the country. They had this trip to California planned and blah, blah, blah and, boom — he had a stroke. Bye. See ya.”
Before that final goodbye, though, Hollis Bible left a lasting impact on his only child. How simple it was, yet how powerful it remains.
“He would never, ever yell and scream at me,” Bible said. “When he was upset with me, it was more just a Ward Cleaver disappointed thing. You watch Leave It to Beaver and the kids almost just melt whenever Ward acts like he’s a little displeased.
“And I think I am the same way as an official. I don’t yell at people but people know when I’m pissed off or have reached my limit. I learned a lot of that stuff from him.”
So there you have it, two men he greatly admired directly and indirectly reinforcing the premise of respect in his life. And one man who has spent the last 25 years almost seeking their posthumous approval in whatever he does.
Respect, quite simply, is everything to Jon Bible.
“It’s one reason why I’ve never had a lot of ejections in baseball or thrown a lot of unsportsmanlikes in football,” Bible said. “I was never into that power trip that some others with whom I’ve worked seemed to be into.
“I didn’t think that that was the way you gained coaches’ and players’ respect. I thought there were better ways to do it. And I think that’s been one of the things that, if I’ve succeeded, helped me to succeed. I think I have people’s respect and it hasn’t come from exerting a lot of power or throwing people out.”
With two notable exceptions — working the 1984 AL Championship Series as a replacement umpire and getting dismissed by the NFL in 1996 after three seasons as a side judge — respect has seemed to follow Bible. And even though those two situations might be seen as blemishes on an otherwise remarkable career, Bible is at peace with himself.
In fact, as far as Bible is concerned, his decision to work as a replacement umpire never really was a serious issue even though it was costly in terms of friendships.
Bible, a former pitcher who advanced to Double-A ball during a minor-league career that lasted from 1967-69, never had the stuff of a true prospect. He made a rapid ascent through the minor leagues as an umpire before giving it up after the ’73 season. “I was in pro ball for four years and had a chance to go to the AL,” Bible said. “I worked with (the late major league umpire) Durwood Merrill. He was one of my partners. And (current and former MLB umpires) Randy Marsh and Jim McKean were partners of mine.
“I had all those fantastic partners and had a pretty good shot to go to the AL. But I got married in ’73 and said, ‘That’s no way to keep a marriage.’ So I quit that and started college ball in ’74.”
Considering he has been happily married to his wife, Carolyn, for 32 years, he looks back on his decision with no regrets. And that’s the same way he feels about his brief fling as a major league umpire in October 1984.
“I never thought twice about that, to be honest,” Bible said. “I lost some friendships. Randy Marsh had been a partner of mine in 1971 and he has not spoken to me since. Durwood Merrill was a groomsman in my wedding in ’73. For a long time, he didn’t speak to me. In 1990, he saw me at a football game and gave me a big hug and it was all over.
“I lost some friendships. But my whole deal was I wasn’t competing against those guys for a job. I had no desire to get back into pro ball. I had been out for 11 years and wasn’t going back. If I didn’t do the games, somebody else was going to do them.
“I realized I was going to be called a scab and it just, honest to God, didn’t bother me.”
As for his failed stint in the NFL, though, that was quite a different matter. Never before in Bible’s career had he not succeeded. Never had his quest for respect been that shaken.
After having established himself as a field judge in the Southwest Conference, Bible set a goal to one day officiate in the NFL. When asked in a March 1994 interview to single out the job he would most like to have in officiating, Bible responded, “I’d be an NFL official and I think I’m fairly close to becoming one.”
Indeed, Bible was mere months away from being selected at that point. But little did he realize the unpalatable experience that awaited him. Working as a side judge in the NFL for his three-year stint, Bible never really adjusted and, for possibly the first time in his life, he truly struggled at something that was important to him.
For the first time, he could not sense that respect from Hollis and D.X. Bible.
“I wish I had done some things differently,” Bible said. “It was difficult at the time because I had never failed. My whole officiating career had just been blessed.”
How much did the usually self-assured man struggle? Once, while working a game involving the old Houston Oilers, he was so twisted up inside that he could not bring himself to follow through with a routine call.
“I remember a Thursday night game. I saw what I knew was pass interference,” Bible said. “Instinctively, I reached for my flag and didn’t throw it. I sort of instantaneously talked myself out of it. I didn’t trust my instincts.”
Going into his third year in the league — 1996 — Bible was warned that if he wasn’t awarded a playoff game following that season, he would be finished. Driven by the respect he had craved for so long, Bible pushed himself hard, struggling to be worthy of being in the league.
But when he wasn’t assigned a playoff game, Bible’s career in the NFL was over.
“Strangely enough, my third year, I had a good year,” Bible said. “I did a lot better and I was finally starting to catch on, but they had given me this ultimatum of, ‘Get a playoff game or you’re not going to be rehired,’ and I didn’t get one.
“But I knew in the middle of it that there was a lot about the NFL that I just didn’t like and I’m not making that up as a rationalization. I hated the travel. I hated the number of weekends gone. It was just overwhelming.
“Plus, there was the fact that they gave me this ultimatum. I mean, it’s sort of tough to work when you have this ultimatum hanging over your head.”
It was the most trying event of his career and the recovery process was difficult. Only recently has he fully come to terms with what happened.
“I had never failed at anything,” Bible said. “But I just saw Jerry Seeman (the senior director of officials during Bible’s NFL stint) a few weeks ago at a NADFO (National Association of Division I-A Football Officials) meeting. We were in the same hotel. I had a chance to visit with him and it was just real nice.
“I told him I did not have any hard feelings whatsoever for what had happened and he said he was glad to hear that and he had heard a lot of good things about me as a referee. And that was just kind of a nice little postscript.”
Respect. Bible lives it and he teaches it. He did so as the first national coordinator of NCAA baseball umpires from 1990-96. “I just thought six or seven years was enough,” Bible said. “Now Dave Yeast has replaced me and he’s done things that I never could have figured out. He’s younger than I am and he understands computers and videos and all that type of thing and he’s put together all those training tools that I wouldn’t have had a clue how to do.
“We got it off to a good start and I’m proud of that, but he’s taken it a hell of a lot longer way than I could have.”
Still, Bible remains keenly aware of the emotional toll his short-lived NFL career had on him. And largely for that reason, he continues to impart his wisdom on those he feels are a in need of help.
“I’m not going to name names, but there’s one guy in particular in the Big 12 right now who’s one of our best officials at any position,” Bible said. “His first year in the league was my first year back and he had a couple of downgrades and he was really doubting himself.
“We just had a little go-to-prayer meeting. I’m not going to take credit for his success. Let’s just say I think I helped him get out of that self-doubting mold by sharing my experience and now he’s a very successful official.”
Just as Bible has been for the past 40 years.
And, to this day, his father and uncle remain such a presence in his life — even when Bible doesn’t initially realize it.
“My psychologist would probably have a field day with this, but we were in Colorado — this was in 2000 — and for some reason out of the clear blue, I just went into this crying jag,” Bible said. “I mean, I just got hysterical. I was blubbering. I couldn’t calm down.
“Later, I realized it was June 9. It was 20 years to the day that dad died. What do I make of that? I don’t know. It was weird.”
Peter Jackel is a longtime sportswriter from Racine, Wis.
