'You'll Have a Job for Life'

By Rick Woelfel

Hank Nichols enjoyed a productive career as one of the NCAA's top basketball officials before taking on the challenge of standardizing rule interpretations and officiating practices across the country.

He may have been the greatest basketball official of all time, with a resumé featuring 10 Final Four appearances and six national championship games.

But Hank Nichols’ impact on basketball extends far beyond the boundaries of the court even today, nearly two decades after he put away his whistle for the last time.

As much as any other man, Nichols brought college basketball officiating into the modern era. At a time when there were virtually no national officiating standards, he helped lead the way in shaping the policies and guidelines that determine how the game is called today.

Officially, he spent 22 years as the NCAA’s national coordinator of men’s basketball officiating, six of them while also serving as the secretary-rules editor.

Perhaps he should have been named a full professor instead. For throughout a career in education and officiating that spanned the better part of five decades, Henry O. Nichols was first and foremost a teacher, who viewed the world of college basketball as one immense classroom.

And he was and is comfortable at the lectern, be it in front of an audience of 100-plus officials at a national clinic or a single visitor sitting across the table at a restaurant near his Villanova, Pa., home, asking him to reflect on how far officiating has come under his stewardship.

Early Start in Sports

Nichols grew up in Niagara Falls, N.Y., outside of Buffalo and lettered in three sports at Bishop Duffy High. His prowess as a catcher earned him a scholarship to Villanova University, where he also started on the freshman basketball team.

At Villanova, Nichols got his first taste of blowing a whistle, calling CYO doubleheaders for $5 a night to help pay his way home at the end of the year.

But baseball was his first love. After college, he fit three years of minor league baseball in the Cincinnati Reds organization around a two-year stint in the Marine Corps. His baseball career ended at age 27 after he hit .330 as a player-manager in the Western Carolina League; the Reds responded by telling him they only wanted Hank Nichols the manager the following season, not Hank Nichols the player.

With that, Nichols headed home to Niagara Falls to take a job teaching English at La Salle Junior High School. He also played independent league basketball and baseball, often alongside his older brother Bob, while coaching at the high school level in both sports.

Around the same time he started to pursue officiating more seriously.

“My brother said, ‘Let’s go take the referees’ test. These guys are so bad; we can do better than that,’” Nichols recalls. “I figured it would give me something to do on nights I wasn’t playing.”

Before long he found himself driving through upstate New York, working freshman and junior varsity games. Sometimes he would work Saturday games at the local prison.

Wherever Nichols went, he was seeing good basketball on a regular basis. “I’ve always maintained that people don’t realize the whole deal about western New York from an athletic standpoint,” Nichols says. “People don’t realize that around Buffalo, Niagara Falls and western New York, the basketball people in that area, the players and coaches were always as good as or better than any in the country. They didn’t have the Julius Ervings coming out every night, but they had really good players and really good coaches.

“They had a very sound philosophy about basketball. And we all grew up with that; that this is how the game is supposed to be played and this is what good referees do.”

Areas that produce outstanding basketball players tend to spawn outstanding officials as well and so it was in western New York. Men like Nichols, the late Pete Pavia, Gene Monje and Jim Burr would all go on to outstanding careers.

But when Nichols was starting out in the 1960s, the officiating talent in the region was a well-kept secret, in no small measure because the severe winter weather in the area made it a difficult place to get to or get back from. When Nichols was an up-and-coming official, it was rare for officials from elsewhere to be assigned there. “There were some great refs nobody ever heard about,” Nichols said.

In those days, the International Association of Approved Basketball Officials (IAABO) recruited, trained and assigned virtually all the officials below the college level in New York state and, indeed, in much of the East.

In Niagara Falls, the leading figure in the local officiating community was Harry Blakeslee who, when he wasn’t working local college games, assigned officials for many of the high schools in the region and was a mentor to newcomers.

“He gave me good advice about how to always stand tall,” Nichols says, “and never worry about coming back. If you’re good enough, they’ll want you back.

“I watched him work a lot. He was very demonstrative but not flamboyant. I kind of used him as a model starting out. Like anybody else, in any walk of life, including refereeing, you develop your own style as you go.”

On to the College Game

After working high school games for several seasons, Nichols joined the College Basketball Officials Association, the officiating arm of the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference (ECAC). He worked two years of freshman games in the ECAC, then was promoted to the varsity roster before enrolling at Duke University to work on his doctorate. The detour to Durham, N.C., gave Nichols’ officiating career a jump-start.

When he arrived at Duke in the fall of 1969, he looked up Hubie Brown, who was a Blue Devils’ assistant under Bucky Waters at the time. Brown had played at Niagara when Nichols was in high school and knew his brother.

Upon hearing that Nichols wanted to do some officiating while pursuing his doctorate, Brown invited him to work a Duke scrimmage, where Nichols got the shock of his life. When he walked onto the court at Cameron Indoor Stadium, he learned Duke’s opponent was the Jacksonville team that would go on to face UCLA in the national championship game that year. The Dolphins featured seven-foot-two Artis Gilmore and seven-foot Pembroke Burrows in their lineup.

Nichols wondered if he was in over his head. “I said, ‘Oh my God,’ I didn’t know if I could do it,” he says.

He must have done well enough. After the scrimmage, Footsie Knight, the supervisor of officials in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) at the time, came into the locker room and assigned him six freshman games on the spot.

Nichols’ most memorable moment that season came at North Carolina State when he whistled a “T” on a fan who had been blasting him from behind the Wolfpack bench.

When Knight asked him after the game if he knew who the fan was, Nichols replied he didn’t. “That was Norman Sloan (N.C. State’s varsity coach).” Knight replied. “I’m promoting you to the varsity.”

In the fall of 1970, Nichols returned to Villanova to join the faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Education and Human Services. He would remain there for 33 years before retiring.

That same year he began handling varsity assignments in both the ECAC and the ACC, rising through the ranks.

In 1974, Nichols worked his first NCAA tournament. He would go on to work 13 in a row. The next year he went to the Final Four for the first time and worked the national championship game, John Wooden’s final game as the head coach at UCLA. The year after that, he officiated at the Olympic Games in Montreal.

In relatively short order, Nichols became one of the best of the best. He maintains that his exposure to the basketball culture in western New York, even before he started officiating, helped him on the court later.

Inside Officiating

Nichols says he never found calling plays particularly difficult. “Officiating a basketball game to me was never brain surgery,” he says. “I didn’t find it hard. That might sound egotistical, but I never found it difficult to referee a basketball game. The refereeing part was easy.

“Don’t get me wrong, I missed my share of plays. But I never went into a game saying, ‘Oh, this is hard.’ I went into the game thinking we’re going to do what we have to do to make it fair for both teams and give them a chance to win. To me that was the easy part. The rest of it, that nobody would believe you some nights and the way the crowds and coaches acted, that was the hard part.”

As gifted as Nichols was at play-calling and sorting out the fouls from the no-calls, his peers say it was his ability to work with and manage the people involved in the game that set him apart, whether it was the players, coaches or fellow officials.

Jim Burr was just breaking into NCAA Division I basketball when he found himself working Big East games with Nichols.

“When I had the chance to work with him, he treated me like just another official,” Burr says, “like an equal. I was in awe of Hank Nichols.

“He had excellent judgment. He had a great feel for how to run the game. He had a presence on the court that no one could question; it was a gift.”

Nichols also had a gift for reading the moods of the players and setting a tone that enabled them to perform at their best. “Everything you do as a referee in a game has to be within the context of what’s going on that night,” he says. “If everything is going really good and you can get them to play without killing each other, that’s what they’re there for, to play. Now some nights you can’t let them play, then you have to have all these whistles and you have to interrupt them all the time. They’re better players than you are a referee, so let ‘em play.”

Nichols tried his best to talk the players through situations instead of immediately hitting the whistle. “I’d say, ‘Watch your hands, get your hands off him,’” he says, “and if the next time down the court he did the same thing, I’d just blow the whistle and say, ‘I just told you to keep your hands off him,’ or in the post, ‘Leave him alone, don’t be knocking him around like that.’ You’d try to get them to play with you. Sometimes they would and sometimes they wouldn’t.”

Nichols also was willing to trust players in the heat of battle. “I remember one night I had Rick Robey (then from Kentucky) and Leon Douglas (from Alabama),” he says. “These two big guys came down the court the first three times at both ends and one guy would set up and the other guy would back right into him; you could hear the grunting. They were just kind of jostling, not with hands so much, but with their bodies thumping.

“I got a little nervous. I was thinking, ‘They’re going to end up in a fight,’ or whatever. After a while I said, ‘Hey guys, let’s knock off all that pushing and shoving,’ and Douglas says to me, ‘Hank, don’t worry. We’ve got common sense, we’re not going to give you any trouble. Just let us play.’

“Obviously there were some fouls here and there but it was beautiful; they knew each other’s limits. They had respect for each other and they just played a beautiful game.”

Nichols tried to deal with coaches the same way, making allowances for the emotional stake they had in the game.

“You’re talking about personalities, you’re talking about context in the game,” he says, “you’re talking about how good or bad the behavior is and whether the game itself needs you to take care of that bench right now, or whether you want to warn them verbally. The feel of that night and that gym was the key to it.

“Obviously, if the guy gets up and throws a clipboard, that’s a no-brainer, but the verbal stuff, as long as in the context of the game you could handle it verbally, with warnings or something that would work.”

Art Hyland was a regional supervisor for the ECAC when Nichols began working there. He has been assigning Big East games since the league was formed prior to the 1979-80 season. In Hyland’s view, Nichols set the industry standard for dealing with coaches.

“His philosophy was always that you shouldn’t spend a lot of time talking to the coaches. But in all honesty there has never been an official who has been any better at talking to coaches than Hank,” Hyland says. “He could disarm a coach or put a fire out with a minimum amount of work and go on with the game. He was terrific at it.”

Nichols learned early on how to deal with crowds. Working in packed buildings in the ACC, the Palestra in Philadelphia during heated Philadelphia Big Five games and later in various venues in the Big East, he soon became comfortable working in a cauldron of conflicting emotions — and adept at blocking them out.

“After about two or three games in the ACC with the sellout crowds and the craziness,” Nichols says, “it dawned on me that these people are screaming at plays that are no-brainers, but they’re against their team.”

Family Time

If there was one aspect of Division I officiating that Nichols found particularly trying, it was the travel and time spent away from home.

He and his wife Letitia (Letty) were raising four children and Letty Nichols was pursuing her own career as a high school English teacher. The couple met when Hank was teaching junior high English and Letty was teaching in the district high school.

“We met in a bar,” Nichols says, smiling at the memory. “She told me, ‘I had some of the same students you had,’ and that’s how we started talking. I always claimed that was a ruse for her to talk to me.”

Nichols cherished the opportunity he had to touch the lives of his students over the course of his teaching career.

He recalls a chance encounter with a former student when he returned to Niagara Falls to give a speech at a scholar-athlete dinner.

“Afterward we were having cocktails and a woman came up to me with a big pile of magazines. She said, ‘You might not remember me, but you taught me in eighth-grade English. You told me I had the potential to be a good writer and to keep at it and I just wanted to show you some of the results of that.’

“Then she gave me all these magazines. You can’t buy that. That’s the stuff that makes the world go round.”

It was not uncommon for Hank to drive as much as five hours late at night after games to get back to his job at Villanova the following morning. As a department chair, he controlled his own schedule, spending much of his time supervising the student teaching program.

Often his son, Jeff, now a Division I official, would ride with him to games.

“Obviously it was an opportunity for us to spend some time together in the car,” Jeff Nichols says, “but part of the reason was there would be somebody in the car to help him stay awake on the ride home.”

But on those late-night rides along the Eastern Seaboard it was often the younger Nichols who had trouble keeping his eyes open. “I don’t think that worked out as often as he would have liked,” Jeff says.

By the mid-1980s Nichols was one of the most-recognized and busiest officials in the sport. In addition to working 60-70 college games a season, he was also working international games for FIBA, including a second Olympic tournament in Los Angeles, as well as the European Championships.

A New Position

Nichols was only in his late 40s at the time and theoretically could look forward to another decade or more on the court. But his involvement in and influence on officiating was about to exponentially expand.

At the time college basketball was evolving from a regional passion into a national phenomenon. The NCAA national tournament had expanded to 64 teams and games were being televised across the country on cable television virtually every night of the week all season long.

The NCAA was concerned that in parts of the country, the level of officiating hadn’t kept up with the growth of the game.

So, the position of national coordinator of officiating was created to help standardize rule interpretations and officiating practices.

Nichols was one of five candidates who had been invited to interview for the post. “A couple NCAA people called and asked if I’d be interested,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Maybe, it depends on what it’s all about.’”

What it was all about was something that had never been tried in collegiate officiating in any sport — an effort to standardize officiating policies on a nationwide basis and get every conference in the country on the same page.

In March 1986, Nichols worked the national championship game between Louisville and Duke in Dallas, then remained in Texas afterward to interview with the NCAA for the national coordinator’s post. With his background in education and officiating, it seemed like a good fit.

The downside: Becoming the national coordinator would mean the 48-year-old Nichols would no longer be eligible to work the NCAA tournament and would have to leave the court sooner rather than later. But he felt the opportunity to help correct what he saw as the flaws in the system was too good to turn down.

My father told me, ‘They’re paying you for that? Take it, son. You’ll have a job for life,” Nichols says. “He said, ‘You’ll never get that mess straightened out.’”

In the mid-1980s the world of college basketball officiating was divided into individual fiefdoms. Every conference and every supervisor of officials, as they were called in those days, had a different way of doing things.

When teams traveled outside their home regions to play intersectional games they sometimes felt as if they were entering another country, one where the language of officiating was foreign to them.

Simply stated, coaches who took their teams on the road often felt they weren’t getting a fair shake.

Nichols says in many cases those concerns were justified. “There was a big disparity in officiating, there was no question about it,” he says. “In fact, it was hard for a team to go very far on the road and win because of the way games were assigned, with local refs a lot of times.

“(Coaches) didn’t think they were going to get a fair shake because historically they didn’t in many cases. When I say fair shake, I’m not saying the referees were cheating in any way, it just was a style that was suited to the team they were playing on the road, because that’s the way those guys reffed.”

Officials who worked multiple conferences often had to make night-to-night adjustments, Nichols included.

“I’d do a game in the ACC where they were a little tighter on stuff,” he says, “then I’d have a Big Five game on Thursday where the coaches were passing each other and guys were knocking people down. You had to make a hell of an adjustment.”

Then there was the issue of split crews. For many years, particularly in the era when two officials handled most games, it was customary for teams traveling to play an intersectional game to insist on bringing an official from their conference with them.

Apart from the possibility of the two officials interpreting the rules and reading the game differently, there was the insinuation that the visiting team needed someone to protect its interests.

“I was not a good split-crew guy,” Nichols says. “Because I refereed the same way I did as if it were a conference game. When I first started, when you went with a team as the assigned official on a split crew, they expected you to counteract whatever happened with the other guy.”

Change is Good

Despite taking the national coordinator’s job in 1986 and no longer being eligible to officiate the NCAA tournament, Nichols needed to learn more about the officiating tendencies in each conference. To get the information he needed, Nichols took to the court himself. Over the next four years he worked games in every Division I league in America.

“I got a feel for the refereeing, got a feel for the style of play in the leagues,” he says. “I got a feel for what the problems were with the refs or the officiating coordinators or with the conference commissioners.”

When he wasn’t working games, Nichols was observing them, either in person or on television. He also created standards applicable to anyone working major college basketball.

“We needed one voice,” Nichols says, “one philosophy, one set of mechanics on everything. We had to find a happy medium between the Tower Philosophy of advantage/disadvantage and some stricter guidelines. You couldn’t leave everything up to the eye of the beholder; you had to give them a certain direction and we did that with guidelines in certain situations.”

Nichols traveled around the country, conducting a series of preseason clinics, observing officials on the floor and preaching the message of uniformity. The concept of establishing national standards was considered a radical notion in some segments of the officiating community.

Some supervisors were suspicious of the NCAA telling them how their officials should work. Some officials were caught between their supervisor, who wanted them to handle games a certain way, and Nichols, who wanted them to do things differently.

“I’d go right into the locker room with the refs and give them a critique,” Nichols says. “Good, bad, ugly or whatever. Now I had clout, even if their coordinator might be reluctant to go along with some of the stuff.

“The officials had to make a choice in their philosophy between the conference coordinator and the national coordinator. That was a bad situation for them, but I eventually got the coordinators to say, ‘All right, we have to do that so our guys can progress.’ Eventually they bought into that.”

Scott Thornley, who has worked three national championship games in his three decades as a Division I official, says Nichols brought the program instant credibility in the officiating community.

“The thing that made it work is the NCAA hired somebody that everybody trusted,” he says. “They reached out, to their credit, and identified who they thought had enough weight and enough experience and national reputation. When (Nichols) said something, the officials would buy into it.”

Thornley says it was very important for Nichols to get the veteran officials in each conference to accept the new guidelines. “If the veteran officials didn’t buy into what he was saying,” Thornley says, “then certainly the officials who were working 10-15 games a year weren’t going to buy into it either. (But) if they went out on the floor with somebody who was a veteran official and said, ‘OK, here’s what we’re going to do tonight, we’re going to call the post, we’re going to keep it clean and we’re not going to let them beat each other to death; we’re going to call the handchecks and we’re going to follow the points of emphasis,’ then it’s going to work.”

It also helped that beyond the officials and their supervisors, Nichols had built a level of credibility with the coaches he had worked with, which made it easier to sell the program within their ranks.

“Most of the coaches, not all of them but most of them, had a degree of respect for me on the floor,” Nichols says, “so they knew it wasn’t just some guy out of the closet. That was a key.”

Ed Bilik, the NCAA’s current secretary-rules editor for men’s basketball, assisted Nichols for two years before assuming the post in 1996.

“He used the sandwich principle,” Bilik says. “Anything he said that was negative was sandwiched on both sides with something positive.”

Slowly but steadily, the concepts Nichols and the rules committee championed began to take hold. Games that were played in different parts of the country gradually came to resemble one another in terms of the officiating.

As officials began to travel more frequently and work in multiple conferences the process accelerated. Over time, regional tendencies began to disappear.

It was not an overnight process. “It took 10-12 years,” Nichols says, “before you finally saw on TV that (the officials) were all officiating the same way. One of my joys about the job was that (regionalism) no longer exists. When referees referee badly, it’s a matter of the talent of the refs rather than regionalization.”

“You now see the game called the same way in California as it is in New York and Florida,” says Burr. “(Nichols) has a great mind for the game. The game is definitely going to miss him because of his insight on how he feels the game should be officiated.”

In his coordinator’s role, Nichols made the final decisions about who would work where in the NCAA tournament. He instituted changes so that the officials who were assigned to the first round and advanced from there were truly deserving of the honor.

“Before I took this job, the supervisors definitely took care of each other,” he says. “’I’ll take care of Joe South, you take care of Joe North.’ That happened all the time and I was probably the beneficiary of that at some time in my career. That’s just the way they did it.

“That was one of the things we attempted very successfully to get changed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying some guys’ judgment couldn’t be colored because even if he had a bad game they believe in this guy so they recommend that he moves on. That’s human nature; I’m not faulting anybody for that.”

Nichols stepped down from his national coordinator’s post after the 2007-08 season, replaced by John Adams. But Nichols hasn’t stepped away from the world of officiating completely. Since 2004, he’s been observing umpires for Major League Baseball, after seeing an ad in USA Today and calling Ralph Nelson, who was in charge of major-league umpires at the time.

Before the end of that initial phone call, Nichols had been hired. He attends most of the Phillies’ home games and makes occasional trips to Baltimore.

“I evaluate them on things like hustle, demeanor and mechanics,” he says. “Everything except balls and strikes. I’m not allowed to talk to the umpires. If somebody screws up, nobody knows I’m in the park.”

No Regrets

Nichols still lives in the home where he and Letty raised their family. He lost his wife to cancer 11 years ago after 32 years of marriage. “It’s never a good thought when you reflect on it,” he says, “(but) we had four great kids, we did a lot of good stuff together, we loved each other.”

His children — Jeff and daughters Rachel, Sarah and Emily — all live nearby. He sees his four grandchildren regularly and the house is still the gathering place for major family events.

Nichols says he has no pangs about having no official connection to college basketball for the first time in nearly half a century. “Basketball was important but it was not my life,” he says. “My life was my kids and my job and all the rest of it put together. Basketball officiating was something I did. It didn’t define me; it never did.

“Being the national coordinator didn’t define me as a person, in my mind anyway.

“That’s the kind of the attitude I had, and when the coordinator’s job came up, I walked away from officiating without one pang at all. I’m out of the coordinator’s job the same way; I don’t have one pang of regret and when I retired from Villanova it was the same way.”

When he looks back on his 22 years as the national coordinator, Nichols points to how basketball officiating has evolved over that period. “I know where we were when we started this thing,” he says, “and I know where we are now.  I know I did the job they hired me to do, to get consistent application of the rules and philosophy around the country. We’ve done that. That’s what I’m most happy about.”

Rick Woelfel is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. He works various levels of amateur baseball and has also worked basketball, football and softball.

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