The dean of NFL referees has died.
Jim Tunney, who labored a number of the most memorable video games in NFL historical past over the course of his 31-year profession, died Thursday at his dwelling in Pebble Seaside. He was 95.
Tunney acquired his begin as a subject choose in 1960 and over the many years he labored video games so singular that they garnered their very own nicknames: The Ice Bowl was the 1967 NFL Championship between Dallas and Inexperienced Bay, so referred to as as a result of the temperature was about −15 °F with a mean wind chill round −48 °F; The Catch, the 1981 NFC Championship sport by which San Francisco beat Dallas by one level acquired its identify after Dwight Clark made a leaping catch in the back of the tip zone on a move from Joe Montana; after which there was The Fog Bowl, a playoff matchup between Philadelphia and Chicago in 1988 the place the fog was so thick that gamers couldn’t see the sidelines or first-down markers.
He additionally acquired a report 29 post-season assignments, together with ten Championship video games in addition to Tremendous Bowls VI, XI and XII.
Tunney’s profession got here of age with the rise of the NFL on TV, and it was a well-made match.
“Jim Tunney is in our house actually the primary referee who needed to embrace tv,” stated Gene Steratore, a former referee who labored February’s Tremendous Bowl for CBS because the community’s guidelines analyst. “He projected himself into our dwelling rooms to make some sense of what these guys within the striped shirts had been doing. And he did it in the way in which that was digestible.”
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Tunney was a well-recognized face to non-football followers, too. He labored because the referee for 14 episodes of ABC’s traditional Battle of the Community Stars. College students at Fairfax Excessive knew him as Principal Tunney. Over his seven-year tenure at Fairfax, Tunney additionally labored his weekend job with the NFL.
“Faculty was out on Friday afternoon, and the following morning I’d get on a aircraft at LAX and fly to Detroit or Inexperienced Bay or Miami or someplace else on my own,” he recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Instances earlier this yr.
Of the present state of NFL officiating, Tunney informed the Instances that there aren’t sufficient seasoned trainers for the present crop of younger officers.
“There are 17 crews, and we’d like 17 good referees,” he stated. “We don’t have that.”
