From Gordon Hill to the doyen of cricket umpiring, via one official sending off another and even a spot of Naked Gun
1) Gordon Hill
It's a touch hard to believe amid the bland pale-faced middle-management orthodoxy of today's referees, Gordon Hill did what no football official has done before or since – he made being the man with the whistle look cool.
Between 1966 and 1975 he was certainly the anti-establishment face of the establishment. He looked like a lost fifth Beatle (free-kicks were awarded from underneath a mop of hair and from behind a thick moustache), undid more buttons on his referee's shirt than was publicly decent and gave as good as he got with the players.
On one occasion Millwall's Eamon Dunphy complained at a robust tackle going unpenalised. "You would have avoided it last year," Hill told him. "You're fucking going, you are. Getting past it." His comfort with expletives got him into trouble often enough – he was once reported to the Football League by a deaf woman who had been watching Match of the Day and lip-read one particular tirade.
He might have been a tad too chummy with the players and perhaps just a touch too lenient. Manchester City's Rodney Marsh, enraged at having not been awarded a penalty, once grabbed Hill by the throat and bounced his head off a goalpost. Hill didn't even book him. Which goes some way to explaining how he managed to get through a nine-year career at the top of the professional game without ever showing a red card.
2) The lackadaisical line judge, Rome, 1963
Some officials are, well, officious, pitilessly rule-enforces with all the human spirit of a malfunctioning ED-209. Take the Tour de France race marshals who in 1913 were on the scene for one of the most infamous incidents in the race's history. Eugène Christophe had victory in his sights midway through the sixth stage and, after a 3am start for the 203-mile leg, had scaled the Aubisque and the Tourmalet. On the descent of the latter he broke a front fork. His rival for the title, Philippe Thys, sped off for victory. But, opting against abandonment, a weeping Christophe carried his bike for more than eight miles to a blacksmith's and, because no outside help was permitted, with hammer and fire made himself a new fork. The job completed, he rode the final 60km to the finish, now nearly four hours behind the leaders, only to be served with a 10-minute penalty for allowing a seven-year-old boy to work the bellows as he had forged his makeshift piece of kit.
Or the American football official who handed the Montreal Alouettes a 15-yard penalty because their team mascot, a man in a giant foam turkey suit, had been "pecking the referee". Or the referee who sent off Dorchester's Ashley Vickers for rugby tackling a streaker in a mankini. Or any one of the deluge of jobsworths who attempted to prevent Derek Redmond and his father finishing the 400m at the Barcelona Olympics.
But not all officials are sticklers. Some turn a blind eye. And some turn around completely and order themselves a raspberry Mivvi. At the Italian Open in 1963 Britain's Tony Pickard had edged ahead in a tight battle with New Zealand's Ian Crookenden. In the fourth set Pickard had match point on the Crookenden serve. "He served and it was at least nine inches long," said Pickard. "The umpire looked to the baseline judge for the call but he was turned around buying an ice cream over the fence."
It proved a pivotal moment. The match point saved, Crookenden went on to win. Pickard was "as sick as a pig" but the line judge, whose name has sadly been lost to history, had struck a blow for shambolic officiating the world over.
3) Wolmer Edqvist
A referee is frequently the villain, but rarely the hero. Indeed, to become a hero to one set of fans automatically necessitates Dick Dastardly status with the other. No, generally his or her best hope is invisibility courtesy of competence.
But not for the Swedish ice hockey referee Wolmer Edqvist. On 13 December 2009 Edqvist took charge of the second division game between local rivals Orebro and Bofors at Orebro's Behrn Arena. Eight minutes in, after an unremarkable check into the boards, Orebro's Niklas Lihagen collapsed on to the ice.
"I realised right away that it was serious," Edqvist told Expressen. "I knew we had about four minutes to bring him back to life."
The 6ft 5in 26-year-old had gone into cardiac arrest. Edqvist, trained in emergency first aid, began CPR and was joined on the ice by the Bofors physio Peter Karlsson. The pair managed to get Lihagen's heart beating once more and an ambulance was on the scene in minutes to take the stricken player to hospital. This time, the referee was the hero.
"It was a nightmare. I felt totally powerless," said the Orebro owner, Mikael Fahlander. "Fortunately Wolmer was the referee."
It was discovered that Lihagen had two congenital heart defects and a series of successful operations followed, ending with the player undergoing a heart valve transplant. He missed the remainder of the season and the following two campaigns but was back on the ice for Orebro in August 2012, 32 months after a referee saved his life on the ice of the Behrn Arena. "It's a match I will never forget," said Edqvist.
4) Power-mad in Plymouth
When it comes to an official allowing power to go to his head, Argentina's Damian Rubino set something of a new standard in 2011 by showing 36 red cards in one match. But even Rubino didn't send off one of his officiating colleagues as a Plymouth rugby union official did in 1967.
It started innocuously enough. Two players came to blows on the touchline. The touch judge leapt in to break the pair up and attempted to restrain one of the players. But this was misinterpreted by a nearby spectator as an attempt by the official to align himself in some sort of tag team with the other combatant. The fan sprang on to the pitch and attacked the touch judge, who, now in the middle of a right old melee, abandoned his peace-keeping role and responded in kind.
The scene presumably now resembled a Beano-esque cloud of dust, with arms, legs and speech bubbles containing only punctuation marks poking out at various angles. Eventually hostilities were ceased and the referee was left to survey the wreckage He did so with all the calm reason of a wasp in a glass. The red card flashed. For both players, obviously, but also (anyone else close to the scene was presumably edging nervously away by this point) for the poor old touch judge.
5) Frank Chester
"He is the law of cricket personified, image of the noble constitution of the best of games," wrote Neville Cardus. Indeed, there is perhaps no official so intertwined with his or her sport than the cricket umpire.
Before Bird, Bucknor and Bowden, before Shepherd, Venkat and Dar, came Frank Chester, the daddy of them all. Chester had been a fine teenage prospect as a batsman at Worcestershire but the first world war, as it would for so many, changed things irrevocably. Chester lost his right arm just below the elbow while serving in Greece. His playing career was over but by 1922 he was a first-class umpire.
At the age of 29 he stood in his first Test match – England v South Africa at Lord's in the summer of 1924 – and 31 years later he took charge of his last, South Africa England's opponents once more, this time at Headingley. Over the course of his 48 Tests he earned the reputation as the best there had ever been. Don Bradman, writing in Farewell to Cricket in 1950, has a chapter on the role of the umpire: "Without hesitation I rank Frank Chester as the greatest umpire under whom I played."
And like all great umpires, his personality oozed into his on-field demeanour. "Chester is a joy watch," wrote Cardus in his essay on umpires in 1934. "He delivers decisions sometimes with immense irony. I have seen him signal a snicked boundary by means of a gesture of regal disdain, as though to say, 'What a stroke! I am compelled by the law to rule it worth four; but I reserve the right to say what I think about it.' I have seen Chester give a batsman out with a finger suddenly pointed to heaven, dramatic in its announcement of ruthless finality. And I have seen him turn his back on a bowler's manifestly absurd appeal for leg-before-wicket – turn his back with the air of a man consigning another to some place outside the pale of all sense and decency."
Chester set a new standard in umpiring, dishing out decisions with neither fear nor favour. Wisden paid its own tribute in an essay entitled Thirty Years as an Umpire in 1954. "Father Time, on his pedestal at Lord's, has the last word. He lifts the bails for the umpires themselves. But cricket goes on, and as long as there are men like Chester to see fair play it will be in safe hands."
6) Enrico Palazzo
Quite why baseball umpire Enrico Palazzo is not a household name is something of a mystery. In 1988 during a game between the California Angels and the Seattle Mariners at the Dodgers Stadium Palazzo produced one of the most extraordinary performances ever seen from a home plate official in Major League Baseball. And then foiled an assassination attempt on the Queen.
The American's seven-innings stint mixed incompetence and exuberance in equal measure: the bat to the face as he stooped too close to the action for the first pitch; the strike calls that grew more theatrical as the game wore on; the moonwalk; the full-sized vacuum cleaner used to clean the home plate; the way he seemed to find more and more ways to manhandle the increasingly bemused players; the brawl sparked as his calls grew more erratic as the seventh-inning stretch approached.
And it was in the midst of that brawl that Palazzo wrote his name in the history books. As the Angels' right-fielder drew a gun and approached the Queen, who happened to be in attendance, the umpire was able to neutralise the potential attacker by tranquillising an obese fan in the upper tier who then tumbled on to the Queen's assailant, rendering him insensible.
Only then did the official remove his face mask and reveal his identity to the world. All together now: "Rico Palazzo! Rico Palazzo! Rico Palazzo!"
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Leslie Nielsen
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