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 residence in Pebble Beach. He was 95.
Tunney bought his begin as a area decide in 1960 and over the a long time he labored video games so singular that they garnered their very own nicknames: The Ice Bowl was the 1967 NFL Championship between Dallas and Green 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 bought its title after Dwight Clark made a leaping catch in the back of the tip zone on a cross 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 file 29 post-season assignments, together with ten Championship video games in addition to Super 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 space really the first referee who had to embrace television,” stated Gene Steratore, a former referee who labored February’s Super Bowl for CBS because the community’s guidelines analyst. “He projected himself into our living rooms to make some sense of what those guys in the striped shirts were doing. And he did it in the way 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 Network Stars. Students at Fairfax High knew him as Principal Tunney. Over his seven-year tenure at Fairfax, Tunney additionally labored his weekend job with the NFL.
“School was out on Friday afternoon, and the next morning I’d get on a plane at LAX and fly to Detroit or Green Bay or Miami or someplace else by myself,” he recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times earlier this 12 months.
Of the present state of NFL officiating, Tunney advised the Times that there aren’t sufficient seasoned trainers for the present crop of younger officers.
“There are 17 crews, and we need 17 good referees,” he stated. “We don’t have that.”