ONE FOR THE BOOKS : Some Comments in a Soccer Referee’s Autobiography Cost Him His Job in MISL

It began with a few simple sentences, just 271 words that seemed innocent enough at the time.

They turned out to be ruinous.

Before it was over, a 30-year officiating career had been destroyed and the question of freedom of speech for those who officiate sports events had been brought into question.

The cast of characters is small, just five persons. But the ramifications of their recent action could be felt for a long time.

First, there is Toros Kibritjian, a 52-year-old Armenian-American from Monterey Park who has been officiating soccer games throughout the world since 1956. He is widely regarded as one of the finest referees the United States has produced.

Next, there are Lee Stern and Willy Roy, owner and coach, respectively, of the Chicago Sting of the Major Indoor Soccer League.

Stern, a Chicago commodities broker and part-owner of baseball’s Chicago White Sox, has been one of American soccer’s leading backers since he founded the Sting in 1975. The German-born Roy is a former U.S. national team captain who coached the Sting to North American Soccer League championships in 1981 and 1984.

Finally, there are Bill Kentling and Jim Budish. Kentling is the newly elected commissioner of the MISL. Budish is the league’s director of operations.

Now for the 271 words, those few seemingly innocuous sentences penned by Kibritjian in his recently self-published autobiography, “Quest for the Cup.”

Referring to a 1985 MISL playoff game in Cleveland between the Cleveland Force and the Sting, Kibritjian wrote, in part:

During the game, every time I passed in front of the Chicago bench, Willy Roy would say, “Toros, you’re a gangster. Toros, you’re a disgrace. Toros, you’re a star, Hollywood star.” Then, like a thunderstorm, he would shower me with nouns such as “cheater, homer, animal,” including “son of a bitch” (with a smile) and many more. Finally, he could not stand my silence any longer. He asked for an official timeout in the fourth period. As I was signaling for a timeout, he rushed behind me and shouted, “I swear to you that you will never referee my team again.” I smiled and started moving away from him. He was not done with me yet. He continued, “I swear to you and promise you that you will never, ever referee in this league again. You are through, you are finished.” I slowly turned around and said, “Willy, thank you for your classy descriptions of my character, but let me tell you something. Tomorrow is Easter Sunday and I will be going to church. I will pray for you. Let me warn you though, that anyone who tries to take the bread off my family’s table will be punished by God.” Immediately after the game the owner of the Chicago Sting made an announcement to the media along the following lines: Next year, either Toros is out of the Major Indoor Soccer League or the Chicago Sting may have to get out. Well, the next year has come and both Toros and the Chicago Sting are in the MISL. Not any longer.

Kibritjian’s book was published in October. Less than a month after its appearance, Budish fired him from his $30,000-a-year job as an MISL referee.

“He was terminated or dismissed because he jeopardized his impartiality and his objectivity as a referee by including certain comments in his book which did just that,” Budish said.

“One of the things that a referee has to have above everything else is not just being impartial but the appearance of being neutral out there, of starting every game fresh.

“I can’t have a referee refereeing Chicago games when he has preconceived ideas about the ownership, the coaches or the players on that team. Taking that a step further, how can you have a guy officiate games which have a bearing on Chicago’s games?”

Surprisingly, perhaps, Kibritjian supports that view. He even makes the point in his book when he writes:

Certainly, very few coaches became my friends. As long as I continue to referee, it is very difficult for it to be otherwise. A referee cannot be a friend with a professional coach and then walk on the field and honestly try to referee the same coach’s team. I have always felt that if a referee had any kind of prejudice, good or bad towards a team, he should not referee that game. He just can’t do an honest job. It is not a question of cheating. Instead, he will go out of his way to show everyone that he is not being influenced, and consequently he may hurt his friend’s team. Feeling this way, why did Kibritjian include the passage about the Cleveland-Chicago game? He had, after all, deleted other MISL game incidents precisely because he was an active referee.

He said he chose to retain the section in question to help other referees, to try to get the league to stop the verbal and physical abuse of officials by players, coaches and owners. He also said he realized the risk he was running but decided it would be worth it if something was done to improve the situation.

“I thought, ‘This is a story I should keep in there,’ ” he said. “I took a chance and I left it in there. Some people told me that maybe I should take it out, that maybe I should take the names out, but everybody knows who it is anyway.

“The league is mature enough to understand we should stop the dissent going on on the field. . . . If a coach on the sideline shows little or no respect to the referee in the middle, his players will not show any respect either. . . . That’s what I was trying to bring out, so I left it in the book.”

In fact, the whole intent of his book, Kibritjian said, was to help and encourage game officials and to make the job of officiating better understood.

“There is nothing written about the referees, what they feel and what they go through,” he said. “I was hoping to put something in there about the human aspects of (officiating). . . . The people, the spectators, the players, the coaches, if they see our side of the story, what we go through, the insults . . . then they understand that, hey, we’re human beings, too.”

Instead, the result was a telephone call from Budish.

“He asked me, ‘Well, will you apologize (for the controversial section in the book)?’ ” Kibritjian said. “And I said, ‘Why should I apologize?’ He said, ‘Will you take it out?’ I said, ‘Never. It’s already printed. I can’t take it out and I won’t take it out.’ It started from there.”

Budish denies either asking for deletion of the passage or for an apology.

“I didn’t see the book until after it was published,” Budish said. “How could I ask him to take it out after it had been published? I may have said to Toros, ‘How could you put this in?’

“Did I ask him to apologize for it? No, I don’t think I ever asked him to apologize for it.”

According to Kibritjian, Roy, the Sting coach whose comments had been quoted, also had an immediate reaction--the day Kibritjian was fired.

“Willy Roy called me up and told me, ‘Toros, I hate to see something like this happen. I’m sorry it happened. These are things that do happen in a game. We shout, we cuss, we get angry, we get punished. But when we’re off the field, we’re friends. I don’t like to see something like this happen to you.’ He felt very bad about it.”

Asked whether he had called Kibritjian and about his thoughts on the book and the firing in general, Roy said by phone from Chicago:

“I just wish him good luck (with) whatever he does in the future. I don’t hold no malice. In sports I think things are said and done but I don’t think 99% of them are meant, whether it’s the officials or the owners or the coaches or the players.

“This has nothing to do with Toros the referee. This has something to do with Toros the person. I don’t like to see anybody lose their jobs. I don’t care who it is or what it is. But everybody makes his own thing. He obviously knew what he was doing and what can I say?”

Stern, reached while vacationing in Florida, said he had nothing to do with Kibritjian’s dismissal.

“I haven’t read the book and was not aware of what was going on until I was informed of what had happened (by Kentling),” he said. “I would not have known. It (“Quest for the Cup”) is not exactly on the best-seller list of the (Chicago) Tribune and Sun-Times.”

Stern said he supports the league’s action and does not see it as a freedom-of-speech issue.

“I would say that if I were writing my memoirs I’d wait until I retired,” he said. “I could not imagine an umpire in major league baseball or an NBA or an NFL official writing his memoirs while he still had his job.”

Kibritjian, meanwhile, is still grappling with being out of a job. He officiates outdoor games in the Greater Los Angeles Soccer League, on the college level and so on, but his primary source of income has been taken from him. All he has now--financially and emotionally--is wrapped up in his book.

“Mentally, it’s been extremely strenuous, very difficult to accept,” he said. “Just for one little story which teaches something to some people. I guess it taught me quite a bit. In this day and age you just are not allowed to say things that people don’t like.

“It’s been said to me even by my colleagues, ‘Hey, Toros, we know and we have heard even worse (insults), but you shouldn’t have put it in writing because that’s what cost you the job.’

“I said, ‘What good is saying something and it doesn’t mean anything?’ Now at least it means something. When a coach reads this part of my book, maybe he’ll tell his players to show a little respect to the referee so that they don’t cost him the game or the season.”

Kibritjian appealed his dismissal to Kentling, since the commissioner has final say in such matters. After meeting with Kibritjian and his attorney in Los Angeles and weighing the evidence, Kentling rejected the appeal.

Afterward he was asked about the case.

What, for instance, is the difference between a game official thinking or saying something negative about a particular team or coach or player and writing about it?

Kentling said it was a matter of a team having concrete proof of a possible bias by an official.

“The distinction that can be made in this case is that for the first time, a team could now point at something published to say, ‘See, what we have said is correct,’ ” he said.

But doesn’t a referee have the right to say or write what he believes?

“Obviously, he has the right to do it. He’s done it,” Kentling said, then pointed out that he is cracking down on the very problems Kibritjian wanted corrected.

“I think one of the few things in life that we can control is what comes out of our own mouth,” Kentling said. “And under my commissionership, the day of coaches or players blithely being able to call a referee a (expletive) is over. We need to discipline ourselves and if we cannot, I will deal with those people and I will do so monetarily, which I still believe is a great way to get folks’ attention.

“I will be the best (commissioner) the referees have ever seen in terms of protecting them from being violated verbally or physically by players or coaches.

“If this means that I have to do away with some great soccer traditions like feigning of injury (to cause a delay), and diving (faking being tripped or pushed) and taunting of opponents and gesticulations in order to communicate, then I’m prepared to do away with those traditions.”

As for Kibritjian, Kentling said he could not have reached any conclusion other than the one that was reached by Budish.

“I did not believe that we could say, ‘OK, for two months you’re grounded and can’t leave your yard and then you get to come back and then you’ll be unbiased.’

“I had to come down with a choice that the man was biased or wasn’t. My decision was that as much as I like him and as good as I thought he was as a ref, that he carried a bias against at least one team.

“I would not ask him to take the book out of print. That’s something that he’s got to decide to do. I wish the damn thing had never been published.”