First Dooowwwnnn…And Life to Go!: How an Enthusiastic Approach Changed Everything for the Most Colorful Referee in Nfl History

FIRST

dooowwwnnn…

and life to go!

How an enthusiastic approach changed everything for the most colorful referee in NFL history

By Red Cashion with Rusty Burson Foreword by Bill Parcells

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© 2012 M.L. Cashion and Rusty Burson. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 8/15/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-2562-2 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-2563-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-2564-6 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012910909

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Table of Contents

Dedication

Foreword By Bill Parcells

Chapter 1: Can’t Keep A Good Man Dooowwwnnn

Chapter 2: Cold Reality Of Where It All Began

Chapter 3: Differentiating Between Imaginary Bugs And Real-Life Subway Thugs

Chapter 4: Treat People Right; They Tend To Do The Same in Return

Chapter 5: Wanna Super Life? Make Sure You Have A Super Bowl Perspective

Chapter 6: Counting My Blessings…Even In Retirement

Chapter 7: Even On The Gridiron, It All Comes Down To People And Relationships

Chapter 8: So, You Want To Be An Official?

Chapter 9: Many Thanks To Many Wonderful Folks

Appendix

Dedication

To my great friend, Art McNally, the former Supervisor of Officials, who first hired me. Art is a great man and a tremendous football person, who has provided me so much inspiration and guidance through the years. And to my four kids—Shelley White, Sharon Cashion, Joyce Cain and Jim Cashion—who allowed me to spend so much time chasing my dreams when I should have been home with them far more often. With your constant support and encouragement, I was able to accomplish what the Lord has allowed me to achieve.

—Red Cashion

To my wife and best friend, Vannessa Blasingame-Burson, the love of my life and a great football-watching companion. She’s proven to be one heck of a referee, too, officiating the squabbles among our three kids—the home team—while allowing me to write this book and many others.

—Rusty Burson

Foreword

By Bill Parcells

During my 19 seasons as a head coach in the National Football League, I regularly stressed the importance of preparation to my team and my coaching staff. The difference between winning and losing each week in the NFL is often a diminutive and extremely fine line, and I always wanted to provide my guys with an advantage by leaving no stone unturned in our preparations.

For example, while all other coaches in the league watched plenty of video of their own team and their opponents each week, my staff also scouted the NFL officials. We evaluated the various crews, charting their tendencies to call certain penalties or to not call them. From these evaluations, we knew which crews were more likely to call holding penalties late in the game and which crews might be more likely to let things go in the fourth quarter.

Our evaluations of the officials sometimes provided my teams with a valuable advantage. Scouting all of the officials on a weekly basis also proved a point that I had long suspected: When it came to referees, Red Cashion was among the very best of the best, week after week and year after year.

I first became an assistant coach in the NFL in 1979. By that time, Cashion had already earned a reputation as one of the most consistent and respected referees in the business. He also was a great leader of his crew, and it was obvious to everyone inside the stadium where Cashion was working on a Sunday afternoon or Monday night that he thoroughly enjoyed the game.

As a defensive assistant with the Giants and the Patriots, I didn’t have a great deal of interaction with Red, but once I became a head coach in 1983, I quickly began to appreciate his professionalism and passion.

Red was a real straight-forward official, and he was a guy who would welcome communication between the coaches and the officials and the players and the officials. In my opinion, one of the biggest keys to being a great official is the ability to communicate. An official needs to be more than just a robotic rules enforcer. He needs to be relatable and approachable.

That was definitely the case with Red. He wanted the game to go well and to be played by the rules, but he also understood the human element of the game. The players make errors, the coaches make errors, and every once in a while, even a referee as good as Red will make an error. I always knew that if Red made a mistake, he was big enough to acknowledge it and move forward. And he also had a gift in telling the coaches and players about their mistakes without being condescending or combative.

Red is also a reasonable guy, who would actually listen to what you were asking him. Not all of the officials did that because they had their mind made up. I liked talking to Red and working with him…even if I didn’t always agree with him.

I tried not to complain to the officials too much, but when I did have something to say, I tried to not make ridiculous claims, absurd accusations or to ask outlandish questions. I think Red appreciated that about me, and we had a very good relationship on the field right from the first time he ever worked one of the games where I was a head coach. I enjoyed it when he was the referee for our game and was very comfortable that everybody was going to receive a fairly and professionally officiated game.

He was also a real positive, upbeat and enthusiastic guy. He enjoyed talking and joking with the players during pregame settings, and he’d always come over to me before the game, shake my hand and say, Let’s have a good game today, coach. Then he went out and made sure that he and his crew provided the best environment possible for the game.

He would double-check things for you. He’d make sure that the players never looked foolish by not accepting or rejecting a penalty that would not be beneficial for his team. You could make him aware of things you felt like were going on that maybe he didn’t notice, and he would make sure that his crew would keep an eye on those things as the game unfolded. He was a top official, and there is no doubt about that. I was lucky in my era of coaching to have several of those officials that I thought were top notch, and Red was one of the very best in the game.

I’m delighted that Red has chosen to write a book about his experiences, his memories and his philosophies. I am also honored that Red reached out to me to write this foreword. He was a colorful and captivating personality on the football field, and I am fortunate to be able to call him a friend from our long-time working relationship in the NFL. The stories in the ensuing chapters will provide plenty of insight regarding what made Red Cashion such an outstanding referee and what makes him such an interesting man. So, without further delay and in honor of Cashion’s trademark call, it’s time to turn the page on go on to the First Chaaaaaaapter.

Chapter 1

Can’t Keep A Good Man Dooowwwnnn

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference. ~Winston Churchill

If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. ~Mary Engelbreit

An optimist is someone who figures that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s the bluebird of happiness. ~Robert Brault

When used together and directed specifically toward you, two of the more humbling, haunting and humiliating words that can ever be uttered are: You’re fired!

Life can be progressing along smoothly, satisfactorily and precisely as planned until those two words stop you dead in your tracks, smacking you in the face with the full-throttle force of a freight train. Especially in terms of how it affects the male ego, being fired can be beyond disheartening. It’s often demoralizing, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

I certainly hope you never hear those two words…unless, of course, they have the same wonderfully positive effect on your life as they did on mine. Being fired was definitely a life-altering event for me in a good way.

No, I take that back. It was actually transforming in a grand and magnificent manner. It made me re-think my methods. It forced me to re-evaluate my goals and plans to achieve them. And it essentially allowed me to reshape my destiny as an official, challenging me to make some significant personality changes and to approach my role with far more passion.

In hindsight, it’s likely that I would have never made it to the NFL if not for being fired. Nor would I have been as successful in my business endeavors. And I certainly would not have been inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame or written this book.

It was only after I was fired that I fully realized my attitude needed an overhaul. That was a pivotal moment in my life. Once I adopted a far more enthusiastic approach to my profession—and, for the most part, to life in general—I realized that not even something so demoralizing as being fired could keep a good, upbeat and optimistic man down.

Or should I say "dooowwwnnn?"

If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me about how my trademark "first dooowwwnnn" call originated, I might be able to afford a secondary home (my wife and I currently live in Bryan/College Station, Texas) in Dallas. Or Denver. Or maybe even Dubai.

For that matter, if I had a dime for every time someone had recognized me and done his/her own impersonation of me performing that call, I might be able to pave a path of silver from Dallas to Denver.

In my full-time profession, I worked for many years in the insurance industry. I was once working on a huge insurance deal at the famous Lloyd’s of London Building on Lime Street in downtown London when somebody at one of the broker’s tables yelled—loudly and across the hallway—at me: "first dooowwwnnn!"

The broker I was working with asked me: Do you know what the bloody bloke is talking about?

I do, I replied, somewhat sheepishly.

It happened similarly at the CNN Center in Atlanta. It’s also occurred in office buildings, theaters, sporting venues and restaurants from Minneapolis to Miami, Provo to Pittsburgh, Boston to Berkley and all points in between. For whatever reason, it is an especially common occurrence in airports.

Outside the American Airlines terminal at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, I once stood waiting to catch a courtesy van that would take me to a hotel on the airport grounds where an NFL meeting was being held. Before the van arrived, however, one of the long buses that transported passengers from a commuter terminal to the main American Airlines terminal whisked past me and then circled back around toward me. I was standing there, basically by myself, and I waved at the driver attempting to inform him that I did not need a ride from him.

He kept coming anyway. He pulled the bus right up next to me, as the brakes screeched to a halt. He then flipped open the automatic bus doors, sprang out of the driver’s seat, stepped out of the bus and hollered: "first dooowwwnnn!" Then he returned to the bus, sat back down, shut the doors and sped away.

I chuckled and shook my head in amazement. I still do.

Although I was still working for the NFL as a referee trainer through 2012 and have worked for the league in some capacity for more than four decades, I last worked a professional football game as a referee in January 1997. Nevertheless, I am stunned and amazed by how many people continue to mimic that call and quiz me about how it began.

The reality is that my emphatically enthusiastic call of those two words stemmed from hearing these two categorically abysmal words: You’re fired!

As I will document in detail in the ensuing chapters, I had dreamed for many years of becoming an official—hopefully a referee—in the National Football League. I started working junior high games as a college student at Texas A&M and worked my way through the high school and junior college ranks with a continuing vision of reaching the pinnacle of the officiating profession. When I earned an opportunity to work collegiate games in the Southland Conference (SLC) in the 1960s, I really thought I was on my way.

The SLC was a small-school conference that had been founded in 1963 with original members Abilene Christian, Arkansas State, Lamar, UT-Arlington and Trinity. In other words, it was hardly the big-time or the bright lights of college football. But I figured it was a great collegiate entry point for me as I continued to climb the ladder all the way to the NFL.

As such, I took a very dignified, detached and stately approach to how I worked games in the SLC. I didn’t participate in much unnecessary chit-chat with coaches, players or fellow officials. I showed no bias and, essentially, displayed no personality. I vowed to be a black-and-white-striped machine and strived to exhibit regal professionalism.

I achieved this aloof, impersonal agenda with such resounding effectiveness that I was fired after one season. My longtime friend, Taylor Wilkins, delivered the news gingerly, as opposed to emphatically. But it still hit me like a right hook from a heavyweight boxing champion. Wilkins said he had to fire me because the coaches in the Southland Conference didn’t believe I was particularly interested in the games. That was not true at all. I loved working those games and being on those fields. My no-emotion agenda was merely a monotone masquerade that had backfired on me in a crushing blow.

Honestly, my first thought was: How in the world can I even fathom making it into the NFL if I can’t even cut it in the Southland Conference?

After overcoming my initial shock and dismay, I made a decision to make some major changes in my approach. After some soul-searching, I thought back to a very important lesson I had learned early in my insurance career. I was struggling to make ends meet when, out of the blue, a gentleman stopped by my office in College Station and encouraged me to participate in a Dale Carnegie course.

Quite frankly, I didn’t have the money to participate in that course or any other kind of training. I was just trying to make sure we could pay all of our bills each month. But I did possess a burning desire to be successful at something. My father-in-law, Hershel Burgess, seemed to have a golden touch in everything he pursued. He’d played football at Texas A&M; he’d become an official in the Southwest Conference; and he was a well-known and successful businessman with a local bank. I married his daughter, Lou Burgess, in December of ’52. I’d been sweet on Lou ever since we attended first grade together, and I always wanted to prove to her father that I was successful enough to provide Lou with the lifestyle she deserved.

It was with this in mind that I decided to scrape together enough money to take the Dale Carnegie course. I knew Carnegie