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Jim Tunney Dies: Legendary NFL Referee Who Officiated Some Of The Sport’s Most Memorable Games Was 95

tom tapp
·2 min read
Jim Tunney Dies: Legendary NFL Referee Who Officiated Some Of The Sport’s Most Memorable Games Was 95

The dean of NFL referees has died.

Jim Tunney, who worked some of the most memorable games in NFL history over the course of his 31-year career, died Thursday at his home in Pebble Beach. He was 95.

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Tunney got his start as a field judge in 1960 and over the decades he worked games so singular that they garnered their own nicknames: The Ice Bowl was the 1967 NFL Championship between Dallas and Green Bay, so called because the temperature was about −15 °F with an average wind chill around −48 °F; The Catch, the 1981 NFC Championship game in which San Francisco beat Dallas by one point got its name after Dwight Clark made a leaping catch at the back of the end zone on a pass from Joe Montana; and then there was The Fog Bowl, a playoff matchup between Philadelphia and Chicago in 1988 where the fog was so thick that players could not see the sidelines or first-down markers.

He also received a record 29 post-season assignments, including ten Championship games as well as Super Bowls VI, XI and XII.

Tunney’s career came 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,” said Gene Steratore, a former referee who worked February’s Super Bowl for CBS as the network’s rules 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 familiar face to non-football fans, too. He worked as the referee for 14 episodes of ABC’s classic Battle of the Network Stars. Students at Fairfax High knew him as Principal Tunney. Over his seven-year tenure at Fairfax, Tunney also worked 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 year.

Of the current state of NFL officiating, Tunney told the Times that there aren’t enough seasoned trainers for the current crop of young officials.

“There are 17 crews, and we need 17 good referees,” he said. “We don’t have that.”

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