Mendy Rudolph
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Marvin "Mendy" Rudolph (March 8, 1926 - July 1979, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) was a National Basketball Association (NBA) referee for 25 years, from 1953 to 1978. He was the first NBA referee to work 2,000 games, his historic 2,000th game taking place in February 1975. He is the son of Harry Rudolph, a prominent basketball referee and baseball umpire in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He wore the uniform number 5 in the NBA and to the present day, no other official in the NBA has worn this number. During the 1979-80 NBA season, officials wore a patch with the number 5 on their uniform sleeves to honor Ruldolph after his passing.
At age 20, Mendy started as a referee alongside his father working games in the Eastern League, one of the top semi-pro leagues outside of the NBA in the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1953, he was recommended by Eddie Gottlieb, coach and owner of the NBA's Philadelphia Warriors at the time to then NBA commissioner Maurice Podoloff, who gave him the job.
In 1976, Rudolph worked as a television analyst for CBS Sports covering The NBA on CBS during the NBA Finals. He was paired with Brent Musburger and Rick Barry. The 1976 NBA Finals were most memorable for a triple-overtime Game 5, which is considered by many to be the "greatest game" in NBA history.
Rudolph was known to be a heavy gambler. As recounted by his wife, Susan, in a 1992 interview as to why he refused to accept an offer of a Las Vegas gambler to cancel his gambling debts by shaving points in a game, Mendy's thought was that "It goes against all my principles. I love the game too much, respect it too much. I couldn't do it to you. I couldn't do it to the memory of my father, and I couldn't do it to myself. If I have to go into bankruptcy, something I'd hate to do, I'd do it."
The quality of Rudolph's work is the standard by which NBA referees are measured. With charisma and personality, he symbolized NBA officiating to many basketball fans of the 1960s and 1970s and was a pioneer to the profession. His friend and colleague, Earl Strom, was an advocate to get Rudolph one day enshrined into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
[edit] Career Highlights
- First NBA referee to work 2,000 games
- In the 1961 NBA Finals, Mendy Rudolph and Earl Strom refereed all seven games between the Boston Celtics and St. Louis Hawks.
While Mendy was famous as a basketball referee, he was also a television time salesman for many years. He started in television sales in 1960 representing Channel 13 in New York when it was still a commercial TV station and owned by his brother-in-law, Ely Landau.
When Ely Landau sold Channel 13 in the early 1960's to Public Television, Mendy went over to the TV sales staff of WGN-TV, a Chicago television station, as their New York sales representative and worked there for almost 20 years until his passing.
