Joey Crawford Is the Worst

Joey Crawford, NBA referee, sounds like a pissed off pencil sharpener. Diacritical marks have not yet been devised that indicate the precise manner in which he growls "tech!" as he points to the penalized party, but suffice it to say people have told cheating spouses to go to hell with considerably less acid in their tone. There is nothing so wrathful as an insulted Joey Crawford, or whose correctness has been questioned, or who is perceiving even the slightest bit of sass from a teenager whose job it is to wipe sweat and spilled beer from the hardwood. So there is nothing so wrathful as Joey Crawford.

Crawford is an authoritarian in the way Bill O'Reilly is. He is pro-order, ostensibly, but he is mostly just looking for an excuse to take umbrage and leverage some quick discipline off it. If he has a broad professional aim, it is to rid the NBA of any and all guff, especially guff hurled in his direction. His default state is a sort of peeved joviality that can switch at a moment's notice over to spitting rage or barely civil paternalistic condescension. He once threw Tim Duncan out of a game for laughing. It is hard to escape the feeling that he does this sort of thing in his everyday life as well. He's in line at the supermarket, criticizing someone's posture. He's standing on a street corner, bellowing at a car to turn that noise down.

He is a majestic jackass. Crawford is performing a block call that belongs in a Vegas stage show. He's interrupting a playoff game's most crucial moment to harangue the scoreboard operator. He's pirouetting through the lane and halting a free throw, literally jumping at the opportunity to lay down the law. When he's not calling ticky-tack fouls against your team seemingly for the sole purpose of reminding you he's on the court—true NBA fandom is achieved around the fifth or sixth time you bark godammit Joey! at your TV—Crawford is legible as a silly man made sillier by the fact he thinks the silly things he does serve some larger noble purpose. He's fastidiously making sure everything is up to code. That guff we talked about earlier? He's ostentatiously keeping it to a minimum.

It's not that basketball games don't need refs, or that officials don't catch an undeserved amount of flak simply for being imperfect arbiters of regulations that are impossible to enforce evenly at all times; they do, and they do. But if you have ever viewed one of those broadcast segments in which the audience is permitted to listen in on what the refs are talking about at various points in the game, you will have seen a lot of apologies, measured explanations, and attempts at defusing humor. I'm sorry I missed that one, Kobe. I'm not giving you that call, Dwyane. Life just isn't fair sometimes, is it Steph? You will have also seen Crawford flying off the handle at a minor affront, or being an impatient dick to the folks at the scorer's table, or treating a bunch of adults as if they were disobedient dogs.

If it seems like you need not to be this callous to officiate a basketball game, it's because you don't. No other referee in the league is as jerkish, short-tempered, or self-regarding as Crawford. He's a knuckle-rapping nun, an overzealous traffic cop who conceives of himself as a game's god. He appears to be obsessed with rules and procedure for their own sake—and there is certainly a whiff of the anal retentive about him—but upon closer inspection, he is obsessed with those things only because they grant him power. One imagines, if he were a player, he would Allen Iversonishly hop up and down at botched calls. He would make his opinions known with the same stridency he does now, because he doesn't care about decorum nearly as much as he does about being right.

In the end, it's Crawford's power that makes him so irksome. He is a punchline, but he also screws up the flow of games and injects a mad-at-everything unpleasantness into the proceedings. He ejects players for dubious reasons—again, guff is usually involved—and conflates every other bit of momentary athlete distress with personal insult. Crawford will not brook your bullshit, even if you're on an adrenaline high and, for just a second, let an indignant what? why?! escape your throat after a whistle goes against you.

It takes a heroic ego for a man to treat everyone around him like simpletons and to insist upon doing what he can to turn a beautiful athletic exhibition into a dour administrative exercise over which he presides. Maybe what has kept Joey Crawford around for so long is his perverse impressiveness. He's bad at his job in obvious and essential ways, but the obstinance with which he sucks overwhelms and overawes anyone who could fire him. He's a soaring falcon of a hemorrhoid, a double rainbow of grouchiness. He is 38 seasons into his NBA officiating career. He's still here, standing courtside with his hands on his hips, looking for a fight.