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Last month, I received a private message from a 37-year-od HockeyBuzz reader based out of Colorado who said he has refereed recreational hockey on a part-time basis for years and asked me if was "too late" to get more serious about getting involved in officiating. My response: age is just a number so long as you are in shape, can skate and want to learn.
Not everyone has to be a candidate for NHL hire or to work at the top international or collegiate levels to find fulfillment and success as official. It's really a matter of conditioning, positioning, skating and commitment to self-improvement. While age eventually plays a factor in recovery and dealing with nagging injuries, I have seen older officials who can skate circles around some of the younger guys out there and are in much better shape with more savvy.
Really, it's all determined on a case-by-case basis. A somewhat older referee or linesman should not be automatically written off any more than an undersized official's candidacy for assignments shoud be dismissed before he (or she) can be fairly evaluated.
Unfortunately, not everyone in positions of power within the sport agree with me. Ageism, heightism, nationalism and all sorts of other 'Ism schism games" have existed for years in the hiring practices in this sport just as they do in many other realms of employment.
I have my own story about ageism in the hiring of officials. I have told the story once before, but it's relevant to today's topic: the story of how I "grew two years younger" when I made the transition from NHL player to NHL referee.
If you look up various biographical entries on me, you will sometimes find a discrepancy in my birth year. Some places have it as 1953 (which is correct). Others have it as 1955. For some reason, Hockeydb.com lists it as March 24, 1952.
For the record, I was born March 21, 1953.
Before the 1984-85 NHL season, I was invited to attend the NHL Officials Association's training camp. I did well and NHL officiating director John McCauley pushed for the League to sign me to a contract.
McCauley told me that there was a catch. When I brought him my birth certificate when I was about to be hired, he looked at my date of birth: March 21, 1953. He later called me.
"Paul, there's a mistake on this document," he said. "That date of birth is supposed to say 1955."
Not immediately grasping where John was going with this, I started to protest that the date on my birth certificate was correct. He quickly interrupted.
"No, if anyone asks, you were born in 1955. We don't hire anyone over age 30," he said.
Shortly thereafter, McCauley mailed me the birth certificate with the 3 in 1953 seamlessly changed to a 5. It was impossible to tell it had been fudged. I never asked McCauley about it and he never told me how he did it.
Soon after, to cover the tracks, I also had my driver's license changed to 1955.
I was friends with a World War I fighter pilot named Eddie Harold and helped take care of him after I got divorced from my first wife. I used to go by his place, take care of him at night, shave him, and take him to the grocery store or wherever he needed to go. He had been my next-door neighbor when I was a kid growing up.
One day, I told him that McCauley had the date on my birth certificate changed. I said that other identification documents still said 1953. Eddie told me his wife, Frances, had worked at the registry of motor vehicles. She had served as the registrar's assistant.
"I'll have her fix your date of birth on your license, too," said Eddie who died at 103 years of age but at the time still held a driver's license that said he was 90 with no restrictions.
Eddie's wife made a call for me to a friend at the registry in Roslindale. I met with some man in his office behind his closed door. He asked me what was wrong with the license.
"My date of birth is wrong," I told him. "It's supposed to be 1955."
With one click on his big boxy computer, the DOB on my license changed from 1953 to 1955.
That helped me avoid detection. Whenever I rented a car or submitted other receipts to the NHL, my birthyear consistently read as 1955.
After McCauley died in 1989, I think NHL management caught on somehow, perhaps because old paperwork from my playing days listed my correct birth year, I received an inquiry about it. I sent the league a copy of the birth certificate that McCauley had fudged, a copy of my driver's license, and a voter registration card. All said 1955. I never heard another word from the NHL about it.
Nobody ever bothered me about it for decades. What's the difference anyway? At the time I looked like I could still be in my mid-20s and I always stayed in top physical condition. Besides, age discrimination wasn't the only discrimination that I faced with those people during my career.
Many years later, I had my documentation corrected back to 1953. I was 50 years old when I retired from the NHL as an active official.
Should it have made a difference in my initial consideration for an NHL officiating job whether I was 31 rather than 29? No, of course not. McCauley knew that, but he also knew it would be a losing cause to try to buck the (unwritten but ardently held) policy of disqualifying anyone over 30. John helped me work around it, and I ultimately had to last laugh by outlasting a lot of the younger hotshot candidates by refereeing 1,010 games in the NHL.
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Paul Stewart holds the distinction of being the first U.S.-born citizen to make it to the NHL as both a player and referee. On March 15, 2003, he became the first American-born referee to officiate in 1,000 NHL games.
The longtime referee heads Officiating by Stewart, a consulting, training and evaluation service for officials. Stewart also maintains a busy schedule as a public speaker, fund raiser and master-of-ceremonies for a host of private, corporate and public events. As a non-hockey venture, he is the owner of Lest We Forget.