A longtime teacher and school administrator in Vandalia, Sam Lickliter was a respected referee who worked the Big Ten and several other conferences and had officiated in eight NCAA Tournaments including one Final Four.
None of that mattered to one Flyers’ fan who sat in the same row as the teenage boys.
“My dad made a call, and this guy stands up and yells ‘Lickliter, you’ve always stunk!’ Though I don’t think he said stunk,” Ben said with a laugh.
“And that’s when I stood up and said, ‘Hey, stop yelling. This is his son!’ And I pointed at my friend.
“Poor Craig, he went into a camel crawl.”
Ben — who today is the pro at Cassel Hills Golf Course in Vandalia and is the father of two of Sam’s five accomplished grandchildren — was recalling stories about his dad Wednesday afternoon.
He’d told me a couple of them before, but this time one thing was different.
References to his dad were in the past tense.
Sam Lickliter died unexpectedly 12 days ago. He was 79.
Lickliter once told me how he’d suffered a severe heart attack on New Year’s Eve in 2007 and would not have survived had it not been for his wife Regina whose quick actions saved him.
Ten days after the scare, I sat with him and his pal Randy Drury, another longtime area referee, in Millett Hall watching Charlie Coles’ Miami team play Kent State.
Lickliter was an observer of basketball officials then — handling the Mid-American Conference and the Summit League — and this was his first day back with basketball.
Before hanging up his whistle, Lickliter had officiated 29 years in the MAC and 22 in the Big Ten. Drury had three more years in each league.
They’d spent a lot of time together and Drury had some Lickliter stories:
“In ’93, Sam worked Michigan State at Indiana. He threw the ball up for the tip and one of the guys hit him square in the face and broke his nose. They cleaned up the blood and Sam stuffed gauze in his nose and kept working.
“Well, Indiana ended up blowing an 18-point lead and losing.
“Near the end of the game, Sam came by Bobby Knight, who said, ‘Sam, that guy should have killed you, not just broke your nose.’”
Knight, who often took delight in wearing the mask of mockery, was teasing. He liked Lickliter and was one of the first to reach out to him after that 2007 heart attack.
Coles and UD’s Don Donoher liked Lickliter, as well.
Alabama’s Wimp Sanderson did not.
“It was the first round of the 1989 NCAA Tournament in Atlanta,” Lickliter once told me. “Alabama was playing South Alabama, a team it never would play during the season.
“Well, South Alabama won that day and over the summer I get a letter with the Alabama (logo) on it.
“When I opened it, Wimp proceeded to tell me I’m the worst official he’s ever seen and I shouldn’t be in the NCAA. The other two guys who worked with me got the same letter.
“Well, that next season Alabama is playing Arizona in a first-round NCAA Tournament game in Long Beach, Calif. And guess who’s working the game?
“Before the tip, I walk over to Wimp, stick out my hand and say, ‘Sam Lickliter … Got your letter!’
“Wimp was on his best behavior that day.”
Over the years, Lickliter worked 15 NCAA Tournaments, five with Regional assignments, and there was the 1988 Final Four. He also worked 15 NITs, including the 1987 championship game.
The only time he was snubbed for an NCAA Tournament was 1993 and that’s because a month earlier he was involved in a controversial call.
During a February game at Penn State it looked as if the visiting Indiana Hoosiers, the No. 1 team in the nation, were about to be upset when Lickliter made a call that saved them and they went on to win in double overtime.
Lickliter whistled a foul on Penn State’s Greg Bartum who had the ball but elbowed IU’s Chris Reynolds who was trailing him.
What Lickliter nor either of the trailing officials saw was Reynolds first pulling Bartum’s jersey out of his basketball pants and using the shirttail to yank him back.
Lickliter was vilified on ESPN, which repeatedly showed replays. Penn State fans were livid, some threateningly so.
But Nittany Lions coach Bruce Parkhill called Lickliter and basically told him to forget the incident, saying one call wasn’t why they lost.
‘He never came back’
Before graduating from Belmont High in 1964, Lickliter met Regina Sears.
They became sweethearts at age 17 and married in 1967, a year before he graduated from Bowling Green State University where he played football and baseball.
While in college he took a refereeing class and figured once he was back home he could officiate on the side to help better provide for his new bride.
He began working high school JV games, then varsity and eventually refereed the state finals.
John Ross, who had coached Belmont’s state champion basketball team in 1964 and then launched WSU’s basketball program, got him to work some Raiders’ Division II games.
Lickliter had Jim Brown, a fellow Belmont athlete who was Ross’s assistant, go with him to Miami to critique his early Division I efforts and, after some seasoning, he started getting big time games across the region.
The one stipulation was that he had to be able to get back home to be at his school job early in the morning. That’s when Ben became his driver.
He said he spent his junior and senior years driving his dad to games at places like Michigan, Michigan State, DePaul, Purdue, Indiana and Illinois:
“I’d pick him up at Butler High School as soon as classes were out. He’d sleep on the way. I’d drive and then drive him back home. He had to get there 2 ½ hours early, so sometimes I’d sleep before the games at the stadium.”
Ben said he’d see about 45 games a year and their father-and-son bond grew so much that he made his dad his best man for his first marriage.
While Ben looked out for his dad — as evidenced by disarming that UD fan who thought he “stunk” — Sam could take care of himself pretty well.
No one learned that better than the Loyola Ramblers mascot — a muscled-up wolf with an oversized head — who would run full bore down the court, dive and come sliding up to and sometimes into Lickliter when he was officiating a game there.
Finally Lickliter had had enough and told the guy to cut it out.
“Sure enough, the next time there’s a break, here he comes again,” Lickliter said.
“So I just stepped down on his hand, pressed hard and whispered, ‘I’m gonna stand on this hand so long, you’re gonna throw up in your head and drown in there. And the thing is, no one will ever know.’
“Once I finally let him loose, he never came back.”
‘A real mentor’
That day at Millett Hall — just 10 days after his heart attack — Lickliter explained how lucky he was to be alive:
“It was about 2 in the afternoon. I’d just taken the Christmas lights down. Suddenly, it felt like someone was trying to tear my left arm off. My chest caved in and I couldn’t breathe.
“I finally was able to get inside and I told Regina, I thought I had indigestion. I mean I’d never had any trouble before. But she looked at me and knew. She called the rescue squad and got some aspirin into me. She saved me.”
He was rushed to Kettering Hospital and taken straight to the operating room.
“The main artery in the front of my heart was 100 percent blocked,” he said. “The bottom two-thirds of my heart weren’t getting anything.
“The doctors told me something like five percent of guys with this make it, but they got it open and now I’ve got some stents in.”
Ben thought of that Wednesday afternoon:
“He had that widowmaker heart attack and survived. He got an extra 18-19 years, saw some amazing stuff and helped a lot of people.”
Two referees, Terry Oglesby, the head of the Big Ten referees, and Edwin Young, the former University of Dayton point guard who now referees in the Big Ten and other conferences, both spoke highly of Lickliter on Wednesday.
“I met him in 2011 at camp when I was starting out,” Young said. “He was a supervisor for the Mid-American Conference then and he was someone that everyone really, really respected.
“He was clear on his expectations for you — you knew they were things he already had done in his career — and he wanted the best for you. But he was very direct about it. He was a real mentor.”
At the start of this season, Oglesby was named the executive director of the Collegiate Officiating Consortium, a regional collaboration of Division I men’s basketball conferences that services 63 schools across 28 states.
He’s also responsible for recruiting, developing, and assigning officials for all Big Ten games and overseeing the assignments in the MAC, Horizon League, Mountain West Conference, and Summit League.
A celebrated official himself, he has worked 15 NCAA Tournaments and each of the last four NCAA championship games.
“I met Sam later in my career, but he still became one of my mentors,” Oglesby said from his home in Missouri. “He was someone I looked up to. He was a no-nonsense guy who didn’t beat around the bush.
“He would tell you things you might not want to hear, but they were correct and you felt better for it.
“He was a true leader of men. He had this aura about him, and you didn’t want to let him down. He didn’t just make me a better referee; he made me a better person.”
Ben mentioned something similar. He talked about how his father had been a great dad to him and his sister Amber and how for Ava, Sam, Olivia, Luke and Will he was “the greatest grandfather five grandkids could ever have. He was a mentor to them.”
In accordance with Sam’s wishes the family held a private funeral service.
And that’s brings us back to Randy Drury once more:
“I was headed to Penn State for a game and I’m speeding.
“A state trooper pulled me over and asked where I was headed. I told him ‘I’m going to Penn State to referee a game.’
“He said, ‘You’re not Lickliter are you?’
“I told him, ‘Oh hell no! No way!’”
Convinced Drury has no connection to Lickliter, the trooper said: “OK, then you can go.”
Sometimes just a little tweak of the truth works best.
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