Although he looked like he should be pretty comfortable, the flat-topped 91-year-old was squirming like a teenager caught between the calls of duty and dalliance.
He is, after all, a basketball man and in front of him the Dayton Flyers were dismantling UMass with one of their most impressive performances of the season.
But Maxine was in his ear, trying to coax him to skip the rest of the game so they could go dancing at the VFW.
And not just any dancing, mind you. They like to “jitterbug,” as Red put it.
In the end, at least until a few minutes were left in the Flyers’ 33-point romp, the bouncing ball won out. And that’s what you would expect from a fellow who spent a few decades of wintertime Saturdays with guys like John Wooden, Bobby Knight, Adolph Rupp and Don Donoher.
Strauthers is a local hoops legend himself, thanks to a colorful 34-year career as a big-time, multi-conference college basketball referee, an NBA ref and a prep official as well.
He worked state high school tournaments and several NCAA tournaments, including two Final Fours.
Knight wrote about Strauthers in his autobiography, “My Story.”
The oft-bombastic coach recounted the one time he tried mightily to get a technical and could not: “Red Strauthers — who officiated in the Big Ten when I was playing — was working the game when I tried and failed. He knew exactly what I was doing.
“He walked over to me and said, ‘The worse you get, the less likely I am to call a technical on you. I just want you to know that.’
“He handled it perfectly. What else could I do but shut up?”
A young Denny Crum, on the other hand, had no trouble getting him to blow his whistle, Red said with a grin:
“UCLA came into Illinois early in the season and Denny was an assistant coach for Wooden. The game wasn’t a minute old and he puts his hands up to his neck and gives me the choke sign.
“Oh boy! If anything gets my attention, that’ll do it. I was on top of him like you can’t believe. I stuck a ‘T’ right in his face and I said, ‘If I have to come over here again, I’ll send you so far into the stands they won’t find you ’til tomorrow.’
“Now Coach Wooden and I got along great and he comes over and says, ‘Oh Red, go away and leave him alone. I’ll talk to him.’ And that was the end of it. I didn’t hear another thing.”
Maybe not then, but he sure heard something when Western Kentucky played a game in Philadelphia at the Palestra.
“Some idiot way up in the stands threw a frozen chicken out on the court,” he said, shaking his head. “It took us a while, but we finally got that guy removed. But I’ll tell you what, if that would’ve hit me it would have killed me. When that thing hit it sounded like a gun going off.”
Worked famous melee
Before he was ducking flying chickens, Strauthers was tending to them and their barnyard brethren.
His parents had a small farm on a hill overlooking Camden, but as a teen he said he lived in West Elkton, where he worked full-time for another farmer: “I pitched hay, put corn in the silo, milked about 20 cows every day, you name it.”
In the winters, though, he played basketball for West Elkton High before finally moving back to Camden High for his senior season. He graduated in 1939 and a year later was drafted into the Army and then shipped to Europe for World War II.
He served in England, Belgium and France and didn’t return home until 1945.
By the early 1950s, he began refereeing high school ball in Preble County. Eventually Xavier University coach Ned Wulk offered him a couple of college assignments and his career was launched.
“I worked the Ohio Valley Conference, Missouri Valley, Mid-American, the Ohio Conference, the SEC and especially the Big Ten,” he said.
Oscar Robertson, Jerry Lucas, Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, John Havlicek and Elvin Hayes head a list of players who left some indelible memories in the games he worked. But none made an impression — quite literally — like Spencer Haywood.
It happened during a 1969 game when Haywood’s University of Detroit team played at Toledo.
According to a Toledo Blade account, there was a rough tussle for a rebound and Strauthers whistled Haywood for a flagrant technical foul and ordered him out of the game.
As Strauthers was explaining the call at the scorer’s table, Haywood came running across the court and launched three haymakers at him.
“I caught a glimpse of him coming at the last second and pretty much ducked out of the way,” Red said. “He just lost his head in the heat of the moment.”
A more calculated and much better known meltdown happened at the infamous 1972 game between visiting Ohio State and Minnesota.
With the Buckeyes up by six with less than a minute left, OSU center Luke Witte went up for a layup and was flung to the floor by the Gophers’ Clyde Turner.
Corkey Taylor then acted as if he was going to help Witte up, but instead kneed him in the groin. After that, fellow Gopher Ron Behagen came off the bench and stomped on Witte’s head.
Meanwhile, Minnesota’s Jim Brewer sucker punched OSU’s Dave Merchant and the Gophers’ Dave Winfield, later of baseball fame, punched another unsuspecting Buck.
With the melee swelling around him and inadequate security helping out, Strauthers did what he could to restore order.
Afterward, though, Minnesota coach Bill Musselman unfairly tried to pass the blame from his players onto the referees.
On the flip side of that, Red said, were many class act coaches like Wooden and Loyola’s George Ireland, who brought his team into the UD Fieldhouse for a 1966 game.
When the regularly assigned official didn’t show up, Red was spotted in the crowd and asked to work the game. And in the final minute he whistled UD center Henry Finkel for a foul and the Explorers escaped with a victory.
“Ireland came to the dressing room afterward and said, ‘If you can call a play like that on this floor — in the town you are from –— you’ve got some fairness to you and you can work any game on my schedule from here on,’ ” Red said.
Over the years Red worked offseasons in Puerto Rico and did clinics across Europe and Asia. He finally retired in 1986, spent a decade as an adviser of basketball officials and now he and Maxine have courtside season tickets to both Dayton and Wright State games.
‘They think we’re nuts’
A little over 20 years ago Maxine showed up at the Christopher Club, asked a few of the guys with Red if they knew how to dance and watched as they all more or less turned into wallflowers.
But when you’ve tangoed with Bobby Knight and Adolph Rupp in front of thousands of people, the dance floor doesn’t look too menacing.
“I said, ‘I can dance a little bit,’ and she said, ‘C’mon,’ ” Red remembered.
Within two years, they had married. Maxine, who was widowed, had four grown children, and Red has a daughter by his first marriage.
They now live in a Wilmington Avenue seniors complex and while they are familiar faces at UD and Wright State games, they are just as well known on the senior dance circuit, especially when local groups like The Impossibles or Jim Robinson are playing.
“Boogie woogie is our favorite,” Maxine said.
“Yep, they think we’re nuts, but we only dance the fast ones,” Red said. “That’s when I throw the cane away and we go at it. Now when I have to do the rumba, that’s when I feel it. I’ve had a couple of hip replacements and all that turning hurts a little.
“But jitterbugging? I can do that just fine.”
And that’s why that decision was so tough a couple of Saturday nights past.
Sometimes you just want to sit there and watch the young guys out on the floor in front of you, but there are other times you just have to pitch that cane and head out onto the floor yourself.
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