Basketball referee Howie Green retires
Howie Green talks about retiring from refereeing Section 1 boys basketball after a long career at his Somers home March 18, 2024. .
Howie Green officiated for 66 years and worked about 24,000 games.Green died Oct. 17.Green enjoyed mentoring officials and loved being in the gym.
The mental image is indelible and it always makes Dave Greiner smile.
The Pleasantville and Valhalla boys high school basketball teams were playing each other at Pace University.
It was one of the 24,000 or so games Howie Green would ref. But it stands out a bit more than the average one.
Green, who died unexpectedly Oct. 17, was already a local basketball legend when the game was played. Skill, longevity and his no-nonsense, the basketball-rulebook-is-The-Bible, approach, made him that.
He’d always been a stickler for rules.
Even as a young teen.
He was maybe 15 and reffing an adult outdoor game in a then-summer community in Putnam Valley when a player who dwarfed him in size had tired of Green calling fouls on him. He verbally attacked his young nemesis. But, as the much-cherished story goes, Green responded by using some colorful language himself to explain it would be in the gentleman’s best interest to learn the rulebook.
That episode ended with Green being chased into a nearby lake.
But at the game at Pace, it was Green who did the chasing.
In his distinctive, Bronx-north/Yonkers accent, Green, fed up with unruly fan behavior that day, shouted, “Section 8, you’re out of here.”
And that was that, Greiner recalled.
An entire section of fans was forced to leave the gym.
Green’s style wasn’t for everyone. He had critics.
But no one questioned his devotion to basketball.
A huge assignment late in his career
He was 80 in February 2024 when he reffed his last varsity basketball game — a huge Section 1 boys semifinal at Westchester County Center between two good and fast teams, Mount Vernon and White Plains.
Some grumbled giving him the assignment was merely throwing an old man a bone and the game was too important for that.
They were wrong, both about what’s important and about what Green had left in his tank.
“He earned that game (through his ratings). He wouldn’t have taken it if it had been a charity game,” said Greiner, a friend and former Panas and Valhalla basketball coach who’s best known for his 41 years and counting as a high school umpire, and as a member of the local high school umpires association’s executive board.
“That’s a big game (and) he did a great job,” said Darren Moran, Executive Board president of the 250-member Board 52 (Westchester/Putnam) of the International Association of Approved Basketball Officials.
Nothing less than a great job was expected of Green — at least among officials.
Green always stayed in shape, had perspective
The truth was Green, who began reffing Section 1 games in 1969, could get up and down the court faster than most officials less than half his age. He’d often match high-level kids, stride-for-stride.
He prided himself in staying in shape, even while battling some health issues in recent years.
Green alone decided to remove himself from varsity games after that 2023-24 season and restrict himself to middle school, junior varsity and things like CYO, unified (combined teams of high school students with and without disabilities) and Special Olympics officiating.
The decision had nothing to do with age or performance, but, rather, was out of his growing concern that, with his reputation as, in essence, dean of local basketball refs, if he blew a call, his officiating partner might not overrule him.
That could, he feared, cost a team a game and he wouldn’t risk that.
Who was Howie Green, off the court?
Green, who lived the final years of his life in Somers with his wife, Sandra, was a contradiction to some. His, “Listen, this is my ball, my gym and my whistle and what I say goes,” message, contrasted, as Greiner noted, with his off-the-court “heart of gold.”
But that’s who he was — the guy quick to tell a mouthy assistant coach his job was to sit on the bench and count timeouts, the guy who called every travel with a dramatic egg-beater, fist over fist spin (the NBA’s blind eye to the infraction, be damned), and the guy unafraid to T-up anyone.
Or, of course, show fans the door.
But at the same time, he was the guy who’d tell reffing partners to keep their whistles permanently in their pockets when calling games involving kids with disabilities.
Those kids could carry the ball step after step after step because the definition of winning at that level wasn’t found on the scoreboard. It was, Green believed, found in the pure happiness on the face of a child who put the ball through the hoop, defying imagined limitations.
Reffing those kids meant the world to Green.
“My dad did the Special Olympics every year. My mom said that was his favorite thing to do. The parents loved him. Dad just let (the kids) play,” Green’s daughter, Kara Longin, said.
But no matter the level of the game, basketball was Green’s sunshine and oxygen. He’d only ask for game reassignments if one of Longin’s children had an event. Kylie Longin was a soccer star at John Jay-East Fishkill High (who went on to play for SUNY-Brockport), and her sister, Jayci, was a competitive dancer who’s now studying nursing.
Busting with granddad pride, he’d frequently talk about them, including when, as he often did, he’d show up to high school gyms hours ahead of the games he was due to call.
“I loved having him in my gym,” Hen Hud athletic director Tom Baker said, noting how Green would make friendly small talk with those passing by.
This, of course, sometimes included the coaches and players he might find himself snapping at post-tipoff.
“My dad was a hard-ass. He was also a softie,” Kara Longin mused.
Neither she nor her sister, Stacy Hulsman, played basketball. But they had no doubt how important the game was to their father.
“I always thought my dad would go on the basketball court. That’s where he was all the time,’ Kara Longin said.
Her dad’s love of the game was so deep, when not reffing, he’d still regularly attend games. Sometimes this was in his role of evaluating officials. Other times, he was there just as a fan.
Longtime Ossining girls basketball coach Dan Ricci remembers Green, who only reffed boys games, sometimes attending girls games.
Ricci liked and respected Green because of their shared love of basketball and because Green was so good at what he did.
“He had reputation for being a no-nonsense guy. He was. But off the court, he was the nicest guy around,” Ricci said.
“He was a good referee. He knew the game. He knew the rules, He always hustled and was always in the right place,” Ricci said.
“From the coaches’ side, he was very respected. He was super knowledgeable, and when he was officiating, you knew he was in charge,” agreed former longtime Croton High boys basketball coach Bill Thom.
Thom, whose Croton hoops career began in 1983 as boys JV coach and ended with his retirement as varsity coach in 2016 (he has subsequently coached at other high schools, including in Alabama and also worked temporarily as Croton’s AD a couple of years ago), figures he first met Green around 1980, when Thom was coaching CYO games and Green was officiating them.
“He was a letter-of-the-law guy. He knew all the rules. Anytime I had a question, he was my first call,” said Thom, who now divides his time between Alabama and New York and runs a basketball training business out of Gulf Shores, Alabama and Croton and Millbrook, N.Y.
Thom said he and Green, who was 15 when he started reffing men’s league games for $5 a game at the Jewish Community Center on South Broadway in Yonkers, would talk monthly by phone about everything from family to basketball.
“He always brought a strong opinion on things. Always brought love of family and just talking hoops — an official’s point of view,” Thom said.
Stopping by Thom’s annual Croton Recreation Department basketball camp in Croton last July, Green was very much the same old Howie Green with no plans to stop reffing.
“He was a guy who loved basketball,” Thom said. …”He was still going to referee lower-level and tutor (young refs) along the way. He was always looking to give back … He was a team player, always trying to do best for the collective group or an individual. …
“He always wanted what’s best for Section 1 basketball,” Thom said.
Thom thinks, even more than loving officiating, Green, who was retired from his main job of better than six decades in his family’s restaurant supply business, loved the connections he made with people through basketball.
That included timers and statisticians, coaches, ADs, parents (especially those of kids with challenges), to the players — bench-warmers to stars, including some who went on to the NBA.
“He was a vibrant personality,” said Baker, who coached boys basketball at Hen Hud for seven years before taking over as Hen Hud AD. (He’s currently wrapping up his 24-year career in that role.)
“The kids knew him, too,” Baker said. “They called him Howie. They’d say, ‘We got Howie today.’ He enjoyed the fun connections and communications he’d have with the athletes.”
Green, in fact, seemed to know everyone and everyone seemed to know him.
Kara Longin laughed, remembering, “We couldn’t go anywhere without him knowing somebody.”
That included a soccer ref at Brockport.
“If you played or coached in the last 50 years, you crossed paths with Howie Green,” said Greiner, a 1982 Valhalla High graduate, who noted Green reffed his basketball games when Greiner was a kid playing for Valhalla.
How many officials Green, a 1961 Yonkers High graduate, helped is unclear. Hundreds is probably a very conservative estimate.
Kara Longin said in the days that have followed her dad’s death, many people have told her family her dad had been their mentor.
“He loved working with a young, inexperienced guy because he knew he could help them,” Greiner said.
The give-back included two stints in the demanding role as Executive Board president of the 250-member Board 52 of the International Association of Approved Basketball Officials.
Moran laughed when remembering Green’s by-the-rules approach to things extended to officials attending board meetings and paying any fines levied against them — although Green did no more than grouse to him when that didn’t happen.
Moran, who started reffing at age 19, enjoyed Green’s support from the get-go and as he advanced up the ladder. Moran, who refs on the Div. I collegiate level, considered him his biggest fan.
“He came to every one of my playoff games last year. He’d text me (afterward), ‘Great job, as usual,’ ” Moran remembered.
Green had never put a timeline on retiring, probably because as long as he could run up and down the court, he was going to do what he loved.
“You thought he’d live forever. i just thought he’d keep going and going,” said Moran, who noted black and white pins, to be worn on pre-game warmup jackets, have been ordered for every ref in Board 51. The pins, bearing the initials HG, are expected to be delivered before the 2025-26 season begins.
Plans, he said, are also underway to create a scholarship in Green’s name.
24,000 games reffed over 66 years. The numbers are and will always remain staggering.
“Man, he loved officiating and everything about it,” Baker said, explaining it was clear from his first day reffing as a kid, to his final day calling a game, Green knew reffing was what he was “meant to do in this world.”
“Basketball made him who he was,” Greiner said.
“There’s never,” Moran said, “going to be another Howie Green.”
Note: Green is survived by Sandra (Sandi) Green, his wife of 58 years; daughter Karen Longin (son-in-law Edward); daughter Stacy Husman (son-in-law Gavin); granddaughters Kiley and Jayci Longin; brothers Billy Green and Alan Green; and cousins and nieces and nephews.
Nancy Haggerty writes about sports for The Journal News/lohud.