Biography
When he wore pads, cleats and helmet for Brown University, Ronald Abdow lined up at defensive end as a starter for three years. He says he was "pretty good", but not an All-Anything star (although, as a sophomore, then sixth ranked Princeton thought Abdow was good enough to be named first string on their All-Opponents team).
This year he is honored as first string on another team. He has been honored with the National Football Foundation's Official's Award for the 39 years he devoted to honing and advancing the art and craft of football officiating.
To Abdow, it was a way of staying with the game he had learned to love and enjoy so much. "I just wanted to stay with football; not have to leave the field," he said. "Playing whetted my appetite. When my college playing days were over, I just wanted to stay with football in some capacity."
Abdow began officiating in 1956. He was out of the U.S. Navy and about to go into business, but even with that full plate in front of him, he went out of his way to add some football to the menu. He became a volunteer football coach at Worcester (MA) Academy and began football officiating at the same time.
"When you're starting out as a green official", Abdow said, "the main thing is to get as much experience as you can, at whatever level of the game." He worked pee wee football, junior varsity high school, high school varsity: anything he could line up, whenever he could line it up.
In 1959, Ron and his brother George went into the restaurant business. Brother George was also a footballer. He had played and he, too, went into officiating. With the business beginning, then growing successfully, coaching went by the wayside for Ron. It just got to be too much.
But officiating, running up and down those sidelines every Saturday, feeling the smell of the field and the noise of the crowd and the anticipation and excitement on the faces of the young players; that he couldn't give up. For him, it was like playing. And he did until he was 62.
"Officiating was fun," he said. Football, playing as well as officiating, also taught him a lot of things that became vital in his business life. "I learned a lot of lessons that I was able to put into place in business," he said. "The teamwork among officials was easily transferable to business. The planning, the awareness of everything going on all around, the perseverance. As an official, just as a businessman, you have to learn how to scramble. My brother and I learned a lot of that."
And it served them well. Their first business venture grew into a chain. In 1963 they bought the Big Boy franchise in their area and eventually had 19 restaurants employing over 1,600 employees in the Springfield, Worcester (MA) and Hartford (CT) markets.
Abdow has been both successful in business and as a leader in his community. He was also getting there on the grid iron. In 1964, Abdow began officiating freshmen and junior varsity ECAC college games. It was a start; a way to work your way up. Then ECAC commissioner Scotty Whitelaw saw his potential and promoted him. He began doing Division I games. He always remembers supervisor of officials Art Hyland who kept giving him bigger and better games to work.
"Hyland was like a coach to me, "Abdow says." After a game he might yell at me, what he thought about this or that and sometimes he'd even give me a pat on the back."
Abdow maintains, to this day, that he never made a mistake on the field. Maybe he questioned himself a few times looking at film on Monday, but he is adamant about his on-the-field calls; especially an Army-Navy game about a decade or so ago where there wasn't a foul called. Not one. Hall of Fame coach Ara Parseghian, who was working the game as part of the television team that day, told Abdow he had never seen anything like it.
Working the field, Abdow was an umpire, which can be tough. You get bumped into. You fall. You're hit. "Sometimes it feels like you're dodging bullets out there," he said.
Abdow worked a lot of perennial rivalries such as Army/Navy, Penn State/Pitt, Holy Cross/Boston College. He worked in three conferences, the ECAC, CIFOA and Big East. He officiated nine Bowl games including Hall Of Fame, Liberty, Sun and the 1988 Orange Bowl which saw Miami beat Oklahoma for the national title.
If there was any negative, it was not being with his family. "They are the ones who sacrificed" he says. "And I didn't get to see my kids play high school sports."
Football today? He watches a lot of games. "My wife says I watch too many," Abdow says. "One to her, is one too many."
But after 39 years being away on football weekends, he understands.
Among his community work, Abdow served as chairman of the board of trustees for American International College, a trustee for the Bay State Medical Center and has been active in the Western Massachusetts Chapter of the National Football Foundation.
