Joey Crawford is Quintessential Delco
When it comes to basketball, my alma mater of Cardinal O’Hara High School has a few notable alumni. There’s Speedy Claxton’s sister, disgraced referee Tim Donaghy, mysterious foreign import Deng Deng (who appeared at O’Hara when I was a senior for a few months and then vanished, only to reappear last season on the Baylor Bears), and superstar referee Joey Crawford. Crawford, of course, is a superstar only in his own mind, and is a laughing stock to pretty much everyone else. In fact, that sums up his home county pretty well in and of itself. Delco: Superstars in our own minds, laughingstocks everywhere else. What else does Joey Crawford have in common with the Delco from which he came?
[Let me preface this by saying I spent all of my formative years in Delco and I love it for all of it’s many, many flaws. Most of the time.]
He lets you hear it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFN6PyNkjTg
Dude loved Allen Iverson
From Tim Donaghy, via Deadspin:
By contrast, referee Joe Crawford had a grandson who idolized Iverson. I once saw Crawford bring the boy out of the stands and onto the floor during warm-ups to meet the superstar. Iverson and Crawford’s grandson were standing there, shaking hands, smiling, talking about all kinds of things. If Joe Crawford was on the court, I was pretty sure Iverson’s team would win or at least cover the spread.
He knows you’re talking shit, and he won’t hear it
He’s not as athletic as he used to be
https://vine.co/v/ebm2wJh09Bq
He can’t dance
https://vine.co/v/O0uHEEJi6lT
He’s bald, and when he had hair, it was bad
He’s got anger issues
From a New York Times profile:
“One night, I hit Bill Fitch with a technical so hard, I broke my finger. My finger was all swollen. I slammed my whole hand down on it when I gave the signal. That’s why I changed my signal to a little one-finger tap — because I broke it once the old way.
Honestly, I think after that whole mess was the first time I called the sports psychologist.”
He used to tell time by number of cigarettes
From the same profile:
“How did I know halftime was over? When I finished my second cigarette.”
He threatened to fight people for no reason
There are two, he said. The first is regarding his actions that led to a guilty plea of falsely stating income in 1998 after an I.R.S. investigation into several referees’ pocketing cash from downgraded airline tickets. The second is an incident in 2007 in which Crawford and the San Antonio Spurs star Tim Duncan had an on-court verbal altercation. Duncan said Crawford challenged him to a fight.
However, it can probably never be said that Joey Crawford is the most Delco person around, since we don’t know if he’s got a closet full of cargo shorts and a cross tattoo on his leg under those referee pants.
