By Tom Kendra
LocalSportsJournal.com

FRUITPORT–Some people can’t handle the pressure and scrutiny of officiating for 5 minutes.

Dave Fisher has been wearing the stripes and dealing with thousands of coaches, players and fans for 50 years … and counting.

Fisher, 75, a longtime Fruitport resident and former mathematics teacher, counselor and coach for the Trojans, met up for a chat on a recent Friday morning – fresh off working a girls basketball doubleheader the night before in Hesperia.

“I still enjoy it,” said Fisher, who has also been officiating Lakeshore football and baseball games since the early 1970s. “It’s good for my health and it makes me want to do things that keep me healthy.”

It sure is a good thing that “Fish” is still swimming.

In spite of ongoing efforts by the Michigan High School Athletic Association to attract and retain new officials, numbers are way down in the three main sports that Fisher works – football (total officials in Michigan down 20 percent since 2012), basketball (down 28 percent) and baseball (down 39 percent).

Fisher said the Muskegon area is better off than many areas of the state due to a core group of “old guys” (his contemporaries) who have hung on into their 70s, largely because of their love and passion for high school sports.

A couple of years ago, Fisher was working a basketball game at Mona Shores as part of a three-man crew – Joe Popiel of Spring Lake and Dave Baldus of Newaygo were the other officials – with a combined 146 years of basketball officiating experience.

Fisher keeps himself in excellent shape, takes no medications and believes he is a better official than in his younger days.

“I may not be able to cover as much territory as quickly, but I think I know how to officiate better,” said Fisher, who plans to work girls and boys basketball games this winter, primarily with Kirk Antekeier and Curtis Adams. “But, believe me, I have seen officials that have kept working for too long and should have quit.”

With that in mind, he ran into Joe Perrin, an evaluator of officials for the Ottawa-Kent Conference, a couple of years ago while working a game at Grandville Calvin Christian. Incidentally, Perrin had played baseball for Fisher in his first coaching and teaching job at Hudsonville High School in the early 1970s.

“I pulled Joe aside and told him: ‘Be highly critical of me. Be honest and tell me whether I should hang it up or keep going,” Fisher recalled.

After the game, Perrin gave him a two-word evaluation:

“Don’t quit.”

Fisher, a 1965 graduate of Muskegon High School, played basketball for Ed Hager and baseball for Harry Potter – two men who had a tremendous impact on his life, strong male role models after his father passed away when he was just 4 years old.

He went on to play four years of basketball and baseball at Kalamazoo College. After a brief stop at Hudsonville, he took a job teaching math at Fruitport High School.

Referee Dave Fisher

Fisher and his wife of 52 years, the former Kathy Meekhof, have three children – twins Jeff and Joy and younger sister, Jani – and now have 12 grandchildren.

Fisher, one of the founders of the Umpires of the Shoreline Association (now known as the USA Officials Association), has become the dean of officials in the Muskegon area and one of the most highly-respected referees in all of West Michigan – even though wearing the stripes was never his intention.

“My plan was to be a coach, and I figured if I was going to do that, I should at least know all the rules,” said Fisher, who retired from teaching at Fruitport in 1998. “So, I signed up for officiating classes to get all the rulebooks.”

As fate would have it, two of his good friends, brothers Bob and Bruce Bareham of Grand Haven, got Fisher onto their football crew and he fell in love with it.

Fisher also did his fair share of coaching through those years at various levels – including stints as head varsity coach at Fruitport in baseball and boys’ basketball, and even one infamous half-season as an emergency fill-in as varsity head football coach in 1980 (just two years after Fruitport cut sports and did not have a varsity football team in 1978).

He recently tried to figure out how many kids he has worked with over the past 55 years, between teaching, coaching, counseling, driver’s training for years in the summer and officiating.

“It came to at least 20,000 kids, so if I see you out and about and I remember your name, consider yourself lucky,” said Fisher, who has no plans to stop officiating any time soon.

Fisher, who wears the white hat as the referee on his local football crew which includes Chuck Hulce, Scott Smith, Todd Sellon and Darric Roesler, still gets strong ratings in all three sports. He was selected to work the Division 2 state championship football game at Ford Field between Grand Rapids Forest Hills Central and Warren DeLaSalle, but couldn’t do it because of a family illness.

Without question, Fisher has seen it all from coaches and players and heard it all from fans over the past 50 years.

A most memorable heckler?

Fisher takes a drink of his pop and smiles.

“I was working a basketball game a while back and things were going fine and a student called out to me during a break,” said Fisher, who then walked over to talk to the boy. “He said: ‘Hey ref, if you had one more eye, you’d be a Cyclops.’

“I thought that was pretty good.”