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Jim Tunney Dies: Legendary NFL Referee Who Officiated Some Of The Sport’s Most Memorable Games Was 95
Jim Tunney, who worked some of the most memorable games in NFL history over the course of his 31-year career, died Thursday at his home in Pebble Beach.
Jim Tunney, who worked some of the most memorable games in NFL history over the course of his 31-year career, died Thursday at his home in Pebble Beach. Tunney got his start as a field judge in 1960 and over the decades he worked games so singular that they garnered their own nicknames: The Ice Bowl was the 1967 NFL Championship between Dallas and Green Bay, so called because the temperature was about −15 °F with an average wind chill around −48 °F; The Catch, the 1981 NFC Championship game in which San Francisco beat Dallas by one point got its name after Dwight Clark made a leaping catch at the back of the end zone on a pass from Joe Montana; and then there was The Fog Bowl, a playoff matchup between Philadelphia and Chicago in 1988 where the fog was so thick that players could not see the sidelines or first-down markers. “School was out on Friday afternoon, and the next morning I’d get on a plane at LAX and fly to Detroit or Green Bay or Miami or someplace else by myself,” he recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times earlier this year.
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