Traffic Cops In Bloody-Nose Alley It's a long, hard climb from the snakepits to the ECAC big time.

They slip into the college gymnasiums that dot the East coast from Harvard's IAB to the fastness of Orono, Maine and Buffalo with civilian anonymity and emerge from their solitary dressing rooms as marked men.

The ECAC plunks this select breed of traffic cops on to inhospitable hardwood floors to oversee the rough and tumble of collegiate basketball, as they are buffeted up and down the court for 40 minutes by the breakneck action that dominates today's brand of play.

"Charlie's got a lot of guts out there," says referee John Hannon of his fellow official and sometime partner Charles H. Diehl, who is acknowledged by his whistle-toting peers as the premier ECAC strongman.

The men who metamorphose into traffic cops of the maelstrom in the foul land--known as slaughter alley--during the day labor at desk jobs and are often doctors, lawyers, and school teachers. There's a Jekyll and Hyde element deeply ingrained in officiating. "I'm always surprised at the high-class people who go into it and stay with it," says Diehl. Officials are often "pillars of the community who no one questions," he says, "but put on a black and white shirt and they suddenly become suspect."

Referees inhabit a closed but unstable world, based on a jesuitical hierarchy of ratings. After working each game, refs receive a secret grade on their performance from the coaches of both teams and a "brother" official on a scale from one to ten. Ratings are an official's lifeblood. Those who fall into the bottom ten per cent of the pile at the end of the year are summarily sacked and replaced by "freshmen officials," who are brought up from the snakepits of high school ball and community leagues. "The cut gives iniative to young guys who are just starting out," Diehl says. "I like to think that we're very democratic."

Split second decisions are the name of the game and mindless impartiality is an ironclad rule. Mendy Rudolph, the former chief of NBA officials turned television commentator, says "Blow with reckless abandon and let the chips fall where they may."

Diehl and Hannon adhere to Rudolph's philosophy. Neither feels it's imperative or appropriate to stick to the multitude of rococo rules. "I have a great tendency to make up my own rules for 50 occasions," Diehl says. "The object is to win it within the four black lines they have out there. The ten kids are there to play basketball and not so two clowns can blow a whistle," he says. "As soon as they think of a way to get rid of us they will, but they haven't yet."

What this adds up to is that refs must keep the action on a tight leash without intruding on the game's natural tempo with staccato bursts of foul calling. "I've yet to come against a coach who wants a lot of shoving, banging, or grabbing," says Hannon. "You just set your mind that you're going to keep on blowing your game, because you don't want a fight. Next day the fight's in all the papers and the first thing everyone does is look who worked the game."

Hannon, who looks like a trim Baretta with silvery sideburns, has hoofed both the floors of sardine-can high school gyms and gleaming, 12,000-seat civic centers in his 19 years of officiating. He works as the manager of Rand McNally's shipping and receiving warehouse and lives in Cambridge.

Hannon played high school ball and in the YMCA league, but was injured in a game when he was 27 and decided to take the mandatory written exam for entering the referee ranks. The would-be refs are also marked on a "flaw test," says Hannon, which "is pretty much cut and dried." After making the grade, refs work junior varsity ball for two years and then apply to be placed on the ECAC freshmen officials list. They are then either elected or relegated to the high schools by a vote of varsity-level officials.

The top refs case the various colleges' offensive patterns so they know what to look for in the constant bump and grind that can flare into fisticuffs unless kept under control. "It's a new game every night," Hannon says. "I know the teams that run the fast break and know that I have to get down the court." He points out that there are many teams that press and zone-press right off the bat, forcing officials to monitor swarming action at both ends of the court.

While the two teams feel themselves out at the start of a game, Diehl is asking himself "are they pressing, using a 1-3-1, or a box and one? Once you figure out the style of play," he said, "you can prepare yourself as to where the action takes place."

Reffing is a joint effort hinging on a subtle choreography between partners. One official is always stationed on the baseline policing underneath while the other scours the action on the perimeter. The two switch positions after every foul call.

With the constantly increasing height and mobility of college big men, the ref underneath has a chore tantamount to untangling gregarious octopi. "The referee on the outside is the key to the whole game" explains Hannon. "He has the best picture. He's the bailout guy."

Any tensions that may arise between partners during a game are judiciously stifled because of Hannon puts it, "you're the only two survivors on the floor."

Diehl says he must be lax about a partner's lapses, "you're not supposed to steal calls from a partner. That's a cardinal sin. It's a thing where you get upset but its something you keep to yourself."

As for the occasional blooper to which every man who has ever donned the pinstripes falls prey, Hannon ruefully explains "sometimes while blowing the whistle I'd like to eat it. You know it's wrong but you try not to let them know it. All you can do is say "oh, oh, now I've got a selling proposition."

Diehl is more matter of fact. "It bothers you," he says. "But I feel it's so long since I made one."

The common belief that the homecourt advantage sways officials because they are loath to rile the clambering multitude has little credibility with either Hannon or Diehl. "It doesn't bother me" says Hannon, "if you make the call right away, at least you're calling what you're seeing. You're like a salesman out there and you've got to make the two teams assured of what you're doing."

Diehl sums up his gutty brand of no-holds-barred officiating when he says "I think most officials have suicidal tendencies anyway. If a foul's there, it's there."

Diehl is referee nonpareil while combing a puckish candor and scholarly insight into the game. He is supervisor of officials for all of New England and has served on the board of directors and as president of the Collegiate Basketball Officials Association (CBOA).

The CBOA presents the prestigious Samuel Schoenfeld award to the college coach who displays the greatest sportsmanship on the bench, so that officials are conscious of coaches' demeanors.

Harvard's former coach Floyd Wilson was twice presented with the Schoenfeld and current mentor Tom "Satch" Sanders was similarly honored in his first year at the Crimson's helm. Sanders says "it's not an award most coaches want to win." It means "you haven't given the referees a lot of heat."

High school referees are affiliated with an organization called IAABO, which as far as Diehl knows stands for "I am a blind official."

In his capacity as troubleshooter for the CBOA, Diehl controls a network that observes the more than 30 refs in the Boston locale in action. "When you're on the varisity list it's a great experience" says Hannon. "You know you're going to be tested. The story's acceptance."

Diehl remains a bachelor and is rooted to the Somerville neighborhood in which he grew up. Like Hannon, who is on the board of directors of the Cambridge YMCA, he is deeply committed to the welfare of the community, but bemoans Somerville's status as the nation's leader in car thefts.

He recounted a game he once worked that had the dubious distinction of lasting two days because of a leaky gym ceiling. The recollection was not an unfound one because the extra day prevented Diehl from attending a meeting of the Somerville Elks on the night the den was raided, the lodge leaders arrested, and the slot machine confiscated.

Diehl has never overseen a game he did not complete in over 20 years reffing. "You'd better not quit during a game," Hannon says, as backup officials are only provided for tournaments. Diehl obviously takes the injunction seriously. He once broke his ankle after stepping on a loose ball but went the route anyway.

Diehl started out in the game by playing on a Somerville High School quintet that won the state championship. He captained Northeastern's squad and after graduating turned in coaching stints at Huntington Prep and Christopher Columbus high schools.

Diehl's genuine concern for the down-trodden young extends further than his ties with mercuric collegiate pheenoms who may rise to the galactic reaches of the NBA. His regular profession is that of probation officer. He invariably works with 17 to 23 year olds, who are mainly drug offenders. "It's kind of like officiating" he muses. "We have our successes and we have our failures but its also like officiating because we only know about our failures." On the side, Diehl conducts a five class clinic at Somerville High every year to prep young men for the ECAC examination.

Diehl, along with the three other area supervisors for Philadelphia-Washington, metropolitan New York-New Jersey, and Upstate New York, is responsible for the laborious paperwork of pairing officials before the season begins. "We religiously hold to not overexposing our officials" he says, as normally a ref will work only two home games and two on the road for the same college.

The ratings are the catch-all that govern pairings and scheduling. Their justification lies in the dog-eat-dog theory that "you're only as good as your next game" and Diehl adds that "we manage through years and years to be consistently lousy."

Those officials with the top ratings work the top games and, in the process accumulate the fattest bankrolls. The 500 to 600 CBOA officials fall into four salary categories, in which they are cast by their respective ratings. Excluding expenses, a college may select a referee who commands anywhere from $40-$80 per game.

The selection procedure usually means that if there's a donnybrook in the area, you will probably find Diehl in the limelight working with a partner from New Jersey or New York, a setup which is known as a "split crew." This was the case for the televised Boston College-Georgetown hoedown on February 21, for which Diehl arrived his usual hour and a half before the opening tap-off. He had worked Harvard's five-point loss to Penn the night before at Philadelphia's Palestra.

For Diehl, good refereeing consists of a triad of intangibles he labels consistency, acceptance, and control. Hannon phrases his motto as "knowledge of the rules, good judgment, and fairness." Whatever the criteria, every official aims to have "the perfect angle" when he makes a call, which Diehl describes as having the play in full view from its inception to the time of the infraction. "There is no perfect position, you've got to work for it," he adds. For Hannon "the key to the whole thing is hustling and getting down the court."

Every ref adds his personal flourish to his calls, especially some flamboyant types whom fans call pejoratively "hop, skip, and a jump-you're a chump refs." Nevertheless Diehl says that positioning and hand signalling have become basically uniform.

Diehl is consistently at loggerheads with spectators and coaches, the dual bane of the ref. He credits widespread fan misunderstanding of the game to the basketball playing boom. The result is "they're all experts. In football they blow a whistle, throw a flag, and go into a huddle. No one pretends to understand the game."

Both Diehl and Hannon stress that college coaches are under the gun every time their team takes to the floor, so any sympathy is misplaced. "You have to keep in mind that there's a coach on the other side of the bench and it's his bread and butter too," Diehl says. Both profess immunity to the hostile bantering of coaches. "You just can't worry that the guy on the other end of the bench doesn't like your work," Hannon says. "A certain few coaches are going to bother everyone." Diehl ribs coaches who huddle their charges in protracted timeouts, saying "they do the coaching and then they say the rosary."

Diehl works around three games a week while Hannon does 70 to 80 in a season. A pedometer attached to an NBA referee clocked just over six miles in a game, which is a lot of mileage considering younger officials may oversee up to 150 games over a campaign.

The fine art of refereeing has evolved over the years, although most of the changes are not on the order of macro-mutations. Besides basic rule changes that have come in, such as the ban on dunking and an automatic technical for vibrating the backboard, Diehl describes a fundamental change in the officials' psychological pampering of players. "We've had to adjust our thinking and our approach because the generation has changed, with their free speech so to speak. We'll give a kind word now instead of a technical."

The reward for officiating is neither lucre nor recognition but "a job well done," Diehl says. "Self-satisfaction is the only satisfaction you're really going to get. We're out there because we want to be out there, not because we have to be." Diehl says "if any official is looking for recognition he should get the hell out. The best compliment is not to be recognized the next day."

Refs may not court recognition or notoriety but while working the nationally prominent games or "suicide games" as Diehl calls them, he and Hannon are about as innocuous as a tandem of sprightly young tarantulas. The two may be roving foci for the stewing frustrations of players whose shots aren't dropping, coaches who have an axe to grind, and a steady verbal effluvium from the stands, but at all costs they try to avoid controversy while on the floor. In short, "if you're constantly in controversy, you're not going to last too long," says Diehl.

The hour and a half before Georgetown is pitted with B.C. is practically over and Diehl emerges from the officials' dressing room for the tinny rendition of the national anthem. After the introductions, replete with cart-wheeling cheerleaders, Diehl briskly steps into the centercourt circle, gives the ball an authoritative toss, and sets out on his six-mile trek with a sure stride and stony-faced impenetrability that makes his profession the lodestar of steadfast control and lockjawed authority in college basketball, while the festooned NBC logos, pied banners, and roar of "Go, Hoyas go" from the Georgetown faithful symbolize all that is hoopla and froth in the big time.