By Staff
June 3rd, 2019
BURLINGTON, ON
It is going to be a great evening to watch a basketball game with everyone glued to a TV screen and really pumped.
It didn’t work out quite that way but Councillor Nisan did say it was ‘Raptors in 6”
What few people will know is that the whistles being used by the referees is a Canadian product developed by Ron Foxcroft and manufactured in Canada.
Foxcroft spent his early years as a referee and came to the conclusion that a better whistle was necessary – the result was the Fox40.
These whistles are also wired up to stop the clock every time a referee blows.
Foxcroft kept a net in his office – was never sure when he was going to be called back to the courts.
And to think none of this would have happened if Foxcroft hadn’t have been a basketball referee who several times had the pea in his whistle get stuck, including in the gold medal game in the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
“I decided I needed to design a whistle that didn’t ever get stuck,” said the Hamilton and Burlington businessman, who earlier this year was bestowed with Canada’s highest honour of being made a companion of the Order of Canada.
Certainly the man known in basketball circles as Foxy has used his whistle in some big games, including in his decades as an NCAA referee.
Foxcroft testing one of his Fox 40 whistles.
He was on the court for the first game a guy named Michael Jordan played at the University of North Carolina in 1981.
He has also refereed an NBA exhibition game and went on to be an NBA official’s game performance evaluator.
“The Raptors are doing something that others have not been able to do,” Foxy mused. “They are uniting the whole country. There is no debate from people of all walks of life over their love of the Toronto Raptors.”
“It will be emotional,” he said. “As a Canadian, it’s a dream come true to see basketball being the focus.”
Foxcroft gave Queen Elizabeth one of the Fox 40 whistles when he was presented to her.
Back in his refereeing days, the Americans he worked NCAA games with teased: Shouldn’t you be refereeing that violent game with the slippery surface?
He laughs now, because who would have ever known the whistle he invented would be in the middle of every NBA game, no matter who is playing?
Or that a Canadian team would be just three wins from an NBA title?
