Weekly Times | MAURICE Rudolph could give anyone tips on how to take criticism — whether that criticism was warranted or not.
Rudolph will umpire his 1000th match today, in the Horsham and District league between Pimpinio and Taylors Lake.
He joined the ranks of the Wimmera Football Umpires Association in 1979, but next week the 58-year-old will also mark 39 years since he started working for the local council.
Rudolph, from Horsham, started out as a ticket inspector and is now the co-ordinator of local laws, issuing fines for various misdemeanours.
It’s a double-up that WFUA president Kingsley Dalgleish joked made Rudolph a “glutton for punishment”, but Rudolph said the two jobs “reinforce each other”.
“If you’re dealing with the decision-making process where you need to reinforce things that people are doing wrong, I think the umpiring actually gave me confidence to do my job, and vice versa,” Rudolph said.
Dalgleish said Rudolph’s longevity was “amazing”.
“It’s a fantastic achievement for anybody to have such a service to our game, whether it’s administration, playing or umpiring,” Dalgleish said.
Rudolph has seen every side of football imaginable, including the bizarre.
He said he once had to report an umpire for striking a player, umpired a game where the winning side kicked 10 goals straight in wet conditions, and saw a goal attempt that bounced off the top of both goal posts.
Rudolph said the worst score he ever saw was 1.12 to 0.6, and as a further source of amusement — or derision — from spectators, the player who kicked the goal was dating one of Rudolph’s daughters at the time.
“I got a bit of flak for giving him the free kick (that resulted in the goal),” Rudolph said.
He has seen the heartbreaking, recalling to this day a senior grand final where a young player — still a teenager at the time, Rudolph believed — took a mark in the dying seconds of the match.
Instead of running all the way into the goal square to kick a goal, as he had the space to do, Rudolph said the player “blazed away” and kicked a behind, and his side lost the match by two points.
“You see the agony and the ecstasy in those close games,” Rudolph said.
Rudolph said he would not give up umpiring while he still enjoyed it, and the idea he was waiting to pass today’s milestone to retire was wrong.
“I guess (reaching 1000 games was) something I never really thought would be impossible, given I’ve always kept myself reasonably fit, but really it is just another game,” he said.
“It’s the players’ game and we’re only there to do a job and I don’t want to be there to be put on a pedestal so to speak.
“I’ll go through the motions and hope I don’t make any major errors on the day.”