From the South Bend Tribune:
http://www.southbendtribune.com/sbt-college-football-parrys-legacy-clearly-visible-20110516,0,31939.storyCollege football: Parry's legacy highly visible
By ERIC HANSEN
South Bend Tribune Staff Writer
John Roggeman can’t remember the first time he crossed paths with Dave Parry, which is actually the ultimate tribute to the closest thing football officiating has to an icon.
Parry, a longtime Michigan City resident who died at age 76 Monday after a long illness, knew he was doing his job at maximum efficiency when he was, well, invisible.
His memory, though, is anything but.
“It’s really impossible to weigh the impact he had on college football,” said Roggeman, a Big Ten football official when he isn’t serving as the director of employee relations for the South Bend Community School Corporation.
“Where would you even begin?”
Roggeman, a former football standout at Mishawaka High and Indiana University, would designate as his starting point Parry being the man who helped him make the jump from small-college officiating to the Big Ten level a decade ago.
But it never ended there, and there were so many others whose careers, whose lives were altered or at least touched by the former Wabash University three-sport star whose own leap into officiating came about because he wanted to earn some extra pocket money.
It wasn’t long after he started officiating those grade school games in college that the avocation morphed into a passion.
He brought that passion, though quietly and subtly, to his job as athletic director at Michigan City Rogers High School (1974-90), to his basketball and football officiating duties in the Mid-American Conference and the Big Ten, to his NFL officiating duties that included a Super Bowl and the infamous fog bowl in Chicago in 1988, to his role as longtime supervisor of Big Ten football officials.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt he made the officiating in the Big Ten better, though not that I always agreed with it,” said former Purdue coach Joe Tiller (1997-2008), now retired and living in Buffalo, Wyo.
“There was a standard the officials had to measure up to, and David was pretty serious about that. He did a good job of staying on top of those guys. And it was a tough job, because none of those guys are full-time.
“But if you had issues with the officiating, and every coach did from time to time, David never tried to sidestep them or dodge them.”
Parry was best known for helping usher instant replay into college football and later becoming the first national coordinator of college football officiating, in 2008. Parry retired from the national post just three months ago.
“Instant replay is a great thing for college football,” Tiller said. “David not only had a lot to do with getting it in, but making it better by working all the kinks out of it. It made officiating easier and it made the game better.”
Roggeman counts himself as one of many people whom Parry made better, on and off the athletic fields.
“The word I would use is ‘professional,’ ” Roggeman said, “but he was always down to earth, too. It was like you were talking to your next-door neighbor. Whether you were an official, a coach, a fan or an athletic director, he just had a good way about him. He has a lot of people tugging at him.
“It’s hard to put into words all the little things and big things he did, but I do know this, he’ll be missed.”
