Football Official and Sporting Good Businessman
After retiring from professional football, Goebel worked in his sporting good business in Grand Rapids, and also worked during football season as a game official for the Big Ten Conference. For 16 years between 1935 to 1952, he was a Big Ten football official. He also officiated in Rose Bowl, Notre Dame, and Army-Navy games.
Goebel played a role in a famous Ohio State-Illinois game on November 13, 1943. The game was Paul Brown's last game as coach of the Buckeyes. With the score tied 26-26, Ohio State threw an incomplete forward pass into the end zone as the gun sounded. The game appeared to have ended in a tie, the teams left the field, and the stands emptied. However, Ohio State assistant coach Ernie Godfrey had noticed Goebel, who was the head linesman, drop a handkerchief to signal a penalty. On hearing the gun sound, Goebel had picked up the handkerchief and put it back in his back pocket. Godfrey confronted Goebel, who conceded that Illinois was offsides. Twenty minutes later, the teams came back onto the field and the Buckeyes kicked a 33-yard field goal to give Coach Brown a 29-26 win in his final game.
During World War II, Goebel served in the U.S. Navy as Lieutenant Commander on an aircraft carrier. His final game as an official was the 1952 Rose Bowl between Illinois and Stanford, in which he was the head linesman.
Goebel was also a fisherman, winning the title of Trout King at the National Trout Festival in 1949.
Read more about this topic: Paul G. Goebel
Famous quotes containing the words football, official, sporting and/or businessman:
“...I’m not money hungry.... People who are rich want to be richer, but what’s the difference? You can’t take it with you. The toys get different, that’s all. The rich guys buy a football team, the poor guys buy a football. It’s all relative.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“... it is a rather curious thing to have to divide one’s life into personal and official compartments and temporarily put the personal side into its hidden compartment to be taken out again when one’s official duties are at an end.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“The Boston papers had never told me that there were seals in the harbor. I had always associated these with the Esquimaux and other outlandish people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the coast you may see families of them sporting on the flats. They were as strange to me as the merman would be. Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail over the sea. To go to sea! Why, it is to have the experience of Noah,—to realize the deluge. Every vessel is an ark.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If when a businessman speaks of minority employment, or air pollution, or poverty, he speaks in the language of a certified public accountant analyzing a corporate balance sheet, who is to know that he understands the human problems behind the statistical ones? If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart. It is as simple as that—but that isn’t simple.”
—Louis B. Lundborg (1906–1981)