I received a note from Pima County Sports Hall of Fame sports activist Dale Lopez last week saying that, among other things, he had been proud to be the public address announcer for the last game of Tucson sports official Cleo Robinson’s stellar 47-year career.
Robinson, a former state championship football player and track performer at Marana High School in the mid-1960s, worked Tuesday’s Pueblo-Sunnyside girls basketball game and quietly walked away, if that’s possible.
Robinson
In 1978, Robinson’s friend Lorenzo Carter, one of the top baseball umpires in Tucson history, encouraged Robinson to become an official. What a good idea.
Robinson was probably the Pac-12’s top football official of the 1990-2010 period, or close. He worked 21 bowl games. More than that, he surely called more than 1,000 Tucson basketball and football games, from middle school to state championship games. He was named the 1998 AIA Official of the Year.
Tucson has been blessed by a history of elite sports officials; 21 of them have been inducted into the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame, from Pat Flood, Boyd Baker, Jim Fogltance, Dean Metz and Bud Grainger, to Bobby Rauh, long-time NFL referee Rich Hall and Chris Rastatter, who is now the head of the NCAA men’s basketball officials.
It would be impossible to rank them from 1 to 21, but let’s just say that Robinson would be somewhere close to No. 1. His smiling countenance in a game too often ruled by unhappy faces will be missed.
