Art McNally’s Pro Football Hall of Fame induction was the dream of his late daughter

Rita O’Hara was fully aware that a referee had never been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but that didn’t stop her every year from writing a letter about her father’s credentials, imploring the Hall to keep him on the ballot for another vote.

If any referee deserved a gold jacket, O’Hara was certain it was her father.

Art McNally, a Philadelphia native whose instrumental career in the NFL spanned from Vince Lombardi to Bill Belichick, had no interest in campaigning, leaving his eldest daughter to type those letters. McNally helped the league introduce instant replay review, implemented rule changes that forever altered the style of play, and developed the standards that are still used for how referees are graded each Sunday.

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O’Hara worked with her father for seven years in the league office, saw how he treated others, and how people respected him. His career, she believed, belonged in Canton, Ohio, and it was her dream for him to be honored.

McNally, who turned 97 in July, will finally be inducted on Saturday when his bust is revealed at the Hall. But the honor comes three years after O’Hara — the daughter who championed her father’s cause — died at 59 after a two-year battle with melanoma.

“The best word I can think of is surreal,” said O’Hara’s son, Connor. “We never thought it was going to happen. We always thought he would be in the shadows. Now that he’s in the light, it’s very weird. We’re not used to it.

“She wanted it more than him, probably.”

Brian O’Hara, then an assistant football coach at Archbishop Wood, met his wife after a game at the Goalpost, a bar in Levittown owned by former Villanova coach Dick Bedesem. Rita, Brian said, was funny, gregarious, and opinionated. And it didn’t take long for him to find out how much she adored her father.

“I’m glad that he liked me,” O’Hara said. “Because she told me that if he didn’t, then she wouldn’t have married me.”

Art McNally’s first wife, Rita Krout McNally, died in December 1981 when their daughter Rita was a senior at King’s College. Rita was the oldest of four children and her mother’s death brought her even closer to her father.

He started his NFL career as a field judge in 1959 while still teaching at Central High but had since moved up the ranks to be the NFL’s director of officiating. McNally’s job involved long hours and put him on the road most weekends, leaving his daughter to help run their Yardley home.

Rita graduated with degrees in business and accounting but after college went to work in the league’s Manhattan office as an administrative assistant for her father. She had started working there during her summer breaks from college, which, she told her husband, seemed like a great idea until her dad was screaming, “Let’s go” from the bottom of the steps as they hurried to catch their early-morning train to New York.

Those years in Manhattan gave her a new perspective of her father. For years, the McNally kids would wait on the corner of their street for their dad to come home from work. Now she was able to see what he had been doing.

“I think that made her respect him even more and gave another light to him,” Brian O’Hara said. “She saw him at work and saw how people respected him and how everyone always said great things about her dad. I believe he was her hero and he was her role model. Art always did the right thing. He was a good guy to emulate and a good person to have as a role model.

“As our kids grow up, we know they become adults, but we also always think of them as our kids. Where I think at some point, that wasn’t them. They were almost equals. It was a mutual respect. He ultimately trusted her.”

Rita wanted her children — Shannon and Connor — to think of her father the same way she did. So the O’Haras were always driving from their home in Burlington to swim in their grandfather’s pool or play with his dogs.

Connor O’Hara mowed his grandfather’s lawn each summer, with the reward coming halfway through the day when his grandfather shouted out the door to O’Hara and his buddy, Ryan Bell, to see if they were hungry.

“We’d come running in and he’d get us food and that’s when he would go off with his great stories,” said Connor O’Hara, who played college football at Misericordia. “We would just sit there and listen to all his stories.”

McNally started his career by refereeing sandlot games in 1946 at American and Luzerne Streets for $5 and moved on to college and semipro football and basketball before becoming an NBA ref. He was hired by the NFL in 1959, was an alternate referee for Super Bowl I, and moved into the league office in 1968 to run the officiating department after refereeing a playoff game coached by Lombardi.

The rules changes McNally oversaw in 1978 — the 5-yard bump for defensive backs and allowing offensive linemen to block using their hands — modernized the game and introduced more offense, allowing the league to reach new heights. McNally is known as the “Father of Instant Replay” as he first introduced it in 1985 and the league’s Manhattan command center (where every replay review is consulted) is named for him.

But the stories he told O’Hara and Bell over lunch often had little to do with football. Instead, he told them about his time as a U.S. Marine in World War II, about attending Temple on the G.I. Bill, and teaching at Central.

“He was in one of his first classes at Temple and they went around the room with the teacher doing that typical elementary school question: What do you guys want to be when you grow up? Everyone gave their normal answers. Lawyer, own a business, yada yada,” Connor O’Hara said. “Then it got to him and he said, ‘I want to be an official on the high school, college, or professional level’ and the whole class started laughing.

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“He stood up and he said, ‘One day, I will walk into Madison Square Garden holding a referee bag and I will work a game.’ He sat back down. Ten or 15 years later, he ended up working a [basketball] game at Madison Square Garden and it all came full circle. He says it with such conviction and he knew he wouldn’t fail from that moment. It seemed like it lit a fire under him from the way he would tell us that story.”

The whole neighborhood — “20 freaking kids,” Brian O’Hara said — seemed to pile into the O’Hara family home on Sundays during football season, moving Rita to order a sectional couch for their living room and buy a 70-inch TV. Her children’s friends were coming to watch the Eagles, but they were also coming to see her.

“The way you could tell that she had a great personality is how our kids’ friends would come in here and sit down and talk to her,” Brian O’Hara said. “It was like they were going to the pope. They were having an audience. Maybe it was girlfriend troubles or they were having job troubles or school troubles. You could trust her. She was like her father. She wasn’t a softie. If you were doing something wrong, she would tell you. But she had that thing about her that she could always calm everyone down. She could put out the fires.”

Neighbors used to invite Rita over to help their children pick their colleges and others would knock at the door unannounced, hoping Rita would be able to solve whatever problem they were facing. That was Rita, her daughter said.

“I know everyone says that they have the best mom in the whole world and I know that that’s true to everyone, but I feel that way about her,” Shannon O’Hara said. “She was everyone’s mom. She just wanted to see us all succeed. If she could help with that, she was right there for everyone. It didn’t matter if you were her biological child or not. If you were there and you needed an ear, she was there for you. I think she got a lot of that from her dad and having that close connection with him.”

Rita O’Hara left the NFL to work in the hospitality industry before working as an event planner. She knew how to throw a party, her husband said. And this weekend would have been the big one.

“Every time I think of this, I think of her,” Brian O’Hara said. “It’s a shame. I’m not being ungrateful and no one in our family is, but it’s a shame that she’s not here to see it and he’s not in his best of health. It’s just a shame. But hey, that’s the way life works sometimes. We think about her all the time. The kids have said it on more than one occasion: ‘Mom would’ve loved this.’ She would have.”

McNally retired from the NFL in 1990 but returned two years later to direct the referees in the World Football League — the predecessor to NFL Europe — before rejoining the NFL office in 1995. He stayed on until he was 90, spending the last eight years of his career as a referee observer.

He was just as sharp then as he was when he was in the stadium overseeing the officials who ruled on the Immaculate Reception and the Tuck Rule. But his body is now starting to slow down, which will McNally to watch Saturday’s ceremony from home. His family members will represent him as they flew out Wednesday morning to Ohio for three days of festivities.

“This was not his thing. He was not trying to go into the Hall of Fame. Do you know what I mean?” Brian O’Hara said. “This was her dream. But I know that he would have appreciated this and this would have been extremely important to him. It would’ve been the best honor that he could have ever gotten. To them, it would have been their journey.”

Connor O’Hara will be McNally’s presenter on Saturday in a video played at the ceremony and Shannon O’Hara will give a speech on stage when their grandfather’s bust is unveiled. It was Rita O’Hara’s dream for her father’s legacy to end up in Canton and her children will represent her this weekend when that dream becomes reality. And perhaps those letters played a part.

“We know she can see all of this and she’s probably just laughing, honestly,” Shannon O’Hara said. “I feel like she always knew that this would happen. She’s definitely smiling down on us.”

“I wish she was here,” Connor O’Hara said. “But she’s going to be very happy looking down. Tears of joy, I would say, if you can cry in heaven.”