Before he was so rudely interrupted by a heart attack, Frank Smysor was seething about the media treatment of Big 12 Conference football official Terry Porter.

The seething, by the way, didn’t cause Smysor’s heart woes — a blocked artery knocked the long-time Lawrence referee out of commission for a week or so — but the inconvenience of hospitalization did delay his climb onto a soap box.

What finally triggered Smysor’s wrath was the comparison of Porter’s pass interference call in the national championship game between Miami and Ohio State to umpire Don Denkinger’s blown call at first base in the 1985 World Series — a gaffe that earned Denkinger the undying enmity of St. Louis Cardinals’ fans but a groundswell to enshrine the baseball arbiter in the Royals Hall of Fame.

The Porter-Denkinger comparison appeared in a certain large metropolitan daily newspaper located several miles east of Lawrence.

“There was only one problem with the comparison,” Smysor told me. “Denkinger was wrong and Porter was right.”

Still, replays of the pass interference call made by field judge Porter, a veteran Big 12 official from Stillwater, Okla., against the Miami defensive back in the end zone seemed to indicate the infraction was marginal. And what really set the media-types off was the fact line judge Derrick Bowers, another Big 12 official, was looking right at the play and left his yellow hanky in his pocket.

As Bowers waved the Ohio State pass incomplete, it appeared Miami had won the national championship. Some Hurricanes even began to celebrate. Then Porter threw the controversial delayed flag.

Why didn’t Bowers make a call? Smysor noted it was because the line judge’s responsibility is to look for illegal procedure, offside and forward progress, and that it was Porter’s job to monitor the receiver and defender.

“Porter did what he was trained to do,” Smysor said. “He saw the entire play and then replayed it in his mind before correctly calling a foul.”

Whether you believe Porter’s judgment was correct or incorrect doesn’t really matter, Smysor said, because the bottom line is Porter made the call for “all the right reasons while using the right mechanics.”

Incidentally, Smysor, who is 54 and has been officiating high school and small college basketball and football since 1971, was also amused by the television commentators’ insistence on calling Porter the back judge, even though he wore an “F” on the back of his striped shirt, and Bowers the side judge even though the “L” on his back was clearly evident.

My feeling is that if you hire seven men to officiate a football game, you must rely on their judgment. If you don’t, you have chaos. It’s as simple as that.

Are some officials better than others? Sure, but when you reach NCAA Division I-A level, the difference in the level of competence is minimal. Are they going to err from time to time? Certainly. Smysor admits that.

“They are human,” he said.

Added Smysor: “Most times the only reward officials get from their avocation is the knowledge they have done the best job possible.”

That depends on how you define the word “reward.” Every Big 12 Conference official earns $750 per game, plus $300 per diem which may sound like a lot of money, but the NFL pays about $2,000 per game, and that’s for rookie officials. Veteran officials can earn nearly $7,000 per game, counting per diem.

No wonder then that five officials who worked Big 12 Conference games in 2001 were wearing NFL stripes in 2002. Over the years, in fact, the NFL has lured many officials from the old Big Eight and the Big 12.

Smysor, in case you’re wondering, won’t be officiating any more basketball games this winter while he undergoes six weeks of heart rehab, but he does plan to resume officiating football games in the fall.

In the meantime, he is working part-time at his insurance agency and singing the standard lament of the post-heart attack sufferer.

“No fat, no salt, no sugar,” he quipped. “No fun.”