Remembering Mel Narol

By Jack Furlong

Founder/President/CEO

In the spring of 2024, a colleague handed me a book entitled “Good Sports,” published about ten years before the turn of the century and written by the late Rick Wolff, a sports psychologist who many in the greater New York area would recognize from his radio program on WFAN.  While reading the book, Wolff referenced Mel Narol, an attorney from Princeton, NJ, whose specialty was representing sports officials who were assaulted on the field.  Seeing how OSIP’s home is just outside Princeton, I took it upon myself to learn more about Narol.
 
Unfortunately, I learned that Narol passed away in 2002 at the age of 51 from a heart attack.  He is buried in a cemetery in my hometown.  I tried to reach out to his daughter who is around my age and attended a private school near my public high school, but the lead went cold.  I had hoped to interview his daughter or some of his colleagues on our podcast to learn more about him.
 
Narol championed a large list of professional accomplishments.  He officiated basketball and served as legal counsel to collegiate athletic conferences while also teaching collegiate law.  He was highly involved with the National Associated of Sports Officials and wrote for Referee Magazine.
 
The law firm where Narol worked was a local one that had sponsored teams in my youth baseball league when I was young.  At the time, the name of that team was just a passing sound of names that happened to represent a company of lawyers who appeared no differently than all the other lawyers in the area.  Little did I know years later that I had been in the presence of the name of the firm that employed a man who would be so crucial to my desire to see aid given to assault victims who simply wanted to officiate an athletic competition.
 
Why did Narol do what he did?  And why was it so important for him to do so?  I began to ask myself these questions and pretend that I could answer them on his behalf.  I started with the obvious:  if you’re a lawyer, you’re probably practicing law in some capacity to earn a living.  But a man who has such a love of sports and officiating probably saw an opportunity to combine his passions and make an immense difference, especially when innocent people are wronged by the physical assaults of others stemming from a youth athletic contest.  From there, word of mouth and a media presence probably accelerated things, turning Narol into the go-to for these victims.  It may not be a glamorous rise to stardom, but it is a path to becoming a respected professional and important member of society.
 
There’s something trite about the archetype of a mystery where an investigator digs deep into the past of someone deceased looking for information or answers about why something occurred.  I felt like I was living that plot while constantly searching for information about Narol, but I knew I wasn’t trying to solve a mystery.  Instead, I just wanted to learn more about him and his work, like a student who becomes obsessed with a historical figure.
 
There was no ‘whodunnit’ payoff on this journey.  Rather, by the time I composed this post, I was left with an emptiness of regret that the opportunity to know this man had passed many years prior.  I wondered if the people I sought wanted privacy, as if I had opened an old wound; the possibility of that left me with guilt, as it was not my intention to do so.  I wondered if those people didn’t take me seriously, like the work of our organization was not a battle worth fighting anymore.  It was more than likely that life just got busy for these people.  Even so, however, I was left with questions, not answers…and many of those questions lacked the ability to even be formed.
 
I’m not sure it’s appropriate to call the words of this submission an obituary or a eulogy.  I’m also not sure that anything I can say here does this man or his work justice.  I just wish Mel was still with us so I could learn more about who he was, what he did, and why he did it.  He would have made an excellent member of our board of directors.