When the whistle blows Friday to kick off the opening match of the 2002 World Cup, two men on opposite sides of the Atlantic will be looking closely.
Not at the televised game. At the whistle, to see whether it has a pea in it.
To pea or not to pea is the question facing the World Cup's 72 soccer referees. A pea is the ball, nowadays made of chemically coated cork, that twirls within a whistle's chamber when blown. By their whistle choice, World Cup referees will be voting for Simon Topman or Ron Foxcroft.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
Topman's J. Hudson & Co has been making the ACME Thunderer, the first whistle model to have a pea, in the UK since 1884.
Canadian former referee Foxcroft founded Fox 40 International in 1987 to make the Fox 40, the world's top-selling pea-less whistle, after a pea got stuck in his whistle while refereeing the 1976 Olympic gold-medal basketball game.
Each man says his product is the way to blow.
Sitting in his Birmingham, England, office, Topman leafs through a stack of graphs from the University of Birmingham's Acoustic Department, which tests the 83 ACME whistles Hudson makes. He says the graphs show that whistles with a pea require less effort, or "flow rate," to make noise, and that they cover a wider range of frequencies.
Using a pen, Topman holds down the pea on an ACME Thunderer and blows. The sound is loud but thin because, he says, it's limited to one frequency. When released, the pea spins in the chamber, interrupting the sound five times a second though the human ear can't discern the on-and-offs.
"It's easier to blow a pea whistle," said Topman, 38.
"Imagine you're a referee and you're almost out of breath just as you have to whistle for a foul."
That's hot air, says Foxcroft, 56, whose annual sales of US$29 million are triple those of Hudson's ACME whistles.
He went through 14 prototypes before introducing the pea-less product at the 1987 Pan-American Games in Indianapolis, Indiana.
To replicate the wide range of frequencies of a pea whistle, the Fox 40 has three air chambers, one underneath and two on top, each producing at a different frequency. Foxcroft chose the brand name because he had just turned 40.
"When you blow a pea whistle hard, the pea goes to the roof and gets stuck," Foxcroft said. "It gets wet, it gets corroded, it gets dirty and it gets filled with bacteria. We brought innovation to whistles."
Everyone has an opinion on whistles.
Arthur Smith, general secretary of England's Referees Association, says he's been using ACME Thunderer his whole career. "I've never had any problem with it," he said.
Gilles Veissiere, France's World Cup referee, says he switched to the Fox 40 as soon as it arrived on the French market about 15 years ago.
"With the old whistles, the cork could get stuck, or it would get wet from saliva or dry out," he said. "I'd find myself blowing rather than whistling."
Because referee whistles range from US$1.25 for a plastic one to US$8 for a brass-plated model, the choice of whistle isn't based on price. "It's a very personal choice depending on what sound you like," said Smith.
Joseph Hudson, a London toolmaker, is believed to be the first to put a pea in a whistle. He invented the ACME Thunderer in 1884 to distinguish the referee-produced sound from the company's one-tube whistle used by the London police force. Later models were used by officers on the Titanic.
Referee whistles account only for 5 percent of Hudson's ? 6 million (US$10 million) of annual sales. Among its products are hunting whistles to replicate bird calls, a "Mardi Gras samba whistle" with musical tones and a 109-decibel whistle that's barely audible to humans because its 12,800-hertz sound is used to train killer whales. It also deters bats, Topman said.
Foxcroft, the only Canadian ever to referee in the NCAA US college basketball league, says he blew as hard as he could when a Yugoslav basketball player elbowed a US opponent during the 1976 Olympic men's gold-medal game. His pea was stuck and the crowd booed his apparent failure to notice the foul.
After the Olympics, he teamed with an industrial designer.
With banks unwilling to back his whistle startup, Foxcroft spent C$150,000 (US$97,4000) from his family's shipping business.
In 1988, he shipped 100,000 units. Now the company ships 40,000 whistles a day to 119 countries. The company, which also makes mouth guards, has annual sales of about C$44 million.
Neither FIFA, the international soccer federation that organizes the World Cup, nor national soccer federations recommend what whistle referees should use, nor keep records. Some referees, such as Denmark's World Cup referee Kim Nielsen, show up at matches with 10 whistles, including ACMEs and Fox 40s.
Nielsen says he chooses his whistle just before match time based on the acoustics of the stadium. The more enclosed the stadium, the higher the frequency of the crowd noise.
The whistle controversy won't blow over. In 1995, ACME began producing a pea-less referees whistle, the Tornado, which it claims is the loudest such whistle in the world at 125 decibels. A Fox 40 tops out at 115 decibels.
Foxcroft sued ACME for patent infringement. The two companies reached an out-of-court settlement stipulating that ACME's pea-less whistles be 50 percent larger, Foxcroft said.
Topman says he now sells as many Tornados as Thunderers.
"The trend is now toward pea-less, but these things go in and out of fashion," he said.
And even Fox is getting a piece of the pea action. Its metal Force Referee Whistle is the official whistle of the National Hockey League -- moisture-resistant sound ball and all. Because hockey games take place on ice, surrounded by glass, its referee whistles need what Foxcroft called "the warble of a pea."
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