Transplant Won't Stop 83-Year-Old From Running Clock At College Football Championship Game

DALLAS (AP) - Jim Ely has seen a lot of seconds tick away over the past 20 years or so as a clock operator for some of the biggest football games played in Texas.

The home games for the Dallas Cowboys, all those Cotton Bowls. And there was the 2009 Big 12 championship between Texas and Nebraska, when the Cornhuskers were ahead by two and the scoreboard showed all zeros on an incomplete pass by Longhorns quarterback Colt McCoy. Ely and other officials noticed there was still 0.8 seconds left on the official clock. When the second was put back on, Texas kicked a field goal and won 13-12 to get a shot at the BCS title.

As he started to leave AT&T Stadium, the head of security stopped Ely, pointing out he was carrying a bag identifying him as a Big 12 official.

"He said, 'Look at your bag,'" Ely said. The man got his car and drove it into the stadium so Ely could leave from there.

"If I'd walked out of there, I might not have gotten out of there," Ely said with a chuckle.

Now 83 and little more than a month after getting a kidney transplant, Ely is ready for another big game: He will operate the play clock during the first national championship game of the College Football Playoff era when Oregon and Ohio State meet at the home of the Cowboys on Jan. 12.

Ely, who for more than 20 years has worked for the NFL as the operator of the play clock for Cowboys home games, has dedicated nearly a half-century to working as a referee for everything from youth leagues to college sports and as a timekeeper for college and NFL games. Even as fatigue from kidney disease took its toll, Ely continued working.

"I didn't let that interfere," he said. The Dec. 5 transplant, he said, has left him feeling "1,000 percent" better.

Still recuperating, he missed working his 33rd Cotton Bowl game last week, but plans to be working Jan. 12 alongside his longtime timekeeping partner and friend, Joe Thompson, who runs the game clock for Cowboys' home games and also for the Cotton Bowl.

"We've got our own jobs, but we look after each other, too," Thompson said, who describes his friend as energetic. "He's very upbeat."

Michael Konradi, senior vice president of external affairs for the Cotton Bowl, called Ely and Thompson the best in the business.

"Jim has been rock solid for us for decades," said Konradi, who is also on the staff for the organizing committee for the upcoming championship. "He may be getting up there in age but he has so much experience in this that he could probably do it blindfolded."

Ely's office at home in suburban Plano is full of mementos and pictures of his decades of work, from the 2011 Super Bowl in Dallas to seven Big 12 championships to umpiring baseball games in China and Japan. He worked in both the old Texas Stadium before it was demolished and the old Cotton Bowl stadium before settling in of late at the billion-dollar showplace of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.

Ely, a high school athlete in Durant, Oklahoma, played football at Southeastern Oklahoma State before an injury stopped his athletic career as a freshman. His first taste of officiating came in college when he refereed junior high school football games.

He went on to have a family and pursue a career in banking, but at about 35 started working as an umpire in youth league baseball in Plano after suggesting to his 15-year-old son that it would be a good job for him. It turned out officiating youth sports, and the harassment by parents that went with it, wasn't for his son, but Ely was hooked. He embarked on what would be a nearly 40-year career in officiating, moving up to high school football and baseball games and then went to the college level - all while working his full-time day job.

"You are five guys against a stadium full of people and you bond," he said.

He retired from officiating on the field in 2005 after sustaining a pair of hamstring injuries during a high school championship game, two years after being diagnosed with kidney disease.

His doctor, Miguel Vazquez, medical director of the kidney transplant program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said Ely made a good candidate for a transplant despite his age.

"He is a young 83-year-old in the sense that he has taken very good care of himself for many years. ... He was active, very engaged in life, physically active, able to take very good care of himself," said Vazquez, adding, "He also has a very, very positive outlook in life."

The transplant will allow Ely, who had been on dialysis three times a week for the last three-plus years, to be more active.

"I plan to continue working as long as I stay healthy," Ely said. "I'll take it a year at a time."

Copyright 2015 The Associated Press.