You can ask him a dozen questions about the big stage, and the first one he mentions is an early 1980s Sunnyside-Santa Rita game.
“I inadvertently blew the whistle on a big play, and it almost cost the Blue Devils the game,” he says. “I got lucky.”
After a decade in the game, Fogltance hoped to advance from high school, junior-college and small-college officiating and get a shot officiating in the expanded Pac-10 in 1978. The league’s supervisor of officials, Jack Springer, told Fogltance that about 2,000 officials applied to get into the Pac-10 every year.
He applied anyway. Mayfield, the coach at Tucson High, and Petty, the coach at Sunnyside High, wrote letters advocating Fogltance.
“I didn’t think I had a shot; I didn’t have any big-time college coaches recommending me.” he says. “But one day I got a letter saying I had been approved.” A year later he was on the field at the L.A.Coliseum, working the USC-Minnesota game.
“I was in awe,” he says. “I had no clue what was going on in that first quarter. I was overwhelmed. But it wasn’t too long that I was working a Rose Bowl game with Bo Schembechler working on me. It was quite a journey.”
There were highs — in 2015, he was the second Tucsonan to be inducted into the Arizona Officials Association Hall of Fame. In 2019, he was elected to the Pac-12 Officials Hall of Fame.