Referee Bob Delaney, shown here with Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, has worked eight NBA Finals games in his 20 seasons on the job. AP

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No ref is immune from criticism -- Delaney describes an incident in Madison Square Garden when his own mother hooted at him for blowing a foul call Patrick Ewing, her favorite player -- but his street cred with players and coaches is demonstrably apparent.

"I used to argue with Bob a lot," Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers said. "Then I found out what he used to do and thought, 'I don't think he's going to be too affected by what I'm saying over here on the sideline.' "

A few years ago, Grant Hill, then with the Orlando Magic, jokingly patted down Delaney during a timeout and asked, "You still wired, Delaney?" The ref answered, "Yeah, I'm wired, and the last time I wore a wire, 50 people went to jail."

Several years ago during a TNT game Delaney was working, the announcers spotted Kobe Bryant talking to the referee after a foul call and theorized that the Los Angeles Lakers' star was giving Delaney "an earful" about the call. "In reality," Delaney said, "Kobe was asking what it was like wearing a wire all the time, and saying, 'That had to be wild.' "

It was wild. Kobe should read the book.

Before getting the whole story in Covert (the title comes from the surname that Delaney adopted during the joint state police-FBI sting operation), I knew a little bit about his background and that informed my observations of him as a referee. I couldn't help but wonder what Delaney was thinking when, say, the fifth guard on a bad team would berate him for making a traveling call. After what he had been through -- facing the prospect of death and, almost as bad, starting to "lose sight of the line where Bob Delaney ended and Bobby Covert began," as he writes in the book -- how can he take a call in a basketball game seriously?

But he does, and that is one of the messages (I'm not going to call them lessons) of Covert: that sports is an endless proving ground where professionalism matters. Delaney describes a moment early in his officiating career when he made an end-of-the-game call that, hours later, upon further review in his lonely hotel room, he found to be wrong. The fact that he blew a "gamer," the officials' term for a call that decides an outcome, put a knot in his stomach and cost him a night of sleep.

"In my profession," Delaney writes, "there's no worse feeling in the world."

Delaney's undercover life was spent in that same agitated state, wondering if he'd be found out the next day, worrying that he was losing what he describes as "the tug of war within," trying to ingratiate himself to the very people he was trying to bring down, thereby experiencing some form of the Stockholm syndrome. I can't imagine what a life it was, but it's all laid out in Covert.

And when I put it down, I was glad that the same era that gave us Tim Donaghy, a weasel of a law-breaker, has also given us Bob Delaney, a stand-up guy in a difficult profession.