Inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1986, he was then inducted into the National Polish-American Sports Hall of Fame at St. Mary's College in Orchard Lake, Michigan on June 13, 1996.

[1] Born thirty miles north of Pittsburgh in Ford City, Pennsylvania as Zigmund Mihalik[2] on September 22, 1916, Mihalik played basketball as a youth and subsequently took up refereeing when officials for a high school game failed to show up.

He then embarked upon a long officiating career, working games for the NBA, NCAA, and Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 1964 and in Mexico City in 1968,[3] and was deemed the best official of the game on all levels in the 1950s by Dell Publications until an on-court knee injury forced him into retirement in 1972.

[4] Mihalik was inducted into the National Polish-American Sports Hall of Fame in 1996.

[5][6] Mihalik died from cancer at the age of eighty on September 25, 1996, in Ford City.