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An assault to my senses
Posted: Wednesday October 21, 1998 04:52 PM
The National Association of Sports Officials has advised
members that their newest benefit will be ... assault
insurance. This unique coverage has been worked up
specifically for American referees. The reason is very
simple: More and more sports officials
are being physically attacked.
What is ironic, too, is that despite all the publicity that
attends a nasty major-league incident, most of the
increased violence directed at officials nowadays is at the
lower, amateur levels of sport ... where, of course,
sportsmanship is supposed to
matter most. Sadly, more often than not, it is parents
themselves who assault officials at games in which their
children are playing.
On the major-league level, instant replay has proven that
top officials make the right call an incredible amount of
time. But because replay shows that sometimes referees are
wrong, those few instances stand out and produce more
irrational
hyper-criticism.
However, at this same time when sports officials across the
board have come in for this greater condemnation—even
for violence—just for allegedly making the odd bad
call, a group of NBA referees have been indicted for a real
crime—tax fraud. Six have
already pleaded guilty and been sentenced. What these
officials did was exchange expense-account first-class
airplane tickets for coach seats, then pocket the money
differential, without reporting this income to the
IRS.
Other officials in all sports are furious at the NBA refs.
The guilty parties are, after all, the cream of the
crop—and the best paid, too. Barry Mano, himself an
official, editor of
Referee magazine, tells me: "Officials around the country
really feel let down by what the NBA referees
did."
Yet there is the most curious public response which has
quite confounded these same rank-and-file officials. What
the NBA refs did—dishonestly, illegally—has
created no backlash whatsoever from fans. Not even at NBA
games last year did honest officials
hear cracks about how they must be untrustworthy, like their
cheatin' colleagues.
The officiating association expected, naturally, for their
whole noble profession to be castigated. After all,
officials are supposed to be Caesar's wife, men of
integrity who, by their honor, can maintain the integrity
of our games. But paradoxically:
American fans seem to have been generally undisturbed by
the illegal actions of sports officials, as private
citizens—even though the trend is to grow angrier,
even violent, toward these same men for making ordinary
professional decisions in games.
"It's amazing," Mano says. "All anybody seems to care
about anymore are W's and L's." Wins and
losses.
I don't have to belabor the obvious analogy here to the
broad national response, which treats President Clinton's
private behavior and political actions independently. But
the way sports fans have acted toward referees supports
that contradiction,
indicating again how comfortably Americans now divide public
people into two distinct and unconnected parts.
They say you can tell a great deal about a whole culture
from its behavior toward its sports. If so, our attitude
toward sports officials suggests that we place little value
on the whole of personal character anymore and are only
concerned with specific
results.
These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.
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