Imagine you're playing the saxophone in a concert, and you're about to get up and play a solo. Everyone else who has been playing solos has been greeted with cheers from the audience, but when you get up, there's no applause. You're handed the sheet music, which you were never given a chance to rehearse. It's very challenging, and the writing is small and handwritten, such that it's hard to tell where some of the notes even are.
Every time you play a wrong note, the crowd boos you. Even sometimes when you play the right note, the crowd boos you. They all have their own ideas of what notes you're supposed to play, some of which are incorrect, and any time you play something different from what they have in mind, they act like it's a disgrace to humanity. There are even a couple people on stage yelling in your face. Nobody's even batting an eye at any of this. And the worst part is that you're supposed to pretend it doesn't bother you, If you show even the slightest amount of emotion, it will get even worse.
This is what referees have to deal with almost every single game.
Let that sink in.
This is an article I've wanted to write ever since I got hired as a writer for Lawless Republic back in March. At that time, basketball season was almost over, so I figured that most of the people who read my articles weren't going to any sports events anytime soon, so I decided to wait until football season was about to start, and now, it's time. Don't expect the same silly antics I've had in my other articles because this is an incredibly serious issue that needs to be addressed in a sober, straightforward manner.
Officials have a really hard job. They're supposed to figure out exactly what happened on every play just by looking at it once, and sometimes, it's really hard to tell, which is why the music in the analogy was challenging and hard to read. It is completely unreasonable for us to expect them to get the call right every time, and yet we do. And sometimes, we're so confident in our expert opinion that every close call should go our team's way that we harass them for making the right call.
Also, notice that in the analogy, I didn't say anything about people throwing things onto the stage/field or making violent threats. These are out-of-the-ordinary things that occasionally happen that people generally respond to with disgust, and rightfully so. What I'm talking about are things that happen regularly, and nobody even seems to care. Things like fans booing and yelling at officials and coaches chewing them out. If a big group of people treated literally anyone else this way, it would make national headlines, but for some reason, when it's referees that get treated this way, people act like it's normal. It makes me absolutely sick.
So why do so many people treat officials in ways they would never even treat their worst enemy? I think I have an explanation, and I'll illustrate it by making reference to a YouTube video by Stuart Barron called, "How Monsters Inc Exposes Systemic Abuse".
As Barron explains, in the first several scenes of Monsters Inc, we get to know a lot of monsters, and we see a lot of emotional facial expressions on those monsters, but we don't really see any of that with the human kids. We see a mechanical kid at one point, and at another point, we hear kids screaming, but we don't see the kids or know them well enough to feel bad for them. Because of this, our natural tendency is to sympathize with the monsters. We might even see the fact that they're supposedly risking their lives to scare children so they can power their city as heroic,
But then, this all changes when we're introduced to Boo. We see her experience a wide range of emotions, from excited, to scared, to sleepy, to playful, to loving, and so forth. We grow attached to her just like Sulley. And then, there's the scene where Sulley does the scare demonstration for Waternoose and the new recruits. We see Boo feel terrified and betrayed, and we can feel Sulley's heartbreak as he looks at the monitor showing Boo's reaction to his terrifying face. Only then do we realize just how downright awful it is that monsters are scaring kids for their own benefit on a regular basis.
Do you see what I'm saying here? Officials are taught to hide their emotions so that they don't give off the appearance of bias, and they are incredibly good at this. In fact, I think they're too good at this, and I think it's the reason people are so horrible to them. When we see someone show emotion, it helps us to see them as a human, and we treat them accordingly. But because officials don't show their emotions, we tend to see them not as humans, but as objects. Objects don't react when we berate them, and neither do officials, and so we're totally comfortable doing it.
So, as I was preparing this article, I thought, "What if I could show everyone an instance where an official got emotional?" I found this video of an interview involving an international soccer referee named Ricardo De Burgos Bengoetxea. (Yes, they have names.) Someone had made a video compilation of several questionable calls he had made, and that video was aired on Real Madrid TV. Real Madrid had requested not to let him referee the next match they were in, and there were rumors that they were considering boycotting the match otherwise. This is what he said in the interview, as quoted in an espn.com article by Alex Kirkland and Rodrigo Faez:
"When your son goes to school and people tell him his father is a 'thief' it's really messed up. All I do is try to educate my son, to tell him his father is honorable, that he's just another sportsperson. I want my son to be proud. ... We need everyone to reflect on where we want to go [as a society]. It's very tough."
How do you think the Real Madrid coaches and players responded to this? Did they apologize and say they had no idea that their words and actions were causing a human being so much grief? Nope. Not even close. They said that his comments were unacceptable and that he should be disciplined by the league. Nothing he said was an attack on Real Madrid. All he did was open up about his personal feelings about the terrible treatment he was given, and apparently, that wasn't OK. This is why officials don't advocate for themselves, and so I'm doing it for them.
Going back to the Monsters Inc video, another good point Barron made is that when we're introduced to Randall's scream extractor, we are absolutely disgusted, and we're even more disgusted when we learn about his and Waternoose's plan to kidnap children and use the scream extractor on them to fix the energy crisis. When Roz and the CDA find out about this, they shut down the factory. To them, this is out of the ordinary and unacceptable. But they were fine when monsters were just scaring children because that was ordinary. It took something out of the ordinary to motivate them to stop it all.
We're disgusted when we hear about people throwing stuff at officials and threatening them because that is out of the ordinary. If we saw someone do that, we might actually speak up and tell them to stop. But shouldn't we also be disgusted by the ordinary things like all the booing and verbal abuse? Why are we so tolerant of that? If we saw anyone else being treated like that, wouldn't we speak up and put a stop to it?
Well, that's what I've been trying to do recently. At a few recent BYU women's basketball games, I printed out several pieces of paper that said, "Please remember that officials are human beings," and before the game started, I went around and handed out a piece of paper to one person in each section and told them to pass it around. This was a big step out of my comfort zone, but it was worth it. More regularly, when I hear people boo the officials, I yell out, "Everyone within the sound of my voice, please stop booing the officials."
So here's my plea to fans everywhere: Stop it. Stop harassing the officials, and when you see other people doing it, stop them. Don't tell yourself that it's none of your business. Any time a human being is being a jerk to another human being, it is everyone's business, and the fact that it's normal doesn't change anything. No one person has the power to completely fix this problem, but if we each just lift where we stand, we can make a difference.
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