I officiated high school basketball off and on over a period of about 20 years and every time I blew my whistle I expected half the people in the room to disagree with me. Not the players and coaches, necessarily, but those who would be referred to as spectators. Disagreement came with the price of admission and I actually enjoyed hearing a crowd’s reaction to a close call. I knew that the officials had the better angle and the better grasp of the rule book but it’s always nice to hear that the paying customers were engaged in the action.
There’s a reason sanctioned games have referees and it’s because everyone else involved has the same bias — their identity is their ideology. In other words, those in the game, the players, coaches, timers, scorekeepers, and administrators represent one team or the other and their identity often represents their ideology, so let’s hire a disinterested third party to arbitrate the tough calls.
Of course, referees come with a wide variety of experience, skill, and knowledge of the rules but universally, they enter the fray as a neutral party, ideally. I say that because I was naturally a much better official in my 20th year than I was in my first year.
At the high school level, you live with the call and move on. At the college and professional levels, they’ll take a minute and check the videotape from time to time on the close calls. Even then, they don’t include the coaches, fans, or administrators in the decision. Those seem to happen often, but in reality the vast majority of calls, everyone agrees with what happened, the correct call was made, and on we go.
You know what you just saw.
(Pause for effect.)
Those six words … “you know what you just saw” have been taken to task lately.
In basketball, everyone from the coach and the players to the guy in the front row and the guy in the top row have a biased opinion but there is one voice of control — the referee. In the reality of daily life now, spectators also have a podcast microphone or a keyboard and a worldwide audience. Right or wrong, those opinions have been shouted long and loud to the world well before the voice of authority weighs in. Inasmuch, minds have been made up and stances have been taken long before the voice of the truly knowledgeable and unbiased have been heard. That is if an unbiased and knowledgeable source has been allowed the chance to be heard.
I have my email address included with my work because what you are reading are my own thoughts and not necessarily those of the Record-Eagle. I have written before that we all know what we saw on Jan. 6, 2021. We didn’t need it interpreted. (Well, most of us didn’t; the elected officials tasked with holding those responsible for the event accountable acted otherwise.) We had a similar situation unfold recently in Minneapolis that involved video with easily determined evidence. In this case, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security gave a cartoonishly incorrect summation of the widely available video.
And again, we all know what we saw.
Writing this 10 days after the event it appears that the provably wrong DHS stance will stand since the Department of Justice, which includes the FBI; our formerly unbiased third party arbiters, are in the pocket of our president. Ergo, instead of having a third-party determination, they choose to use the threat of military action.
Root for your team, worry for your country.