Officials are often given opportunities to demonstrate a basic sense of humaneness. When those situations arise in a game, how do you respond?
In a high school football game a coach came out to attend to an injured player, and while kneeling down he said to another player, “Carl, you’ve got to take over for Leroy here. He won’t be able to continue. You shift to quarterback, and we’ll have to run mostly off-tackle plays. Harvey, you take Carl’s spot at halfback. …”
Before he could finish the referee interrupted, in a no-nonsense, authoritative tone, “Coach, you can’t confer with your players on the field during an injury timeout.”
“You mean, the whole team that struck my player down can go over to the sideline and talk to their coach, but I can’t tell my squad how to adjust?” the coach asked, incredulous.
“By rule, I have to restrict you,” the referee replied, almost peevishly, intent on upholding the letter of the law. The official was applying it according to his notion of duty (8-8-1h).
In that same interval, with his team on the sideline, the opposing coach approached a nearby official and said, “It looks like that player may be down awhile and it’s cold. May I allow my guys to put on blanket wraps?”
The official smiled and answered, “There’s nothing in the rules against it, Coach. Go ahead and bundle them up. We both want them to stay loose when play resumes.” That coach was equally surprised. He had expected to be turned down, but he got a polite, warm approval instead. After all, the team was still in a playing mode.
The first official was unsmiling, stern and officious — the person some feel you must be to establish dominance. That attitude may be what the general populace expects: firmness and rigidity, upholding the stricture of a rule without thought to the impact of its application in a special context.
The second official, on the other hand, showed an immediate regard for the players while behaving with cordiality and respect.
Officials have chances to be genuine humanitarians — using the spirit of the game and its accepted principles of fair play to guide choices of how rules should be applied. Incidents like those can bring to mind the litany of terms by which Boy Scouts are expected to abide: A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.
Many officials from all sports have those same qualities. Official number two exemplified those characteristics. How many of those qualities do you bring with you on the field or court? A cold player is more susceptible to injury, whereas a cold official can be thought of as fundamentally heartless.
Written by Jerry Grunska, a retired educator who lives in Evergreen, Colo. He officiated football official for more than 40 years. This article originally appeared in the 4/04 issue of Referee.
