Kill the Bum

 

A game official puts his shirt on just like you and I; however, we are the ones who chose whether or not it has a bull’s eye on it.

Back in the day, when a questionable call would occur at a sporting event, you could often hear a certain refrain.  It would belong to an unhappy patron yelling kill the bum.   This universal obsession to blame the man in blue or zebra stripes seems to be prevalent in every sport and in every era.

Here are four options to entertain, instead of just yelling kill the bum:

1 Take personal responsibility.

During the World Cup of Soccer this year, I remember hearing on the radio that the Mexican coach was blaming the referee for their loss.  Unfortunately for him, from what I could gather, their poor play was what truly led to their defeat. 

Of course, the calls going against them made it more difficult to succeed, but good teams use adversity to fuel them.  A fellow softball coach once told me that if you lose a game due to bad call, you should have never left the game get that close in the first place.  Fate is not always kind. 

2 Don’t throw a fit.

A perfect example of how not to respond to an umpire’s bad call has got to be baseball’s famous pine tar incident.  The image of a ballistic George Brett as he came charging out of the dugout to confront the head umpire for having too much pine tar on his bat, is unforgettable.  Needless to say, the above picture aptly conveys that he certainly was feeling like killing the bum because the call had ultimately cost his team the game.

Eventually, his team, the Royals would win the game when they replayed the inning weeks later. However, that visual still stays with me as a testament that you can be right and still be in the wrong, if you lose your temper.

3 Try putting yourself in their shoes. 

A few years ago, during an NFL game, the Seahawks trailed the Packers by five points with seconds to go and twenty five yards to go for a score.    The Seahawks’ quarterback heaved a desperation pass into a group of players and it appeared that a Packers’ defender had intercepted the pass.  However, after the Packer fell to the ground a Seahawk player, grabbed onto the ball. One referee called it a touchdown and one referee called it an interception.  After a lengthy review the play stood and fans everywhere couldn’t believe what they had just seen.

The play has been dubbed the Fail Mary, because of how badly the referees blew the call.  However, the real story was that the poor referees doing the game were just replacements filling in for the real ones who were on strike.  In essence, these referees were doomed to fail sooner or later.  They had no professional experience doing mostly high school and lower level college games and were in way over their heads.  Frankly, anyone of us could have made the same poor call, if we had been in their shoes.

4 Be the bigger man.

Speaking of big men, BJ Raji, a 300 plus pound defensive player for the losing Packers appropriately summed up his feelings about the famed Fail Mary play.  He said this, “right now it’s a tough pill to swallow, but we’ll get over it.”

Sadly, I must confess that as teen I chose far too often to act like a raving lunatic when playing sports and the calls went against me. Consequently, somewhere in my adult years I discovered that being right doesn’t give me the right to act like a spoiled brat.  Over time, I also discovered that regardless of what the referee or umpire called that he was a human being too and tried accordingly to treat him as such.

Ask yourself this: if your child were old enough to officiate would you like someone to scream kill the bum at him?

 Swavel