Why We Need Umpires, Referees and Judges

We have many names for essentially the same thing.  The soccer field is known as a pitch and so is a field on which you play cricket.  The arena can be called a court.  Stadiums hold concerts but also baseball diamonds.  Rinks are for hockey and fields are for football (American) and courses are for college and golf. Court is for justice and also tennis.Fencing has a piste or a strip. And so on and so on.  

Then there are those who keep order and enforce the rules.  Penalties are in tennis, golf and hockey, fouls can be in baseball but more commonly utilized in basketball or football.  Baseball really relies on strikes and outs. Soccer has red cards and yellow, and like in all sports if the infraction is big enough you can be ejected.  For example, if you touch an umpire, you can be immediately thrown out.  Some sports have multiple officials, linesmen, umpires, line judges, referees and some have very few.  However, the goal is simple to keep order.  To ensure that everyone plays by the rules and the most fair outcome is achieved.  To which, with recent technological advances aids have been provided.  For some sports there is instant replay and slow motion technology.  These innovations have given the athlete or the coach or manager the opportunity to appeal “the call,” the decision.  

In football there is the red flag.  When a coach feels the referee has made a poor decision, he can ask for a review by throwing a red flag.  This has become the subject of a great commercial advertising campaign.  It suggests that it would be great if we had instant replay in our real lives so as to fairly arbitrate differences. 

A generation ago John McEnroe often called Johnny Mac, was considered the true bad boy of tennis.  His frequent  and seemingly uncontrollable outbreaks left fans booing and umpires rattled.   Just google tennis and tantrums and his name will be at the top of the list. Rarely pointed at the other player, Johnny Mac’s outbursts were legendary and gave rise the title of autobiography, You Cannot Be Serious.  Technology put an end to most of it.  With a piece of technology often called Hawk-Eye.  This innovation works via six (sometimes seven) high-performance cameras, normally positioned on the underside of the stadium roof, which track the ball from different angles. The video from the six cameras is then triangulated and combined to create a three-dimensional representation of the ball’s trajectory. 

Now a player can’t argue because you can’t argue with a machine.  

It was during those McEnroe irrational, almost out of body moments that we were treated to the rules of tennis infractions.  In a sport that because of Wimbledon may be considered one of the most refined sports, I learned about how each penalty gradually gets elevated until a player finally defaults or is disqualified. 

They are: Under the Rules and Regulations of Tennis,[1] when a player violates a rule or does not follow the tennis code of conduct, (I love how refined the term “Code of Conduct” is) the umpire or tournament official can issue one of the following (Section IV, Article C, Item 18 – “Unsportsmanlike Conduct”):

Generally, this results in the following escalation:

1. First offense: Warning
2. Second offense: Loss of a point
3. Third (and each subsequent) offense: Loss of a game

After the third offense, it is up to the chair umpire (1%) but mostly tournament supervisor (99%) whether this constitutes a Default/Disqualification.

To hear and see a really good example of this watch Serena Williams, who lost both her temper and her US Open 2009 semi-final against Kim Clijsters, was fined $10,500 for her profanity-laced tirade against a lineswoman who called a foot fault against her.  The emotions were high.  Serena was serving to stay in the match.  She had lost the first set 6 to 4 and in the second set she was down 6-5 and was down in the game 40-15 (To understand the scoring you will have to wait until I do a blog on keeping score and the insanity of that.) The line called a foot fault on her second serve, bringing Serena to boil over.  Serena was the hands on favorite to win.  She was and will ong be the most dominant woman tennis player of all time.  She was seeded (another crazy thing, the entire seeding vs ranking obstacle to fair competition) number 2 and Clijsters at that time was unseeded. 

There are athletes that have ever walked on the tennis court with greater veracity, talent and raw power as Serena Williams and it all came pouring out and she defaulted. In a tennis tournament it is usually single elimination, which means she was out of the tournament for singles.  

Sometimes infractions are so great that suspensions extend beyond the match.  However, usually it is only for that particular game or tournament. However, depending how bad the behavior is, fines and multiple game suspensions can be enacted.  Sometimes an athlete can be suspended for something they have done off the field such as the football player suspended for domestic abuse. In the very extreme life long bans can be levied, such as in the case of Pete Rose who was caught betting on baseball. 

The lessons abound. As we have seen from the dramatic speech Tim Walz gave at the Democratic National Convention, messages from sports applied to real life abound. 

So here are my takeaways:

1. We need people in life that will keep us in check, tell us when we have stepped over the line or even just stepped on the line.
2. We are all accountable for our open actions
3. We get second chances, so don’t blow it. 
4. In life there is no instant replay but there are apologies that let us move on and not live in the past.
5. Sometimes we go beyond what is acceptable and we are taken out of the game, we lose a job or a marriage fails.