Back in the day… You know, half my life ago… I was a huge sports nut. That changed in college when I found my mind engaged in other things. Whether or not it was a coincidence, but that was when I remember vividly reading some pieces about the psychology and sociology of sports and games.
You probably know the basics. We like sports and games so much because it’s a symbol of society in that there are easy to follow rules. These rules are more black and white than society rules. These rules make it easier to learn and participate in. The lack of rules would destroy the point of sport.
To protect these rules, sport have people simply in charge of enforcing rules. These people can be called referees, umpires or even judges… These persons are usually highly esteemed, and sometimes considered beyond reproach within the sport.
So what, eh? It’s just been a weird month with two judgment calls within sport that show the best and worst with the need to evolve sport.
The first was the perfect game broken up on the last play of the game. If you live in the US, then you most likely saw it in some kind of news broadcast. If you’re a sports fan, then you saw it hundreds of times with as many opinions. This shows the best of what the bastion of sport rules could be. The umpire apologized profusely, knowing what he had mistakenly taken away. He didn’t have to apologize, and it’s a rare, refreshing occasion of a person in such a position admits their fallibility and their screw up.
The second instance is more fresh, and I have less time for it to really sink in. This morning saw a referee of a World Cup match make numerous errors, but most aggregiously were two – a yellow card where the foul claimed didn’t come close to occuring (a hand ball was called when it actually hit the players face) – and another call that stopped what would have most likely been a game winning goal in the closing moments of regulation time. The umpire, and the regulating body of the sport have offered no explanation of the foul, nor is there any reason to expect them to do so.
So what can we learn from this? I’m not sure. It seems this whole thing has to do with the fact that it’s so obviously easy to see every angle of every sport the moment it happens. How we watch and interact with sport has changed. Sport has changed to maximize profit. Rules for most sports haven’t changed much except in the realm of equipment.
It’s time for sport to change. It’s time to make the games more reflective of the times. In their pure forms, sport is about participants and rules. The enforcement of those rules was a need at a time without the aid of all our new fangled techno widgets. Why have things never really changed about the enforcement of those laws? A little communication device here, a little instant replay there…
But there’s still way too much subjectivity for any sport to be pure. I guess there always will be as long as there’s dishonesty among participants to need judges. It’s these judges which make sport imperfect in the worst ways.
As sport can be a microcosm of society, it’s too bad the participants of society can’t play the games within the rules, or without the need of judges.