Help wanted: perfection in ref’s uniform

Johnny Crawford takes it every Monday night at the Macon Touchdown Club.

As an SEC football official, anonymity is a goal, but that’s hard when you’re an officer in a club of football fans that gets together two days after game day, the day on which fans are offended that their team may have let them down by losing or are aggravated that a man with a whistle had only two eyes.

Forget women, hell hath no fury like a football fan whose own perfection has not been matched Saturday by those in uniform.

It has been a little testier in Georgia lately, thanks to some iffy calls — calls that had nothing to do with wretched fundamental football and a remarkable inability to tackle — at Sanford Stadium a few weeks ago. It picked up steam in the region with some botched flags — which had nothing to do with a 6-foot-7 quarterback missing the most open of targets — down at the Swamp. And there was an issue or two in Starkville.

An officiating crew has been suspended but not until after getting e-mails and phone calls and texts from a collection of knuckle-draggers.

Poster children for birth control making threats against sports figures is nothing new, which doesn’t make it any less acceptable. Our species’ maturity seems to stagnate at best.

Look at a message board, at your own intellectual risk, of course. In every region, with every conference, there is whining about how bad the officiating is and baffled confusion about how can it be so wretched.

It comes from people who, of course, know nothing about the rules, are watching from a quality point of view with nobody running around in front of them, have their eyesight affected by the drink of choice and are about as objective as any host of a political talk show.

Those who bellyache that refs want attention and to decide the outcomes are absolutely silly, don’t get much of anything about sports and clearly have never officiated a thing.

Some officials need a little mustard to cover their occasional tendency to hot-dog it, but they are extremely rare. About 98 out of a 100 want to just jog to the locker room after a game while fans cheer a win.

My own officiating experience is fairly short, but it is at least experience: umpire in chief of a 13-15 baseball league for a summer or two when I was in college and calling some games on day at a basketball camp I worked at one summer in college.

That was enough. You masochistic zebras can have that job.

I’ll never forget one play. Fielder is at second, gets the throw, and places his glove down on the base, doesn’t move it. Runner slides in, but moves his lead foot over to the open part of the base. Ball beat him, tag was waiting, but he was never tagged.

Safe.

Somehow, I must’ve hit somebody’s momma, such was the fervor with which the coach sprinted — OK, waddled — out to argue.

Reason No. 43 to never be a ref/ump/official: You can never explain logic to a coach/player/fan. You can be backed up by video, but it doesn’t matter. Suddenly, video can’t be trusted. A bus load of nuns could testify in your behalf, and it’s moot.

You know, it’s simple. A person calls what he sees. A person is an imperfect human, albeit not as bright and competent as those in the stands or on the sidelines who execute their job to the highest level, the same they expect from refs (and coaches and players).

Because of that exquisite daily job execution — and I’d sure like to meet some of those perfect people — there is outrage at these public errors. Yes, dear God, how can such tragedies occur in this day and age of perfect health, no homelessness, a rollicking economic engine and missing children?

People make mistakes, regardless their salary or training. Almost two dozen people running around in chaos can affect the perfection of an official. Stunning, I know.

Sure, some calls are a little inexplicable, but the people were punished and long before it became public. To think a ref doesn’t anguish about mistakes is to mean you have no substance regarding competence at your own job and feel nothing when you err.

Unfortunately, there’s no real prescription for getting a grip.

Contact Michael A. Lough at 744-4626 or mlough@macon.com