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Originally Posted by UNIgiantslayers
Thanks for the response. That's what I was curious about. As a History teacher, I've always been interested in inter/intra racial relations. Often when guys around here get metro league assignments, if it is a suburban school (much lower percentage of minority students) vs. a city school (very high percentage of minority students), I've noticed that there is usually a Black official. I assume this is by design and it's probably a good practice. I'm sure they also deal with the same thing that you do, but I don't hear much of it or much about it so I'm always curious if that happens often. It's a hard subject to have a conversation about, and I'm always nervous that I will offend someone by asking the wrong question or a stupid question but this is interesting to me.
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Don't feel nervous, this is just life. This is not something that changes because we are talking about a sport. I wish that there was nothing else but our job, but often that is not the case.
Quote:
Originally Posted by UNIgiantslayers
Do you have a line in the sand where you are going to shut them down and/or issue a technical, or is that fluid based on their previous interactions? Do you notice a difference between the way white coaches treat you vs. your partners?
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Of course, I have lines, but I also know the situation I am in. And when you are in certain situations, you have to often deal with them in unconventional ways. The situation I talked about also got the focus back on the game, not me or my partner's and who happened to be one color or another. It was not perfect, but it got the job done. And I had to approach him as a man, which would not have solved anything by a T. If I had given a T in this situation, it would have been all about me. I was trying to avoid that.
Keep in mind I have officiated all over the state of Illinois. I have officiated in small rural towns from large urban, poverty-stricken areas. Yes, I have been mistreated in ways that I feel it is about my race from white coaches. But those situations are much more subtle and much more under the radar. When I deal with a Black coach in many cases they will come right out and say what they are thinking. It puts you in a peculiar situation when no one hears the comments. But I will say this by far the blatant disrespect I have gotten is from people that look like me. And it usually surrounds who they are playing and who they think is on their side, whatever that is supposed to mean to them.
I am not trying to take this off on something else, but I can imagine what Teddy had to deal with when it came to this player and why he took such an extreme situation to solve the problem. Again, the problem seemed to be solved. The player stayed in the game and he probably stopped bitching to him about plays. So when someone suggests that the player won, that is funny because if a player goes back to playing and keeping his mouth shut to me, I win that every single time. It does not help you coming to me as if you are in the NBA because you did not like a call. And he was not the official that likely saw the play as clear.
Peace