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Conclusion
After reading up on all the responses and totally amazed at this issue. I had to look further to try and understand what really was going on here. First of all, anyone that says Vic is to blame for this is crazy, and if you are an official saying this, I challenge if you are even capable of judging fair play. Vic is a Vice Principle of a Middle High School for crying out loud and a very accomplished basketball official. This in itself is credibility people! Do I need to say more?
Now let's take a look at the other persons credibility. We don't know because he doesn't have any, or he simply doesn't have a leg to stand on. Also, according to the May 2006 article in Referee Magazine, Bailey admitted to calling Vic a boy several times.
Another piece of this is referee's Darin Stanfield and Alfred Smith completely dropped the ball here. According to the KHSAA code of ethnics, it says officials shouldn't work state playoffs games from the school they graduated from. Now let's be real. If your HS makes it to the state playoffs and you happen to get that game. At the very least, we're talking credibility here, but at the very least they should have informed the assigner that they went to this HS. More of this later.
As JRUT mentioned, we already have a racial issue in Kentucky when it comes to minorities, particularly blacks, getting to work state hs playoffs games. So much so, that the people in charge of assigning these games, wouldn't correct this issue themselves, so the Supreme Court had to get involved. People, this isn't 1897 here. I think it's safe to assume that Vic may have been apart of this struggle to take this case to the Supreme Court, and now, working it to this point, he gets ambush, successfully.
I beginning to smell a rat here. When no punches where thrown, they argued inside of the officials locker room which according to Vic did not spill out from the locker room to the court. I imagine some pretty bad things where probably said in this room, and Vic's partners had to separate them. Now Vic returns to the floor to find he is no longer working the game! Hold the phone! Do you begin to see the setup here? And yes the tournament director was in on it. Now I'm basing my conclusion on the time Vic and his partners left the officials locker room to the time they returned to the court. What exactly happened during this time? This is the grey area.
Vic, who is very credible to me says nothing happened, and Bailey indicated he went to sit in an area with other officials. Now, if nothing happen here, they had absolutely no grounds to remove him from working the 2nd half. In fact, it's written in the code, once an official starts a game, he has to finish it. I'm saying that they where wrong to do this to him, his rights where violated, and he didn't start this problem. Now, after they told him he couldn't work the 2nd half, then all hell broke lose! I don't know of any red blooded American that wears the black and white stripes, that would not have come unglued here. Now, they got what they wanted, what they needed, and thus he was removed from the rest of the tournament. Mission accomplished.
Nows let's get back to the 2 officials that started this. I'm sure they where quite angry when they where told they couldn't work there graduating HS games and blamed Vic, the Supreme Court, and everybody that wasn't white for it. I'm sure there was some outrage, and this spilled over. I think Vic suffer the biggest lost here. His reputation has been permanently damaged, and for what. Standing up for what was right! Regardless if Vic had anything to do with those other 2 gentlemen working that HS game that they graduated from. This was the problem, this was wrong on there part. You can't do that. You have to know that this is wrong and given the assigner enough notice, he probably could have just switch them with another crew. My bet is they wanted to work that game. My bet is Vic doesn't do any assigning of state HS games either. So if Vic did mention that there is a conflict of interest here, which is truly what Bailey was upset about. Vic was the only one acting like an adult, trying to uphold the code of honor. Remember, he's a vice principle. He's teaching your kids about respect and following the rules. He sees it first hand everyday.
This was a nice ambush, worked to perfection. Black guy is now out! How many times has this been done to us? Far too many, and what's worst, people like some of you on this forum, try to pretend that it really didn't happen that way. I'm sure these individuals settled out of court. I'm also hope they are able to move on and wish them much continued success. If the KHSAA was smart, they would want more people like Vic working there tournaments because we all know now, there is some big time problems and bad seeds in that organization.
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