TV Teddy Video and comments?

[JRutledge]

Originally Posted by UNIgiantslayers

I'm wondering if you'd be willing to expand on what you mean by this. I'm not doubting you at all on this, so please don't mistake this for skepticism. I can imagine what you're saying, but am curious about this. How often does this type of thing happen? What types of things are they saying that they wouldn't say to me? How do you handle that? Is there a line in the sand for you? Do Black coaches interact with you differently than they do with your partners and/or differently than white coaches do?

What I am saying is that Black players tend to be a little "extra" with Black officials. They tend to say things to us they never would imagine saying to other officials. I deal with this all the time where I live in both high school and college games. I have had this conversation with many Black officials as to how Black players and coaches act towards us when we have Caucasian partners or non-Black partners.

I will give one example that happened to me last week. I had a game between a City team and a Suburban Catholic school (That plays in the major city Catholic School Conference) that happened to have a couple of white players on the team. The coach from the All-Black city team had the nerve to say to me something about the racial breakdown of his opponent. I got actually upset and challenged him directly when he made that comment. And you can say, "Why didn't you T him?" Well, that would have caused another issue and would have been ammo to use against me based on what was happening in the game. But I got my point across and we moved on. BTW, the teams both had the same amount of fouls in the game and we fouled out only one player in the game and he happened to be a Caucasian player. But if you listened to this coach all night you would have thought we were screwing him or had something against him. His team also won the game by about 4 in a tough game. For the record, I was not the only Black official on the game and it was clear that the players and coaches from this one team said very little to our white partner, even when he would make a call that was all on him. This is common, it is annoying and there is no easy solution. You just have to have a team or area enough where they realize you do not give a damn either way.

I will just say this. People do not leave their social, political, or values at the door when playing sports. It often is an issue from everything to assigning to how you have to deal with the extracurricular in a game. And this was the case when I worked a game in my new home state where I was the only Black official and you would have thought I was the only official a certain coach would talk to. It gets old and unless I know something about what was said to Teddy, I get it big time. Because if he has to constantly hear his mouth, sometimes you need to do drastic things to get player's attention. It was certainly drastic but might have been the last straw.

Peace