Most embrassing moment

[refnrev]

Let's lighten things up a little! What's the most embarassing thing that has happened to you on the court? Having asked the question, I'll start. Several years ago at 7/8 boys game we were wearing our jackets during warm-up. I went to the bathroom with 4 minutes on the clock. As teams are coming on the the floor for tip-off, we remove jackets in front of table. Went to take mine off and I had zipped up the drawstring in my pants. Had to unzip my pants, take out the string, and zip them up again in front of the crowd. As my partner said, "Oh well, it's gotta get better from here!"

[beachbum]

14 days ago. I was in the trail and moved to get a better look at two players close to me. I moved right into the path of the running defensive player as she swiped the ball from the offence. Both players were comming straight at me with the ball on the floor rolling around my feet. They wanted the ball and I wanted to get the hell away from them. I tried to keep from stepping on the ball as I was knocked into the second row of bleachers by the players. Some girls players are pretty tough.

They had to stop the game as i imbarrasingly crawled out from inbetween the fans. The defensive girl says "are you alright sir"?

[grunewar]

B12 Rec game. Small court. Benches close to sidelines. A setting up what is a pretty good, patient, half-court, set offense and going through their dribbles and passes. B settles into a 2-1-2 zone. I'm T in two-man. Ball passing around perimeter, I'm busy counting closely guarded, stopping, starting, etc.

Ball passes from A1 at top of key to A2 on my wing.....B1 suddenly steps out and quickly pokes the pass away...which was apparently traveling at a good rate of speed and now flies about 10 feet and hits me square in the forehead.....

I shook it off. B1 however was miffed that I "got in the way" of his steal, which, IMO would have gone out of bounds if I wasn't there anyhow.

[TheOracle]

Grabbing a competitive onball matchup as the C, I aggressively jumped out of bounds to get the right angle to see between the players. As I landed, the defender swatted the ball out cleanly with his hand. Unfortunately, he swatted upwards, like they teach them, and the ball rocketed squarely into my nuts and bounced off me back to him, when he would probably have had a breakaway dunk or layin. Not only did I have to blow it dead since I was OB, I had a hard time pointing, and needed my own officials' TO to recover. Supervisor then made the great snide comment when I go the film about getting too old because my nuts should have been higher up in my pants. So it was embarassing at the game and then 4 days later, too.

[JugglingReferee]

I've never been brassed, so I do not have any embrassing moments.

[Texas Aggie]

Great topic. Always need to learn not to take ourselves too seriously.

A bunch of incidents come to mind. One time my first year, I made a backcourt violation call on a girl who had dribbled over the volleyball (but not the basketball division) line and then went "back." I double checked with my partner and then quickly put the ball back into play. Another time, I was at a camp and we were playing on that rubberized flooring crap. I was busting butt to get back on a fast break, stumbled and hit the deck. No one within half a zip code of me! Even though the rubber floor caused me to stumble, it softened the fall, except for a skinned knee. 2 goof ball officials at the camp gave me some grief, but we all had a good laugh. Then, back when we had that lack of action rule, I went through the whole process on the wrong team! Oh, well. Nobody got killed.

[Judtech]

This is easy.... My second year officiating, I have already gotten the "ref hike" of pulling up your pants about every dead ball. Oh yeah I had also gone from about 300 lbs to around 250.
Fast break, I feel the britches starting to slide down a tad. No worries, we can stop, I can hike and move on. Butt nNNNOOOOOO.... the little weazel has to turn the ball over. So as I stop and begin my pivot to head down the court I feel first one side then the other slide over my non exitent tuckus and now have my pants just below my buttocks. But I press on, run down the court as though I am riding a horse to make sure there is no more "slippage". But the fun keeps going, there is a "bang-bang" play, and I signal out of bounds.
After the game our supervisor comes into the locker room and asks about that specific play. He asks why I didn't call a blocking or charging foul but just went out of bounds. I said "Two reasons, first Ithought they both got to the spot at the same time and there was some REALLLY bad acting, thus no call." He asked what the second reason was, I said "Well, since my pants were about to fall off, I thought that the less moving I did the better, and there is no telling what would have happened if I had to move from the baseline and report the foul!" He thought the second reason was a better reason!

[Jim Henry]

Doing a JV girl’s game a few years back. Get to the locker room and I discover I forgot my pants! I am now panicking realizing my house is about 20 minutes away and I would not have enough time to drive home. Therefore I call home and no answer but I leave a desperate message on the machine to call me back. (Can you image what the wife thought when she heard this one?) Well I tell the AD my situation and I tell her I’ll have to wear what I have on. She said OK because there is nothing else I can do. Back in the locker room my partner shows up and he has extra pants but about 4 inches smaller in the waist. So forget about it. So I wear my charcoal gray flecked pants with cuffs and do the game. My partner tried to reassure me that all will be OK and just go out and have a good game. Well I was a bit self-conscious at first but soon got into the game and it turned out it was the easiest and best game I every did (in my humble opinion) in six years! Go figure!

Since then I triple check my bag for all my items and think back how lucky I was I wasn’t wearing my khaki chinos that day.
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