In Defense of Referees

For most of my life, I have enjoyed both participating in and spectating sports, but as I've gotten older there is one aspect of sports culture that really bothers me and that is the vilification of referees.  As you might expect, I have a few thoughts on the subject.

• Why is it socially acceptable to yell at and make insulting comments to referees?  If a cashier gave me back the wrong change, I wouldn't start screaming at them or telling them to pull their head out of their ass.  In most other professions, if someone makes a mistake, I don't think we usually scream at and insult them.  Granted, sports is a different context than real life, but I still find it interesting how acceptable it is for fans, coaches, and athletes to berate referees.
• Why are referees the only participants in an athletic contest of whom we expect perfection.  If a baseball player gets a hit a third of the time, he's doing great.  If a basketball player makes half his shots, he's awesome.  But if a referee misses any call, people want their head on a platter.  I have only tried to ref on a couple of occasions, but both times I found it to be exceedingly difficult.  When referees are expected to see, react, and interpret hundreds of actions instantly, mistakes are going to be made.  And overall, I think referees typically do a very good job and get much more right than they get wrong.
• Accusations of bias by referees are completely unfounded.  I can see where if one team just keeps its mouth shut and plays hard and the other whines incessantly, there might be a tendency of the refs to favor the non-whining team as the game goes on.  But to say that referees come to the game with the intent of helping one or the other teams to win is ridiculous.
• Blaming referees for a loss is not constructive.  Referees are going to miss calls and sometimes those missed calls can come at critical junctures in a game.  But in any closely contested athletic competition, there are hundreds of individual events that help determine who wins.  And more often than not, there were mistakes made by coaches or players...a missed shot, a dropped pass, a missed defensive assignment, a missed block...that had every bit as much to do with determining the winner as a missed call by a referee.  By focusing on the referee, we don't see our mistakes and fail to work harder to correct and improve on areas that we can control.
• Without referees, in most cases, the sporting event would be unable to take place at all.  In many cases, we have individuals giving of their time, or making a few bucks to allow an athletic program to exist, and they are rewarded by listening to fans and coaches scream and yell at them the whole time.
• We can do better as a society and within sports culture of respecting referees.  There is nothing wrong with respectfully discussing the interpretation of a rule or pointing out something that the referee might be missing, but it should always be calmly and under control.

So the next time you're at a sporting event, cheer your team loudly, if you're playing, play hard, but be courteous to the referees.  Give them the respect they deserve.