A Simple Boo Will Suffice
link Derek Dye, Ejected By Umpire For Playing Three Blind Mice « CBS Philly.
If you can’t yell at an umpire, pro sports as we know it, is dead. This is another in the series of neutering events foisted upon male culture in North America. Where will it all end? For a peek into the future of feminized games, look no further than soccer, the sport in which tactics are explicitly employed to get the referee’s sympathy by players grabbing their shins and rolling on the ground like a 5 year old howling in pain even though they were bumped on the head. Pretty lame in comparison to ice hockey where the players continue to play with broken limbs and bloody facial cuts.
Most big ticket spectator sports are masculine pursuits. It’s not like an opera where attendants politely clap after a long snooze. Sports is all about visceral warfare. Even the gentleman’s game of golf will see examples of rabid fanaticism from time to time. Next time you watch Tiger hit a tee shot, listen to the gallery. Or watch the Phoenix Open at the 16th hole when the crowd acts as if they were in the Roman Colosseum. If people couldn’t cheer or jeer, it wouldn’t be sports; it would be masterpiece theatre. Loud rounds of tsk-tsk’s just won’t do.
If the umpire in this story is hurt by characterizations of his vision, he should maybe rethink his profession, since blindness and umpires have almost as long a history of association as sex and fishnet stockings. The mentality of nice-nice and touchy feely has no place in the world of pro-sports. At the highest level, people want to see athletes perform at standards that they couldn’t possibly attain themselves; in essence, the public lives vicariously through their heroes. As the bounds of socially acceptable behavior get more and more restrictive, pro sports remains as a useful outlet to vent frustration for many people. You can’t yell at your boss for fear of being fired, or berate an underling without fear of being sued, but you can legitimately vent at players and referees alike, heck you pay for that privilege.
And come on, to be criticized at your job is the American way. That umpire is lucky he’s not in the political business like the commie-pinko-socialist-useless-marxist-entitled-President of the United States.