“Emotions churning, Patrick Bishop was at his wits end.  Incensed by what he perceived to be poor officiating at a junior Varsity/High School soccer match, Bishop rose from his seat in the bleachers and screamed four words that chilled players, parents, coaches, referees and spectators alike: `I have a gun.’”

From Florida Today, December 3, 2000, cited by AFL umpire, Derek Humphery-Smith, at the Brisbane ‘Fair Go For Officials’ Forum, September 2002.

All over the world, sporting officials are under siege. Australia’s figures disclose a crisis. A record 75% of kids who begin umpiring Australian Rules Football are dropping out. Rugby League’s rate is 60%. The number of people officiating in sporting events has fallen by a confounding 26%. It’s not a silent epidemic. There’s no mystery about it. The entire world witnesses it daily, on television screens, at major and minor sporting events, and, crucially, in junior ranks. Here are some examples of what they’ve seen just at the elite level:

* August 2002. During a rugby union International between the Springboks and the All Blacks, South African businessman Pieter Van Zyl runs onto the ground and tackles referee David McHugh, breaking his collarbone. McHugh is replaced for the remainder of the match. Unrepentant, Van Zyl claims he did what any patriotic fan would do in the face of “one-eyed” refereeing. “People like me are what the game’s about”, he declared as he was led away. Lawyers flock to defend him, gratis, and he receives overwhelming offers of money from Springbok supporters. In South African club rugby, referees have been shot at, threatened with knives and beaten up, but this is unprecedented at this level.

* October 2001. During an International Rules game at the MCG, Irish assistant coach Paddy Clarke pushes Australian umpire Brett Allen, calling him a “fucking cheat”.

* June 2002, during the soccer World Cup, Portugal’s Jaou Pinto punches referee Angel Sanchez after one of his team-mates is sent off.  Sanchez is then harassed by several other players.

* November 2001, Las Vegas. Zab Judah, the IBF World Junior Welterweight champion, has been comprehensively concussed by Kostya Tszyu. Judah throws a chair, then grabs referee, Jay Nady, by the throat, before being restrained by his entourage.

Throw up a name: Pretoria Hockey Club; Tomahawk East Baseball Club; the Welsh-Scottish Rugby Union; Arlington Girl’s Softball Club; East Fremantle Football Club – the world over, clubs, associations and leagues feel the need to have written protocols governing the behaviour of players and spectators toward officials. All have noticed a dramatic decline in standards.

But why?

Jason, 17, is a typical kid from Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs. Eminem shares wall space in his bedroom with Brett Lee, Andrew Gaze and a signed Essendon scarf. Knolls of paper cover his desk, each with a designation: maths, legal studies, PE.

Jason’s moving on to the next phase of his involvement in sport. He’s given up refereeing basketball. He began as a participant, but his attitude saw him increasingly marginalised. Officiating, he thought, was a way of entering via a different door. He didn’t see “exit” written all over it. No-one is more marginal than a sporting official. Now he wants to study sports administration, because he still believes he can make a difference.

Jason politely declined to be interviewed. He knows too well that “sook” ranks with “dobber” and “poofta” in the Australian lexicon of loathing.

His father, instead, tells the story. Jason’s first contact with football came at age ten. The first thing the coach asked was what the poor kid had been doing for the last five years. “I suppose any sport will tell you now that the skills have to be there by that age if you want to succeed. If you haven’t got them by ten, you might as well go and hit the books.” Jason and his dad were hardly welcomed with open arms. “The attitude of everybody, especially the parents, was scary. The kids were scary. I used to wonder what they were on! At ten, rampaging around with these blank expressions, looking as though they’d trample anyone in their way. They looked as though they were born with a footy in their hands. Jason was a bit above average height, but he looked so frail, and it seemed no-one was interested in teaching him how to survive out there, never mind play the game. Like he was a lost cause.”

Jason changed to basketball. He played in a church team with an ethos of fair play. “Our coach, and the other parents, taught kids to respect refs and opponents. Not that our team won much. When we did, the opposition would trudge off to their embittered mums and dads, hanging their heads. There’s no character to be gained from losing.

“Sometimes, even the refs were aggressive, as though they expected abuse.  Anyway, according to most people’s logic, my son’s sporting career was an experience in losing, and to them that’s why he decided to officiate – because he was a loser.  But I’m proud of him. He opted out of competing – which he loved, and probably had some talent at – and chose character over success, whatever that is”. Does he still officiate? “He still umpires, and plays, cricket – that’s not too bad at park level, but it’s getting worse. But he gave basketball away after one season and a couple of ugly incidents. Once he warned these ferocious nine-year old twins from hell, both with the same rat’s tail haircuts and earrings, and was physically scragged by this toothless troll who turned out to be their mother. Sorry, now I sound bitter. In another, this irate father who was screaming in his face ended up butting him”.

The mistreatment of officials in sport is a symptom, the causes of which are evident in Jason’s cautionary tale: parental ambition; stress; the professionalisation of sport at all levels; major shifts in the reasons our kids play. Sociologists Colin Tatz and Geoffrey Lawrence attribute the abuse of officials to a general rise in bad onfield and off-field behaviour, which, in turn, is an indication of the increased commercialisation of sport across the board.

Many blame Dr Benjamin Spock, the advocate of progressive child rearing and father of today’s generation of “brat” parents. Related to this is the politically-correct consignment of “bourgeois” or “Victorian” notions like discipline and authority to the dustbin of history.  Others say that in our “post-hierarchical” society, authority is becoming irrelevant. One doesn’t have to be a sociologist to see the consequence for sport. If authority became irrelevant, there would be no sport as we know it.

Society has its stress points – places where all of its self-made troubles weigh heavily to produce a fracture. Sport’s officialdom is one of them.

For example, if we’re sensitive to “punishment”, then any penalising action by a referee or umpire is dimly viewed as punitive. If commercialisation controls sport, then players who, ten years ago, might have had another job, are now more intensely protective of their sole livelihood. They have more reason to remonstrate. If spectators increasingly, at every turn, pay for the privilege of being fans, then they have more invested than sentiment. If sport is tricked up so that it seems like life itself, naturally fans become caught up in the drama. The official is the bad guy. If sport is a hero factory, those heroes’ fans assume an official is out to dim their star. If winning is everything, the ref must be to blame if a parent’s kid has the stigma of “loser”.

If sport is made out to be much more than it is, it competes not for our attention, but our lives. Our media commentators persist in using the vernacular of war (it’s routine now to describe a coming game as “the clash between…”), and the corporate vocabulary (“The AFL might have to make its product more attractive to consumers”; “the rugby league brand is at stake”). Pretending to maintain the fine balance between passionate and dispassionate, they’ve actually become spruikers, trying to excite fans to act in ways that go beyond spectating. Then they bemoan the decline in fan behaviour and the attitude toward officials.

Everything has its shadow side.

Sport has a new tension: the tension between will and desire on one hand, and self-discipline on the other. A decade ago we could afford the luxury of sniggering at the excesses of fully-professional Americans. But back then, our own children were only beginning to be seen as a natural resource for sporting success. Co-ordinated sporting programs, the infusion of money and sponsors, greater publicity and higher profile – all are positive developments, but each has its shadow.

The coverage of sport has reached saturation. Officials’ decisions are replayed incessantly. As we’ve witnessed in Test cricket, players now spectate at their own game. In one incident against the West Indies in 2000-01, the Australian players huddled together to look up at the replay on the big screen of a decision that went against them, and made great show of their disappointment. Cricket umpires have lost confidence. Even the most obvious runout is now referred to the third umpire.

Officials are professional scapegoats. They were always ripe for the picking, sitting ducks waiting for the explosion of television reportage and analysis. The memories of fans have always been selective. Player and coach mistakes obviously outweigh those of officials, but fans have always remembered the bad call. Now they don’t need to rely on memory.

*

Most officials I spoke to agree that spectators are the biggest problem, even if, at the elite level, it often begins with the players and ripples out in a flash from the centre of the ground. But no matter what the level, every sport, from junior gymnastics through to rally-car racing, reports increasing problems with spectators. In junior sport, parents “participate” more intimately. 19,000 members of America’s National Association of Sports Officials now have assault insurance. Violence involving parents in the USA is the major reason 70% of juniors are lost to sport by age 13. Some recent cases:

* San Fernando, California, 2002. A baseball umpire is confronted in a car park after a game. The last thing he hears before having his head slammed into a car is, “How dare you make my son a three-inning player?”

* Florida 2002. Four and five-year-old kids watch in horror as their parents brawl viciously – at a T-ball game!

* Massachusetts, 2000, a father is beaten to death at a junior hockey game by another parent.

* September 2002. A shirtless pair of spectators, William Ligue Jr and his fifteen year old son, run onto the ground and punch and kick Kansas City Royals first-base coach Tom Gamboa, to the ground. Before the attack, Ligue rang his girlfriend to tell her to watch the game on TV.

Almost every academic, coach, commentator and sportsperson I spoke to had the same disturbing observation: today’s parent is different from the parent of five years ago, and officials are copping the brunt of it. What on earth could go so horribly wrong in five short years?

*

Remember that junior rugby league coach who was banned for life after it was found he’d bribed children with the promise of two dollars for every opponent they took out? Winning at all costs is about violence. Violent events on the field have increased dramatically. There is a correlation between the extent to which a sport itself is seen to condone violence at the elite level, and the incidence at the junior level. In all cases, when participants are violent toward each other, they are also violent toward the official in charge.

Bill Harrigan, the rugby league referee, is pessimistic for sport’s future. “We’ve got to change society’s attitudes and go back. That’s where we’ll fail. It’s deteriorated over 10 or 20 years, and to get it back there will probably take us 10 or 20 years, but society’s got to want to do that and they don’t. I’m a positive person, but this is something I’m negative on”.

It’s beyond sport to resolve the problems that beset society. How do we consider sideline rage separately from road rage, aeroplane rage, cell-phone rage and other permutations of anger? But one fact stands out for me: the culture and character of an individual sport overrides even that of a nation, or a group of people.

Identifying this powerful truth is like isolating a virus. If a sport imports problems, it needs a way of understanding its own behaviour: what it tolerates from players and fans; what the expectation of the average player and fan is. In Japan, where respect for authority is still a feature, it is in baseball – a sport imported from America with a fanatical supporter base – that violence against umpires has become problematic. Tennis is similar. The world over, regardless of the local, historical attitude to authority, tennis’ traditional tolerance of abuse has caught up with everyone. Kids have bad role models in the game and, it seems, in the home. “Parental Rage,” says tennis writer S. Kirk Walsh, “from verbal outbursts to violence against umpires and other parents, has reached crisis proportions in the junior ranks.”

These are clues that sporting organisations and other peak bodies need to notice. Ice hockey has the highest frequency of violence, and its bad example has even tainted the relatively new sport of inline hockey. Therefore, it has been studied extensively. The findings? Youth hockey has the most problems with spectators. Over 2/3 of the cases sent to Missouri Amateur Hockey’s Rules and Discipline Committee involve adult spectators.

University of Lethbridge Professors Michael Robidoux and Jochen Bocksnick have observed the assumptions that spectators and players bring along to hockey games. Says Robidoux, “By analyzing behaviour we were able to observe a profound violence that is critical in shaping the community’s values and beliefs. Spectators, players, coaches and referees become conditioned to the violence, which in turn produces its own culture of violence.” How true. When we go along to see our kids play, or watch a game of footy, what are we ready to do? What assumptions do we make about spectating? That we’re there to encourage our kids, or to blame someone if they don’t succeed? To cheer our heroes and enjoy watching, or to become a protagonist by being an antagonist?

If individual sports have violence and abuse deeply ingrained in their communities of players and supporters, and if the elite level is imitated throughout the ranks, a place to begin has been identified.

The problem needs to be approached from the top down and the bottom up, by each sport’s peak organisations. Bocksnick found that in youth hockey, it’s easy to see the early developments of this culture, and that’s where he works at addressing “discriminating and violent behaviours so ingrained in the lives of Canadian hockey players. By sharing our results, we hope to sensitise the community to the impact of ‘well-intended’ spectator support.”

*

The Australian Sports Commission has identified the predicament as a threat to sport’s future. Initiatives such as the Play By The Rules website and Thanks Coach, Thanks Officials Program acknowledge the rightful place of officials in sport. The Commission has made 2003 The Year of The Official.  Its  ‘Fair Go for Officials’ forums have been run in every state and included some of sport’s biggest identities, including super coaches David Parkin (AFL) and Wayne Bennett (Rugby League). There, Harrigan told emotionally of the time his life was threatened via a text message to his son: “Make sure your father does the right thing today or he’s a dead man”.

Harrigan, AFL umpire Derek Humphery-Smith and soccer referee Mark Shield all spoke at the forum. All believe that the recruitment, development and retention of officials is under serious threat. But Shield and Humphery-Smith are hopeful that a solution will be found, and believe the forums have already had an impact: “I’ve noticed an increase in the level of awareness, where people are talking about officials and how hard their job is”, says Shield.

As a solicitor with Lander and Rogers, Humphery-Smith speaks from a legal perspective, and sees an increase in emphasis on Duty of Care and OH&S. But he doesn’t want to see the game “so sanitised that you can’t go and abuse the umpire on a weekend. But there has to be a line we don’t cross. We don’t want to look through mesh fences or barriers or moats. The forums were not aimed at stopping that. We’re just saying if you step over the line we won’t tolerate it. People like Van Zyl who think they have the right to take the law into their own hands should never be allowed near a match again”.

Humphery-Smith has seen what positive peer pressure can do: “This is the first year I had something thrown at me, in Adelaide after the Brisbane game. They all rushed toward the race, and I felt something hit my chest. We stopped and pointed to where it came from, and the crowd parted. They knew this guy had stepped over the line, they identified him, police grabbed him – thrown out of the ground”. But he’s still astounded by the assumptions people make regarding officialdom. “The incident was interesting this year when a spectator threw a bottle that hit Chris Johnson. The bloke rang both clubs to apologise, but justified his behaviour by saying he wasn’t aiming at Johnson. The implication was clear that he was aiming at my colleague Darren Goldspink. And that somehow was OK”.

*

Officiating depends largely on volunteers; people like Jason who love their sport. As Wayne Bennett said at the forums, we can’t expect them to do what can sometimes be an onerous job, then leave them to defend themselves. Anyone who cares has a solution; they sense a looming catastrophe. When the whistle stops, the playing stops. What then?

“Someone’s got to do it”, says Shield. “The person who’s doing the abusing might have to pick up the whistle. Wouldn’t that be interesting?”

Published in Inside Sport, December 2002