I am finally home and drinking a cold beer after a taxing weekend: I reffed six games-- three on Saturday and three today-- and I worked three games as the center ref and two games as AR where the home team was running a serious offside trap, so I got some good experience calling various infractions, from the center and from the side-- and while I'm really starting to get the hang of things-- checking players in, keeping order during substitutions, calling fouls and restarts, and the various organizational duties of the ref, but I still haven't given out a yellow or red card yet and I haven't called a penalty kick-- but I'm ready to do so-- and this weekend, i worked with some veteran refs, including Rocco, an older Italian gentleman who condemns Venmo and only operates with cash and our one-armed assignor, who told a youngster who was nervous about his performance "the best ability is AVAILability"-- which is a fucking great old man statement; anyway, I've noticed that the difference between being a ref and being a coach is that when you're coaching, you are looking for reasons the ref should call a foul, but when you are reffing, you are looking for reasons to NOT call a foul: advantage, there was no contact, the player tripped over his own feet, the player's hands were against his body, little kids are just generally spastic, the ball is stuck in a pack of seven children and there's going to be random bumping without malevolence, a player tripped over the ball, etcetera . . . and there's definitely no way to get it all correct-- reffing is an exercise in futility, an exercise in unreliable narration-- but you have to be confident with your calls-- you can't reveal to the crowd and the players and the coaches that your perspective is limited, that you are at the mercy of your angle and your eyes and your old legs, you can't reveal that we are all residing in Plato's metaphorical cave, only perceiving the shadows of reality, not the actual truth, and your calls are just one subjective view among many, from one particular view of the field, your calls are not biased by rooting for one team or another, your calls are biased because you are a human, living within the flow of time, unable to stop it, run it back, rewind it, slow it time, look at it frame by frame-- this isn't TV-- and there's something very excellent and fun about this, you make a call and sometimes you nail it, and sometimes you wonder, and sometimes you get it wrong (and sometimes your AR corrects you) but you are outside, in the sun, watching sports and listening to passionate fans and players-- so, as a retirement job, it sure beats tutoring kids for the SAT or helping them write a college essay (plus, I got a shitload of exercise-- my feet hurt . . . also, if you bring any of this up during a game, I'll give you a yellow card for dissent).
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