Assault on high school ref should open eyes
Grant Rice warns them about Facebook. Warns them about YouTube. Warns them about what they say and how they act and what they write and the message it all presents.
Warns them every day.
“Nothing is private now,” Rice said. “There are video cameras everywhere. We let them know that everyone is watching.”
Rice is the Bishop Gorman High boys basketball coach and hadn’t yet seen the video clip from Florida, the one in which a prep player on Monday attacked a referee after being whistled for a technical foul.
The 18-year-old first pushed and then grabbed the 51-year-old official, picking him up and slamming him to the floor.
Good for whoever shot and posted the attack on the Internet. Good for the world to see. Don’t think this hasn’t happened before. Don’t think it can’t happen again.
If the famished shark that is the information age has swallowed our privacy, having evidence of a vicious act is one of the positives from such an all-access existence.
Mason Holland was the DeSoto County High player who went all Georges St. Pierre on the official. Holland was suspended from school and removed from the team. He could also face charges of felony battery.
He should face them.
If this happened at a mall, if someone said or did something Holland disagreed with while shopping for Christmas gifts and his reaction was to attack that person, police would be called and charges probably filed. That it occurred at a sporting event shouldn’t in any way lessen the act’s intent.
Watch the video. Watch the player pause after his initial shove and still attack the official.
This wasn’t a mistake. It was a choice.
“It would be a felony in this state,” said Marc Ratner, who has served for more than 20 years as commissioner of officials for Southern Nevada. “It’s a very, very serious infraction. It’s a crime. This was an assault. There is nothing the kid can say. There is no gray area to it. There is no he-said-she-said. In watching (the video), the official was just stunned. It was very distasteful.”
The life of an official: Rarely if ever do you hear one praised. Coaches whine. Players beg. Fans boo. Reporters mock. It’s part of reality for those who choose to wear a whistle.
There are good officials and bad ones. There are ones who blend into the show and ones who want to be it. There are ones who know the rules but not the game and others who know neither and others who know both.
There are none who deserve what the prep official faced in Florida this week.
Verbally ridiculing another is one thing. Assault is another. Assault by a high school athlete is even more disturbing.
Ratner has never encountered such a scene in his time as commissioner, but there was that Friday night when a police escort was needed to safely lead a group of officials out of a small town whose fans went berserk under the lights. Parents were the main culprits. They usually are.
This has been an issue for years, so much that more than 30 states — including Nevada — since the late 1990s have passed legislature in an attempt to prosecute those unstable and brainless enough to attack sports officials.
The law extends beyond the field of play, meaning following an official to his car or bumping into him at a gas station after a game and taking out your anger will result in the same charges. A great thing.
You can educate. You can, like Rice does at Bishop Gorman, have a plan in place that should any fight break out during a game, the head coach will intervene while his assistants keep those on the bench from entering the court. You can instruct officials, as Ratner has for decades, to retreat immediately from harm’s way if attacked and not fight back initially but to always protect one’s self.
The good news is that an attack like the one in Florida is almost always broken up quickly.
The bad news is that it happened at all.
“It casts a big negative on all high school sports,” Rice said. “Hopefully, everyone will learn from it and coaches know to have that plan in place in case something like it occurs. This is 2010 — something a kid in Florida does gains national attention for everyone to see.”
People need to see it. Officials need to be protected from it. The law needs to treat it as a crime.
The video, in this case, doesn’t lie.
Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be heard from 2 to 4 p.m. Monday and Thursday on “Monsters of the Midday,” Fox Sports Radio 920 AM.
