I have to lay a little pipe for this thought so please bear with me. I experienced my first obnoxious parent at a soccer game incident this weekend. It was the game before ours and it was being decided by a shoot off after two overtime sessions. This guy, high 30's-low 40's was yelling to the opposing kicker "don't choke", maybe 3-5 times per kicker. The referee asked him to stop once, twice and the third time tossed him off the field. And I mean he would not start the game until this guy was 20 feet down line on the opposite side of the cyclone fence.
Now I suppose the punishment might have been less severe for a more cooperative individual. But this guy carried on like, well, you can imagine. After the cool headed people like the coach and others tried to sort of escort him off, things really turned against him when his wife yells "Get going, your out of control". I suspect this wasn't his first time for this so it didn't have a a lot of impact but he did slowly take his new position outside the fence. A rather humiliating spot that he drifted off somewhere from.
The game finally ended, not surprising his kid's team lost and here he comes back on the sidelines. He had some time to think about it and I think the normal expectation was that he would apologize to everyone and that would be it. Well, not this guy, his period of contemplation resulted in a sort of "meaning of is" defense. He was claiming that he was actually encouraging the players on the other team by saying "Don't choke".
I couldn't believe my ears. An older man, one of our teams grandparents hears this and walks towards me and says, ( sorry, I've got to save that for later). Listening to all the rationalization and face saving support he got from the coach and other friends wasn't easy. Then a woman who hadn't seen the incident but got the story from the "people in the know", quite fervently tells me that these referees need to relax ," It was just a mis-communication".
I wonder if this idea was spawned by the out of control guy yelling to the referee "you need to take some Zanex" and other choice phrases.
Of course what is sad is what the kid's have to endure.
That aside, what struck me was how quickly the truth evolved into something unrecognizable. If you hadn't witnessed it you wouldn't know what happened. It created a real awareness of the tools we are constantly utilizing to find the closest thing to the truth.
Oh, the grandparent's comment was, "There sure are a lot more horses asses than horses in this world". Now that was the truth.
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