Sports referees are the perfect enemy for our time. They wield large amounts of power yet operate in relative anonymity. They are mistake-prone humans enforcing defined but often squishy rules and are instructed to do so in equal measure to each side of a competition — leaving themselves vulnerable to anger from all involved parties.
They are the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to complaining about an outcome of a close game, and that’s what bothered me the most about Cheryl Reeve’s postgame lambasting of officials after Sunday’s Game 5 loss to New York in the WNBA Finals.
She can be right that they botched the final possession that sent the game to overtime — plenty of us at home, myself included, thought the shooting foul should have been overturned — without turning it into a conspiracy theory-level travesty.
Patrick Reusse and I talked about that on Monday’s Daily Delivery podcast.
We live in an era where grievance is more fashionable than accountability and groupthink is more desired than nuanced discussion.
As Jim Souhan noted in a lengthier piece about Reeve’s postgame reaction, New York was similarly aggrieved after Game 4 when the Lynx shot 20 free throws to the Liberty’s nine and won the game on a debatable foul in an otherwise rugged game with two seconds left.
But fans, players and coaches quickly develop amnesia about the breaks that went their way and never forget the perceived slights against them.
Such bitterness is usually the domain of long-suffering Vikings fans, many of whom have a disturbing mental catalog of all the times the purple have been wronged by officials over the years.
