“Make no mistake about it, Harold Dawson and Louden Downey are sitting before you in judgement today because they did their job”
I am not going to pretend there is a baseball angle here, but there is one helluva “Few Good Men” angle here, so I am going with it.
Two High School Football players in Texas blindsided a referee last week. If you never saw the video, you can find it here. It takes all of 2 seconds to realize it was intentional. Shocking. Appalling. Reckless.
Now the players in question say it was a Code Red – they were ordered to hit the ref! Okay, they never said Code Red, but they did say the team assistant was mad over a series of calls (bad calls in a sporting event??) and several alleged racial slurs, and ordered them to take revenge. The refs attorney unequivocally denies any racial slurs.
Did the kids do what they were ordered to? Should they have ignored the coach? Did they have a choice? Do the alledged racial slurs make a difference? Discuss
I saw this the other day and was absolutely disgusted! The fact that this took place in a HIGH SCHOOL GAME is just beyond the pale to me.
First of all, if what the kids say is true (and I don’t believe it in the least, but let’s play devil’s advocate), the coach needs to get fired and never get another job around children. Let’s get that straight. Any coach that tells underage kids to commit a crime (and it’s a crime – it’s assault at the very least) needs to go. You can hate on refs all day long, but the fact is that the football players have pads and all sorts of protection. The ref has a baseball cap.
Also, you don’t attack the ref from their blindside and take them down for poor calls and alleged slurs. If the ref did engage in racial slurs, that is something that you can bring up to the head ref. You can also file a formal complaint with the athletic conference. You don’t physically assault them!
This whole thing makes me sick. I know a good many teachers and they want to teach kids how to live right. This isn’t it.
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It’s high school football in Texas. They are completely insane about HS ball out there. Coaches, kids, parents, all of them. I asked my niece about what her school would do – she’s HS teacher here in central Fla- and she said at a minimum, criminal charges for the coach, if he directed that. Minimum of a year’s suspension from school for the kids who hit the ref, and total suspension from any sport for the rest of their school days.
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I would say that in Texas, they are completely insane about remaining juvenile and stupid right to the edge of the grave in general. Witness the grade school, police department and city hall overrun with cretinous knuckledraggers in Irvine, for example. Listen to any stump speech by the former unlamented decerebrate the good people of that anachronistic state elected twice to the governor’s mansion whose only outstanding achievement upon retirement was the world’s record for death warrants in an ostensibly modern society just like Jesus himself would have signed (not forgetting that they also awarded themselves a failed designatedhitterball executive as a function of the same collective idiocy and have now sent a raging tinpot demagogue with a face like an acromegaliac parakeet to the US Senate) for more examples of mystified cracker intractability.
That ref got orf easy.
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I grew up in Arkansas. Granted, no place is as crazy about football as Texas, but I’d say there’s still an absolute obsession there. My high school didn’t have a great team and high school ball was still a collected mania. People closed shop early to get to our football field every Friday. Literally would close their business early on Friday to go to see a bunch of teenage boys play football. We had a huge parade every Homecoming, and the entire town was invited to the pep rally. We also got off of school early on Homecoming Friday.
Now I live in Wisconsin, and the culture shock re: high school ball here and there is tremendous. Kids here, for the most part, have a smaller field with way fewer bleachers. Back home, even in my dinky little town, we had bleachers on both sides of the field, a press box, a segregated area for the marching band, and well defined sideline. My high school’s facilities look like some D-2 schools up here. And remember, I grew up in a really small town. When I graduated from high school, we only had maybe 6500 people. The Spousal Unit recently went to his alma mater for a game for the first time in almost twenty years and we only live about fifty miles away. If we lived in Arkansas, he would’ve gone a hundred times by now.
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After the incident, the kids only mentioned the racial slurs. A week later, they say the coach ordered the code red. Give them another week, and they will be saying the ref touched them inappropriately in the locker room before the game. The longer these kids have to pile on the excuses, the deeper it’ll get. The fact is, there is no justification for what they did. they could have broken his neck or back. The kids need to come out of this incident with a criminal record, period. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but this was assault, and must be treated as such.
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I agree – the “code red” angle would have been more believable had it come out right away. I think the coaches have a TON to account for – if nothing else, then for fostering an environment in which this happened, along with anything else they may have said or done. But my feeling is that these kids are using a line the coach probably said, and are turning it into an “order”
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Absolutely- The entire staff deserves some sort of suspension for fostering an environment where something like that could happen, and if a coach did order the CR, he should be arrested as well. The kids still need to pay the price, however.
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You know how they would handle this in Singapore, right?
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Pretty roughly, I assume. Certainly way beyond what I would recommend. Is that relevant somehow? Is a well timed OG joke flying straight over my head again?
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