I enjoyed this interview, between New York Times staffer Sopan Deb and Zach Zarba, a veteran NBA referee. Here's a teaser, the most interesting exchange of the interview to me (aside from an amusing story about the young Kobe Bryant):
Deb: Do superstars get more leeway?
Zarba: I would disagree and go the other way and I would say that the majority of superstar players in our league don't get all the calls and don't get as many whistles as they deserve.
I guess I would have expected an official either to acknowledge that conventional wisdom about a star system is true, thereby winning points for "candor," or else to defend the honor of his profession by insisting that refs treat star players the same as everyone else. The view that star players get the shaft from officials therefore struck me as actually candid. From my long-ago experience umpiring ball games, I have an idea how this could be true without impugning anyone's good faith. I felt like my judgment could be affected by what I expected to happen, and that it was practically impossible not to have these expectations. For example, a batter hits a sinking line drive into the outfield. I think it's a hit for one second, two seconds—I can't suppress the thought—then the racing outfielder dives and gloves the ball at turf level: Was it a trap or a good catch? Well, from the instant the ball was hit, I'd been thinking: "can't be caught." It seems to me entirely possible that your perception of what actually happened can be colored by what you thought was going to happen—or, to put it another way, by what you thought was possible. It's not hard to see how such a psychological process operating in a good-faith referee might work against an athlete capable of defying expectations.
On the other hand, in the NBA the same officials are working games with the same players over and over again. Zach Zarba knows who is a star, right? Maybe if I had known that the diving player was the Kobe Bryant of outfielders, my expectation about what was going to happen would have shifted and the result of the headlong dive would look more like a good catch. Only thing I'm sure of is that referees are human, a point that comes to the fore when you talk to them, if Deb's conversation with Zarba is representative.
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Ten seconds of every hour devoted to social media is worth the callous on the tip of my scrolling finger. I know I won't get 59 minutes and 50 seconds back but here's the harvest from the other ten ticks, my candidate for Tweet of the Day:
don’t even bother clicking - I checked, they don’t show you the sandwich. https://t.co/X0fxToheAg
— hend amry (@LibyaLiberty) September 23, 2020
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