Officiating and Subjectivity

In the continuing conversations with my friends regarding the US Open situation, a few points were brought up with made me think about the rule itself and our expectations of the officials.

First the rule. Almost all sports have behavioral rules which do not exist in response to the on field play but rather exists as a deterrent to undesired behavior from the coaches and players. The logic to these kinds of rules are along the line of hitting them where it hurts, i.e. in the score of the game itself. Even though this deterrent never stopped anyone from behaving themselves the first time, the threat of further sanctioning, it is thought, will deter them from reacting errantly the second time around. What is different this time is that tennis has an escalating scale of punishment: a sanction with no consequences in the actual score, the awarding of a point, and then the awarding of an actual game. It is the second sanction which set Serena Williams off and resulted in the third sanction. In volleyball, we do have a sanctioning of a point and then the officials can deprive the team of the coach by ejecting him or her. In the greater scheme of things, the volleyball sanctioning affects the team psychologically rather than in terms of actual points.

I am not sure if I know of any other sport where the officials have so much power as to being able to definitively throw the game in favor of one player. This is an awful lot of power to invest in one person, which brings us to the other topic, which is:  the expectations we have of the officials.

The ideal model for a good official is the stoic and objective interpreter of the arcane arts of the rule makers. The are expected to know and understand the rules and adjudicate with Solomon-like righteousness and fairness; in presupposing this model of the official, we are assuming that these humans can strip away their humanity and very human emotions to serve the integrity of the game. This is an impossible task, even as we are entering an era of AI and automation the rule makers leave quite bit of room for human interpretation and allow the official to use their best judgement to best serve the integrity of the game. Officials are human, not only human, but human because being human is characteristic to be celebrated.

In looking back at the situation, Serena Williams behaved as a human when she interpreted the coaching penalty as an accusation that she is a cheater. The chair umpire behaved as a human when Serena called him a thief for taking a point and then a set away from her. Both behaved as any humans would except one is being castigated for showing her emotion, even if it was over the top and expressive. Carlos Ramos reacted emotionally when he assessed the third penalty, even though he didn’t show the emotions externally, it was an emotional reaction to her accusation. The difference is that we are assuming the official does not and should not react with emotion, we therefore interpret his actions as a due part of his duties as an official arbiter of the rules. Was he at fault? I would say no because he was at the mercy of the ambiguous rule. What constitute verbal abuse? Different people have different thresholds in the face of socially unacceptable behavior. As evidenced by the videos of McEnroe, Kyrgios and others, some of the officials just let the torrent of abuse roll off their backs while others react in other ways. Which brings us to the point of Serena’s contention: do the officials in tennis have a different threshold for men versus women? I would say that they do, they have demonstrated it time and again. The question is: do we allow the normalization of attitudes to equalize those thresholds, allow the situation to persist as status quo until humans alter their attitudes towards the genders or should we enforce equality immediately? Either option make it difficult for the official as they are asked to rule as they have always done while pretending nothing is wrong and suffer the wrath of players and fans alike because the inequality has been exposed publicly or to think about their own inherent bias they most often are not aware of consciously and rule accordingly, which robs them of the spontaneous skilled responses that they have worked hard to hone and perfect?

How did we get here? I still point at the rule itself, it is an imperfect rule and in this case it is a judgement call. In volleyball you cannot argue a judgement call, but in this era of instant replay, judgement calls are argued all the time amongst the fans. The more egregious point regarding the coaching rule is that it is exclusively a judgement and that judgement suffers from large amounts of variability and randomness, this is where the inclusion of human interpretation comes to serve to the detriment of the game. Even if the definition of “coaching” is specific in the rule book, it is still subject to human emotions and immediate reaction. Couple that with the escalating scale of justice imposed by the tennis organizing bodies, the capriciousness and randomness of human judgement inevitably play a large part in a game that is supposedly objectively adjudicated.

Some question then: is it desirable to have behavioral deterrent rules that punish the player? Is completely objective officiating desirable? If not, if we want to have that human element rather than having robots officiating, what are the limits for the human officials? Is it desirable to have any rules that is so broad and have so much impact on the outcome of the game be dependent on  the variability of human emotions?

I don’t know the answers, but it is interesting to consider.