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.

On Serena and the 2018 US Open

It has been three days since the debacle at the 2018 US Open. Many people have jumped in the fray and many opinions have been expressed, some defending Serena Williams; while some profess their admiration for her talent and athleticism, yet also taking her to task for reacting the way she did, calling her out for having a reaction.

Three things became of interest to me.

First there is the lukewarm defense of the umpire, Carlos Ramos. There is the touting of his credentials as a tennis official, and there are small but spirited few who admiringly commending him for being fair to players of both genders because he is strict in his interpretations of the rules. The most common defense narrows the field down to the fact that his interpretation of the rules is strictly by the book, that there can be no fault to be found in his rulings. People who resort to strict and narrow reading of the rules are usually the same people who have a moral dilemma on their hands, or they have been called out by someone for not doing enough in a particular situation: witness the by-the-book defense of Paterno and of Urban Meyer. He walked right up to the minimal limits of his responsibility without doing an extra ounce more. The sign of someone who hasn’t done enough to meet his responsibility as a citizen of their society.

In the case of Carlos Ramos, it isn’t quite as serious but the logic is the same: he applied the rules as if he was a role model for future AI based tennis droids, strictly by the book, no interpretation allowed. Yet, in the any world where rules and laws are necessary for smooth operations, the rules demand interpretation because we cannot reasonably anticipate all situations and contingencies. The strictness of the interpretations is left up to the adjudicators. Interpretations that are too strict and too loose ill serve the greater good of the endeavor, but interpretations must be allowed. In this case Ramos hewed closely to the limit and it ill served the tennis world.

Texualists are those in the legal world who hold that only the original intent of the laws as written are the only interpretations that should be allowed. Of course the orthodox original intent of the laws are only those that are interpreted by the texualists and no one else. How convenient.

The other issue that interested me is the coaching rule itself. I am not so interested in whether Serena’s coach admitted to coaching or not, she was on the other side of the court and probably did not see his hands, which is where the looser interpretation of the coaching rule should have applied but wasn’t, thereby averting the controversy. This is important because this is the fuse that lit the situation into an unrecoverable mess.

I am not a regular tennis fan but by what I gather this is a rule that is difficult to enforce. What constitutes coaching? It seemed that coaches are expected to sit stock and live in fear of lifting a pinky finger for fear of being called for coaching. The other part of this coaching rule morass is that the rule is an open secret that everyone does it and it is rarely invoked. People on the broadcast talk about this rule as if it is an open joke amongst the cognoscenti, that this is one of these rules that exists as some kind of anachronism and that people ignore it with a wink and a nod. If this is the case, why even have it in the books? Why have a rule that is so ridiculous that no one knows how to deal with it? Why have a rule that is so broad and so difficult to enforce that the possibility of abuse by a very broad interpretation is very real. I think that Ramos in his zeal to be seen as strict and fair official abused this rule by so strictly interpreting this innocuous and arcane rule.

Now, the second and third penalties called by Ramos seem to follow his strict interpretation to a t, and I don’t have much to argue about those rulings, but the penalties that accrued are based on his original and humorless interpretation of the rules and what he thinks he saw.

Finally, the debate continues regarding what caused Serena to have her outburst and whether she had a right to be so indignant by equating the coaching ruling to being called a cheater. The ugliness blew up from that point on. Many electrons were sacrificed to that debate, but that doesn’t interest me.

What interest me is in observing the reactions of some of the people who have thrown themselves into the discussion. Those who take Serena to task for reacting the way she did. Many have pointed out that the best of the athletes who compete in the arena of public sports get incredibly personal, insulting, abusing, potty-mouthed, and childish when the ruling goes against them. They pout when things don’t go their way. Some have brought up the fact that there is a double standard when it comes to the male athletes versus the female athletes. The argument in response that just because men get ugly and cuss and swear doesn’t mean that women should be given the carte blanche to do the same. Indeed, that would be a sad and erroneous interpretation. The irony that people miss is that their reaction to what Serena exactly mirror the gender inequality in the way we view male and female athletes.

Why is it that our first reaction to a woman being combative and fierce is to call her out for being combative and fierce? Why is it that we do not react the same way or to the same degree when it is a male athlete acting inappropriately? Why is it that we hold female athletes to a higher standard of conduct than men? Does this have to do with your own inherent bias? Some have advanced the slippery slope logical fallacy, that if we allowed women to behave in the same way then all of society would slip down the slippery slope towards aggressive incivility. My contention is: if we find the rude behavior so unattractive, why not hold the male athletes to the higher standard that you are holding the female athletes? Why has this NOT been the norm in all the evolution of our society? Why are we such hypocrites when it comes to civil behavior? Why do we put the onus on the female athlete to behave differently from men? Why do we hold female athletes to a much higher standard? Why do we excuse male reactions as being passionate and a good quality to have while we condemn the female athlete for the same behavior? Why are men considered a get getter and a woman a pushy broad? Why not apply the same standards to both genders?

In the end, the one good thing that comes out of this, I hope, is that we can use the  ugly incidence to open minds and change attitudes, because if we let the ire and disgust with the inequality to just fade away, as the powers that be are wishing for, the anger will simmer and then explode in a more emotional and uglier form later. This discussion isn’t going away.