RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume C, Issue 29480, 5 April 1961, Page 23

RANDOM REMINDER

REFEREES Every now and then when the cable news is scarce an item appears about a football crowd, anywhere from Buenos Aires to Italy, chasing an umpire off the ground with violence and malice aforethought. Apparently it happens all the time with hot-blooded Latins, and only when the cable agency man is short of anything else does he get round to cabling any such occurrence. New Zealanders can glow with conscious pride at their own manly sportsmanship in these matters for hardly ever does anyone do anything about a referee except mutter angrily, at a safe distance. But one referee last year thought the principle expressed in the term, “Let’s be kind to our referees,” was being forgotten. He’d refereed a game at a

»üburban park. A pretty clean sort of a game it " 016 « nd of * had t o rush away to catch a plane, and he had arranged for his wife to pick him up at the end of the game, drive him straight home. He had his shower at home, in very quick time, caught a plane to Rongotai (one of the ones that eventually got there without being delayed). He came home next morning. His wife met him at the airport. “You’ll have to give up refereeing,” she said. It appeared that all the previous evening (or at least till she locked the door and refused to answer knocks) there had been callers, all speaking indistinctly and, she thought, rather rudely. There had also been a number of ’phone calls from people she could not identify, but they had said, or

mumbled, enough for her to know it had been eon“rned with her husband being a referee. She had been very short with all of the callers. The referee found out within a few minutes of getting out of the car at home just why he had been to sought after. Before the match started, while he stood disconsolately in an old overcoat over his whites, seven players, as was their wont, had carefully given him at tha last minute, carefully wrapped In handkerchiefs, their sets of den* tures. He had rushed off, with a pocketful of teeth, changed his clothes, and quite ruined Saturday night for all the toothless players especially for the one who was going with a girl who thought his teeth were natural, Which all shows just how careful a referee has to be.