You may recall my sports rant in the May Tribune, wherein I had a bit to say about umpires, and in particular the way the AFL is treating them. My biggest problem is that, however good or bad a job they do, the league comes down like Vlad the Impaler on anyone who comments on their activities in any way at all.

I think they’re going about it the wrong way, however their intent is noble: umpiring is a bloody hard and mostly unrewarding job, and it’s getting harder and harder to attract young ‘uns to the profession. My bike ride last weekend illustrated for me exactly how tough it is.

I like to ride around Albert Park Lake – it’s flat but there’s always a decent head or crosswind to keep things interesting, the bike lanes are nice and wide, and there’s bugger all traffic to worry about. Also, there’s always a game of something on one of the dozens of sports grounds within the park, so I’ve got something to look at other than my front wheel.

Last weekend I was passing an Under-17s match, and I was lucky to see a towering leap from a ruckman, and enough ball skills from the midfielders to convince me that this could be worth a five-minute breather. There were about twenty or thirty spectators, most of them, I presumed, parents and club officials, and one big bloke, standing on his own, wearing a fluoro tabard. I stood about twenty metres around the boundary from him.

This being a game of footy, every time a player was tackled, or half a mark was taken, someone in the crowd had something to say. However, when the ump blew or didn’t blow, the whistle, everyone was strangely silent, and looked towards fluoro-guy. Strange, I thought, until I caught the letters on the back of his tabard: UMPIRE ESCORT.

So officiating a junior game of footy in the not-particularly-rough neighbourhood of Albert Park is such a hazard for the umpires that they require a bodyguard. This is fucked. Why is this happening?

Go to any junior game of footy these days and you’ll get your answer: fuckhead parents, bitter over their own inadequacies, trying to live vicariously through their long-suffering kids. The vicious screaming at their own kids, their opponents, their team-mates, the umpires and the other parents is enough to make you want to round them up and hit them with a big fucking stick.

Maybe it makes me a bit of an oddity, but my parents never had an interest in sport of any kind. Being a kid, though, I wanted to make some attempt to fit in, so they accommodated me, driving me to various sports (at which I uniformly sucked) and giving me quiet encouragement, despite their ambivalence about the idea of chasing a perfectly innocent ball around a large windy park. They wanted me to do well, but most importantly, they wanted me to be fit, and to enjoy myself.

They had no need to project their own fucked-upedness onto me, so if I dropped a catch or hooked a kick it was no big deal to them. If the kid chasing me was faster and stronger and I got tackled and planted in the dirt, so be it – fair bump, play on, it’s all good.

But I recall, even back then, there were fuckhead parents pushing and pushing their kids; while we were chowing down on oranges and the volunteer coach was doing his best to entice a bit more run and carry, there was always a couple of kids away from the rest of us, being berated by their (always, always, always overweight) fuckhead fathers, being told to pull their fucking finger out, get the ball away from the rest of us spastics, lay the tackles, kill the other team, wake up to themselves, stop being wimps.

Then in the next quarter we could see the fear in those kids’ eyes, their desperation to get the ball and kick the goals and be the hero. Not for fun, not as our team-mates, but to maybe avoid copping a verbal and/or physical beating when they got home.

Some of us, attempting to help them in that endeavour, went out of our way to pass the ball to them despite other, better options. Of course, our lack of skills meant well-intentioned passes usually ended up over the head or just in front of their intended target, drawing blistering abuse from fuckhead parents on the sidelines.

It’s gotten worse now though, as we can see with the dwindling numbers of young men and women joining the umpiring fraternity, and the fact that they need bodyguards. Recently in country Victoria there was a brawl at an under 10s game, involving fuckhead parents and, for some reason, under 16s players.

This is not an isolated incident, and it has the potential to be replayed all over the country at hundreds of sports grounds every weekend. It’s sick-making, it really is.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting your kids to do well at sport, or to excel academically or artistically. But to push a kid, to bully him or her every weekend, to berate them because they dropped the pass or swam too slow or their serve is too soft, what does that achieve?

The kid starts to hate sport, because the they’re copping tons of shit every weekend, and the kid starts to avoid sport (and any other activity that can be rated) for fear of being not good enough for the invariably untalented parent who, in a pathetic attempt to assuage their own inadequacies, is ruining what should be the most fun a kid can have. It’s doubly ironic that these fuckhead parents are not only ruining sport for their kids, they’re also showing how ignorant they are – hang around a seniors game, and tell me if you hear the coach screaming and humiliating the players, week in and week out. They don’t, because it doesn’t work.

Well I started this article talking about umpires and here we are going into good parenting.

Part Two next month, I guess.

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