by Adam Burns
Come on, admit it.
You laughed when Dennis Rodman head-butted that referee.
When Nick Van Exel shoved one over the scorers table, you said, "What kind of shove is that? You could of hit him harder than that!"
Now Magic Johnson stopped being such a goody goody and finally gave one of those creeps what was coming to him.
It's OK -- refs are evil; players should get extra points if they can take one of them out.
Or this at least seems to be the current sentiment among the majority of players, coaches, fans and the sports media.
At Saturday's Red and White game, even though the Houston Cougars football team was playing itself -- the refs still managed to draw boos from the crowd.
True, there was one bad call on a pass interference -- but it was a glorified practice, for crying out loud.
Later on Saturday, in the Rockets' win over the Dallas Mavericks, Hakeem Olajuwon hit a stunning, buzzer-beating shot with four-tenths of a second left in the game, and the Houston Chronicle's game story led off talking about Clyde Drexler and Mario Elie's little tiff with a ref that got them thrown out of the game.
Nobody seems to notice that Drexler gets into a lot of feuds with different refs that result in his getting thrown out of games.
Psychologists call it hostile media phenomenon: People believe that if an impartial person lays any type of impartial judgment on you, what you stand for, or the team you root for, it's because they are biased for the other side.
I've only complained about officiating once in a story, and I sure wouldn't lead off a story with a complaint.
It's one thing to yell and scream at the refs for fun, or to try to get the calls to go your way, but it seems that so many people actually believe that the officials are out to get them.
If you are going to scream or complain at the refs, at least have the decency to be cool or funny about it; don't just whine.
During the Dr Pepper Southwest Conference Post-Season Classic about six weeks ago, one of the Southern Methodist band members screamed at the refs, "Hey, ref, I bet that whistle isn't the only thing you've blown today!"
That was funny.
Also cool was when, during the Cougars men's basketball team's win over Baylor, a call that could have gone either way, but went against Houston, drew the comment from UH coach Alvin Brooks, "The Big-12 gets all the calls."
Uncool was the guy that sat in the front row of every Cougars home game and did nothing but whine to the refs. He never cheered on Houston; he never booed the road team -- all he did was whine.
If he was reading a script it would say, "Hey, ref, call the game both ways!" repeated 20,000 times.
Texas coach Tom Penders also made it a habit to complain about the officials as often as possible.
Johnson, and any player in any league who gets physical with a ref, deserves to be suspended.
Officials, particularly in the pro leagues, train for years to do what they do. They may miss a call once in a while, but trust me, they aren't specifically biased against you and your team.
Burns is a senior journalism major.