Señor Juez!

Today there was an encuentro interparroquial (inter-parish encounter) where professors from the various schools in the zone play against each other in "friendly" voli, basketball, and futbol matches. Yes, dear reader, there's a reason for the quotes. All in good time.

As is always the case in futbol, I always say that I don't want to play, but they're always short a player so I end up playing goalie. Except that this time it was the other team that was short several players--so I ended up playing goalie against my own teammates! I'm proud to say that we tied, much to the amusement of the crowd, who enjoyed calling us traitors. Some from my side were not so amused, however: apparently, upon finding out that the other team was short, they bet money on the game--and the tie screwed up their bet, so they were pretty pissed at us. Oh well, their fault for not cutting us in on the action.

I'm pretty sure that I came within a centimeter (hey, I'm in Ecuador; they use metric over here) of breaking the pinkie on my right hand. A forward boomed a kick at me from waaay out; about the halfway point between the goal and mid-field. You know, It's quite a mesmerising thing to see a soccer ball heading at high speed, headed straight at your face. You can actually see the seams on it. I imagine that a cannonball has a similar effect on a person, though I hope to never have the comparison data on that one. Anyway, I decided that I would try to catch the ball.

I quickly realized that this was a mistake. The thing hit me like a sledgehammer and crumpled my fingers. Thankfully, the ball trickled to the side and they only got a corner out of it. Immediately afterwards, the crusty old teacher from our school (who was playing on the other side, and made me look silly for 3 goals), came up to me and said "tendras cuidado, Sebas" ("you be careful now, ya hear?") flashing a shit-eating grin as he did so. Grr.

They also played voli, though I didn't watch much of that, because... they also played basketball! Santa mierda, something I'm actually good at. Unbeknownst to me, I was elected to be the referee for all the games that didn't involve my (men's) team. I initially considered this an honor, but I've now come to realize that any time I get elected to a position without being consulted, it usually means that there's some ulterior motive.

And the ulterior motive in this case was to avoid crazy, amped up, violent women who want to kill each other. Note that this is a segment of the population that I normally try to avoid.

Aside: Did I mention that I have never refereed a basketball game in my life? And I didn't know any of the terms in Spanish; I had to do a crash course on all the terms with a buddy of mine ("hey man, how do you say 'traveling?' How about 'up-and-down?' and 'backcourt?'") before I went out there. They proceeded to give me a wimpy-sounding whistle, and threw me to the wolves.

Now I've played a lot of sports in my day, been involved in several altercations that sometimes came close to blows, but in reality I've never been involved in anything like what happened today.

Things started well. I reffed 3.5 games total (aside: in Ecuador, this would be written "3,5". Basically, you switch commas and periods. Except a lot of the calculators they use are made in the USA, so it's sometimes inconsistent.) The first three went well; one men's game and two women's games. I think I was pretty fair, I didn't miss too many calls and above all I was decisive, which inspires respect. In fact, I refereed a game that involved the women's team from my town--and nobody accused me of partiality, which is actually quite a feat, as everyone knew where I was from.

I proceeded to pass the Arbitro reigns on to another young guy, as my team was due to play next and I had to change into my ridiculous school uniform (XXXXXL t-shirt and tiny running shorts make for a weird combination). I get back and it's halftime, and the ref who was sporting, in retrospect, a haunted look, the look of someone who has seen things and been subjected to pressures that no human should have to face, begged me to take over for the second half because he "had to leave."

I said ".... ok, sure." In the back of my mind, I knew something was up. Everyone around told me that he had done a terrible job, and that the women were playing way too rough and it was starting to get out of control. OK, so I figure I'll just call the fouls a little tighter than usual and keep an eye out for rough play. No big deal, right?

Wrong. In the first minute, a woman from the white team (which is our closest neighbor, and the one I was worried about being accused of favoring) elbowed a woman from the blue team in the mouth. Hard. A lot of blood was pouring out, there was a deep cut on her lip. The woman from blue turned and punched the woman from white in the face. All hell breaks loose, the teams are jawing at each other, the fans are screaming, everyone is yelling "arbitro!" and "señor juez!" and I'm in the middle of it all. It all happened so fast.

[Expletive] me. [Expleteive] me! What do I do? I'm surrounded by angry natives! There should be something in the Peace Corps handbook for this. I asked myself how it could have happened so quickly. My professional opinion was that the elbow was not intentional. Certainly some shoving was intended, but I'm pretty sure the elbow wasn't meant to land on her face--they're amateurs and don't really know how to move and turn with the ball yet.

What does one do in that situation? I told the bleeding woman she had to leave the court until she got cleaned up (which pissed everyone off because she was one of the better players), and gave the woman who threw the elbow a technical (2 free throws to the other team, and the ball). It really should have been a double technical because of the punch, but I felt bad for the blue team who had lost their player. The pandemonium continued for about 10 agonizing minutes with the blue team threatening to leave the court and the white team complaining about the punch. I was about to call it blue's forfeit (at white's behest), as they had walked off the court... but at the last second, they came back and wanted to finish! The whole time people were yelling at me from both sides... It was terrible! Really terrible. Guys from my town felt bad for me and came and stood next to me for moral support (and possibly to physically protect me).

Suffice it to say that I'm never reffing a women's game again.

I've got to say one thing though. Say what you will about men being machista and aggressive and whatnot, but at least we are brutally straightforward; if you get elbowed in the face by a guy, you instinctively know if he meant to do it or not. If he did it on purpose, obviously you must throw down, because you can't let someone do that to you. But if it was by accident, which is more often the case... suck it up, spit some blood on his shoes, give him a nasty look that will leave him running scared the rest of the game--and nail the free throws. Win the game.

Maybe that's just me though.

What a day.