Goal: Referee Played Music in His Funeral Parade

No one loves the soccer referee. In fact, he is universally hated. A humorless actor, he is jeered and insulted in all corners of the globe.

Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan novelist and essayist, has called him soccer?s ?abominable tyrant? and ?pompous executioner.? ?Whistle between his lips, he blows the winds of inexorable fate either to allow a goal or to disallow one,? he wrote in ?Soccer in Sun and Shadow.? ?Card in hand, he raises the colors of doom: yellow to punish the sinner and oblige him to repent, and red to force him to exile.?

The referee most often has worn black, a fitting color since so many players, fans and officials have no doubt planned his premature funeral. On April 11, 1920, some players did exactly that; they staged a referee?s mock funeral in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, N.Y.

According to The New York Times, the annual match between officials of a Brooklyn shipbuilding company and another local business ended in a 2-2 tie. Although satisfied with the result, both teams began chasing the referee, Bert Sommers, as soon as he blew the final whistle.

Sommers, an electrician by trade, lived only a few blocks from Todd Field, the soccer ground constructed by Todd Shipyard Corporation, the largest shipbuilding company in the United States. Started in the midst of World War I, the company had several worker teams, including a top professional side. Between 1919 and 1921, Robins Dry Dock won three national championships, when Brooklyn was a mecca of the metropolitan soccerscape.

Sommers had no chance that day as 22 players chased him around the field. They pounced on him, pinned him to the ground and then dumped him into a simple pine box. The referee was then ?made the central figure in a mock funeral procession.?

They lifted Sommer?s coffin on their shoulders and began the ceremony. ?To show he was very much alive, the victim of the prearranged joked blew his whistle incessantly during the march across the field and was finally and somewhat unceremoniously spilled to mother earth,? The Times noted.

Sommer?s shrill sounds from within his coffin was not typical funeral music, but surely a sign of his good nature and sense of humor, qualities referees are rarely accused of possessing.

Afterward, the teams and officials posed for photographs. Unfortunately, a picture did not appear in The Times, or in one of the Brooklyn newspapers. Perhaps it remains buried somewhere in The Times?s picture library, and will be resurrected someday in The Lively Morgue.

That would be altogether fitting because Bert Sommers, the referee who played music at his own funeral, was at the center of a lively funeral scene.

Tom McCabe teaches history at Rutgers-Newark, and he is the author of ?Miracle on High Street,? which details the rise, fall and rise of a Newark prep school. He is currently working on a history of soccer in New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter.

Source: http://goal.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/referee-played-music-in-his-funeral-parade/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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