If your name is Tim Tebow, and you’re a Christian, and you drop to one knee in prayer after a big play — no flags. But if your name is Husein Abdullah, and you’re a Muslim, and you drop to both knees in prayer after a big play — flags. This isn’t a case of one referee reading the rulebook differently. Multiple flags were thrown on Abdullah. Teebow has never been flagged for his on-field prayers.
The NFL’s explanation is that Abdullah wasn’t flagged for praying, he was flagged for sliding, which is considered “celebration” under NFL rules, and indeed Abdullah himself seems to accept this explanation and his team isn’t accusing the officials of religious discrimination.
But still, this penalty is a bit reminiscent of cops who pull over black drivers for dirty license plates while white drivers whiz by 15 or 20 mph over the speed limit. In short, you wonder. And lots of people must be wondering, because the referees on this play are catching a ton of flak in social media. It may have been a technically correct officiating call according to the rulebook, but it just didn’t feel right to many folks.
The controversy over this incident brings up an interesting point about professional sports. Intellectuals like me usually aren’t big sports fans. We prefer reading books to watching TV. (I don’t even own a TV, but my house sports 16 overflowing bookcases, with more books piled on floors, desks, and anywhere there’s a flat surface.) But it hasn’t flown over my head that professional sports have been at the forefront of breaking down discrimination barriers, and began doing so even before the Civil Rights era.
So you don’t expect racial discrimination to occur, or be tolerated, in professional sports; and I don’t think that’s what happened here. (Gender equality is another story, but let’s skip that for now.) It was simply referees flagging what in fact was technically a violation, which the player and his team aren’t disputing, and that’s what NFL referees are paid to do. Players and fans expect no less. You don’t get to be an NFL referee unless you adhere to a very high standard of unbiased and accurate officiating. Make a wrong call and coaches, players, and millions of fans will climb all over you.
Sports fans, generally speaking, also are great in this respect. Even beer-swilling rednecks who attend local KKK chapter meetings* are color blind when sitting in football stadiums watching a game. In that time and place, the markers are how well a player throws, catches, runs, kicks, blocks, tackles, intercepts, recovers fumbles, etc. In baseball, it’s how well he pitches, catches, throws, hits, runs, slides, etc. There’s something about sports and fan loyalty that makes prejudices collapse on America’s playing fields. Being a good player makes you okay in everyone’s eyes. That was true even when racism was virulent in this country. Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson were among America’s most beloved citizens at a time when they couldn’t sit at a lunch counter in South Carolina or Georgia.
Even today, in the 21st century, prejudice is rampant in America. We have no lack of ignorant people who stereotype their fellow Americans and treat them badly because they’re nonwhite, Muslim, or gay. Muslims, especially, have been vilified and victimized ever since 9/11/01, as if each and every Muslim in the entire world is somehow personally responsible for the terrorist acts of a few. Against this broad social backdrop, there’s something uplifting about seeing sports fans, many of them white, questioning an NFL officiating call that looks to them like an athlete may have been treated differently for being a Muslim, even if their judgment of the situation is wrong and the officials were right.
* yes, the ironic stereotype here is intentional and tongue-in-cheek.
