Editor’s note: The following column from the Best of West collection was originally published in the Port Arthur News on Sept. 5, 2001.

On the public sympathy scale, the quest among NFL officials for a substantial pay raise probably ranks them somewhere between Gary Condit and the Internal Revenue Service.

It is, after all, a fact of life that striped shirts in all sports are basically perceived as the enemy and treated with disdain.

Dating back to childhood, most everyone has memories of being done wrong by somebody blowing a whistle or calling balls and strikes. Usually it was on purpose by a despicable form of humanity whose mission in life was to inflict misery.

On other occasions, the guy was just blind, deaf, dumb and incompetent.

My dad, who didn't appreciate my attitude toward officials, used to tell me I was the only kid who ever played three years of high school basketball and never committed a foul. He was right, of course.

Bottom line, then, is our American heritage dictates that we view officials as a cross between Jesse James and Ray Charles. We all know there's a standing-room-only special corner of hell reserved for every referee who maliciously stole a game from our favorite team.

It is that attitude, by the way, which is exactly what the NFL is banking on in it's hardball farce of using replacement officials. The NFL, which has a better propaganda machine than the Clinton White House, figures Joe Fan's lifelong disdain toward officials will play heavily into forcing a settlement favorable for the league.

Let me suggest, however, that you the fan try to look beyond your anti-official feelings, your sickness for the seeming nonstop financial bickering in sports and the NFL's impressive spin-control monster. There is more to this than meets the eye, and a big part of it involves the NFL's hypocrisy toward the fan.

NFL officials are asking for equal pay with baseball umpires, NBA referees and NHL zebras. While there is room for debate on this issue, because there are considerably more games played in the aforementioned sports, there is little room to debate that what the officials are asking is a drop in the bucket to what has become a multi-billion dollar industry. 

Here are a few things fans needs to clearly understand before following their natural instincts and siding with the NFL:

• NFL officials are the most scrutinized in professional sports and, as such, spend 30-to-40 hours per week preparing for each assignment. 

• They travel every weekend during the preseason, regular-season and post-season, and are required to be at the game site 24-hours ahead of time. 

• They are the last line of credibility and integrity for a fast, violent sport with complicated rules that require split-second decisions.