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the Times of London reported Tuesday that anonymous tennis referees had considered boycotting Serena Williams' matches after his dispute with referee Carlos Ramos derailed his open American final against Naomi Osaka. As this story has been taken up, stripped of its context and redeployed into unfamiliar contexts and culture wars of the time by dominant racists and absolutists and well-intentioned people who miss the point, referees have often been considered as antagonists. It's easy to see why the story unfolds this way: considering all the obstacles tennis has placed on Serena Williams' path, its conquest must be read as a triumph. And it is easy to group Carlos Ramos as another person who is blocking his way. But one of the lost aspects of the easy analysis is that, despite their power on the court, the referees are also workers.
Referees like Ramos do not belong to any centralized body, earns $ 450 a day while officiating a match that brings in $ 3.8 million to the winner, and which could, at any time, be casually thrown under the bus by two of the governing bodies of the sport. (This is not a hypothesis, that's what happened.) So, if the referees were organizing a demonstration like Time reported, it probably would not be because they oppose Williams's behavior so deeply, but because they do not trust the governing bodies that would prefer to appease a frustrated overall icon instead of backing up their own employee who respectfully followed all the rules that they had established outside. This is the motivation that all anonymous quotes would seem to justify: "unsupported", "thrown to wolves just to do his job", "dragged to dry".
It is not clear that Serena's identity is relevant to this grievance – except in the sense that she is one of a handful of tennis players powerful enough and popular enough to elicit this kind of frantic reaction. Referees could hardly be blamed for wanting coverage in these situations. This hypothetical boycott is far from being a clean solution and is, at first glance, ugly in its specificity, but attribute it only to racism is reductive
Why do not we use an angry attack from another player? Because the referees are not afraid of the crisis itself. In virtually all other cases where a player is punished for an explosion on the court, the player is clearly considered to have broken the rules, and the governing bodies will never feel compelled to support the player against the referee. In this case, Williams' comments – both during and after the match – explicitly linked his treatment by the referees to questions of gender equity. This type of public pressure makes it much more likely the presence of an administrator, even if it is only for the sake of optics. A few days later, USTA President Katrina Adams attempted to make amends to Ramos for the speed with which the association gave in:
When, for example, Novak Djokovic makes a crisis in front of Ramos, as he did in fact, it's going to have a violation, and unless it explicitly binds that treatment, let's say, to anti-Serb sentiment, there's no reason for ATP or USTA to say or do anything other than support his referee. Serena Williams has both the influence and the difficult history of her sport in an often hostile environment. Even after this incident – which is less easily explained by a structural bias than by the fact that a star knowingly opposed the limits of what the sport allows, while a universally rigorous referee opted for a heavy hand – she is always avatar of much larger principles, for reasons both in and out of his control.
In any case, such a boycott, anonymously obtained in the first place, may never materialize at all. It is difficult to hear the relevant points of view because current referees can not in any way discuss the matches they or their colleagues have officiated and are therefore unlikely to be on the record. So after talking to the former referees, the New York Times reported on Thursday that such a boycott seemed exaggerated:
"I would put hand in hand to say that this does not come from professional referees," said Felix Torralba, a former gold chair referee for the WTA Tour from Spain. "It could be a comment in a room of people related to formalization, but not people working on the tour, who are international officials. I doubt that. I talked to colleagues. I do not believe it.
It is possible to believe the following: that the tennis bureaucracy – including its referees – has made Williams' career much more difficult than it was, that systemic racism and sexism have shaped this same bureaucracy . Just throw a referee at the side of the road when it suits him. Even veterans like Ramos are not in such a big, structurally speaking situation that they find themselves at the forefront of the collapse of an influential player.
For his part, Ramos seems to be perfectly fine: "I'm fine, given the circumstances," he told the Portuguese newspaper Tribuna Expresso Tuesday. He will resume his duties as usual when officiating this weekend in the Davis Cup between Croatia and the United States.
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