Earlier this year, a man called Coach asked me to referee a soccer match between two prisons: Louisiana State Penitentiary, where I’m incarcerated, and Dixon Correctional Institute, about 45 minutes southeast of us.
Coach is employed by the prison to facilitate athletic competitions. I found his request ironic: Prisons are for rule breakers, but now I was being asked to be a rule enforcer.
On the field, right before the game, the DCI warden lightly interrogated me about my past experience, the final step before I was officially chosen to referee the match. I told him I had earned a referee certification from the U.S. Soccer Federation, qualifying me to oversee recreational games for youths and adults, when I was 14. He joked that because I was so young when I “caught my charge” (a phrase I’ve never cared for; it was a homicide, not a Frisbee), I probably had only called little kids’ games.
It’s true that I was arrested at 16, and it had been a lifetime — I’m 32 now — since I officiated in any capacity. But I had real experience, and knew I could still do it. The warden seemed satisfied with my answer.
I projected confidence, but I felt nervous. This wasn’t going to be your normal kind of soccer match.
My nerves weren’t so much about refereeing convicted felons. I’d seen games of slow-pitch softball and figured that if my fellow prisoners could make it through nine innings with aluminum bats without killing each other or the umpire, they could probably restrain themselves for a soccer match.
My main concern was having to live with around half of the guys after the match. When a game ends in the free world, everyone goes their separate ways. I would remain locked in with some of the same players I would surely be blowing a whistle at. If the team from my prison won, things would probably be fine. But if they lost, that was a different story.
In search of help
When I officiated games as a teenager, the first thing I had players do was line up on the sideline and rap their shinguards. If your shins were silent, you couldn’t step on my field. Then I had them stand on one foot so I could inspect their cleats. I was looking for the telltale toe spike that meant someone was trying to play in football cleats. At the prison match, no one had shin guards. Apparently, they were a “security risk” — the rumor mill tells a story of a guy who tried to escape wearing shin guards over his forearms to protect himself from the razor wire.
Most people did not have soccer cleats. The few prisoners who could afford to buy their own cleats did so through one of our clubs, and the rest borrowed from the flag football team — the kind of cleats I would have outlawed as a teenage ref. Apparently these were not a security risk.
My equipment was also suboptimal. I was issued a black-and-white striped jersey to call the game in. But the zebra look is for football, basketball and Footlocker. I’d always called games in solid yellow, red or blue jerseys, with my USSF badge velcroed above my heart.
After I collected my shirt and whistle, I started recruiting two assistant referees. The center ref calls every throw-in, goal and foul. The assistant refs work opposite sidelines and opposing halves, keeping level with the second to last defender so they can call offsides.
Minutes before the game, I found two volunteers, one from each prison.
Since I’d left my ceremonial FIFA coin back home and money is contraband behind prison walls, I borrowed a can of dip from the warden for the coin toss. The Stoker’s label was “heads,” the plain black plastic reverse “tails.” Two players were arbitrarily designated captain and the DCI captain called the can in the air. DCI won the toss.
No ‘prison rules’ here
The two teams arranged themselves for kickoff. LSP wore a basic blue jersey with white numbers on the back. Their shorts were a motley collection of whatever they could find. DCI, on the other hand, looked almost professional. They wore green-and-white jerseys and shorts with the silk-screened names of local companies on the front. Maybe DCI’s enthusiastic warden had managed to wrangle some corporate sponsorships.
As I prepared to blow the whistle, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. I remembered why I had never missed this job.
When you get locked up, you find yourself missing all kinds of things you took for granted or even disliked. I missed McDonald’s, even though I never had much taste for it. I missed high school, even though I had dreaded it as a teenager. I missed my brother, even though we fought all the time growing up. I never missed being a referee. Telling people what they can and can’t do was never fun for me.
As play began, I noticed that a few guys had a deft touch, but most people were sloppy. Almost everyone played rough — an attempt to substitute physicality for skill. There weren’t a lot of tactics and strategy evident, but there was also no sign of “prison rules.” Nobody threw punches or threatened to kill anyone. If someone fell over, the nearest man would offer him a hand, regardless of what color jersey he wore.
The most prison thing to happen was pausing the 90-minute game in the first half so guards could re-count the guys playing and make sure no one had snuck away.
The game ended in a 2-2 tie. When it was all over, I was paid with three pieces of baked chicken and a hefty helping of jambalaya.
The old joke among referees is that if both sides are equally unhappy at the end of the game, you did a good job. By that measure, I did great.
No ‘Longest Yard’ here, either
There were calls I should have made that I didn’t. There were calls I shouldn’t have made that I did. But my biggest mistake was explaining my calls. Veteran refs warn against that. Your call is final and not up for debate.
On the field, though, my approach smacked of insecurity. I wanted to explain to my fellow prisoners that I was on their side, wielding my authority benevolently and not arbitrarily. This endeared me to neither side.
Meanwhile, my LSP assistant ref was enthusiastic but misguided. He didn’t stick to one half but tried to follow the ball from goal line to goal line. He thought he was most useful where the action was, but this left him out of position when I really needed him.
The other guy was useless. He planted himself in one spot and sipped on a giant Styrofoam cup for the first half. We replaced him with another DCI prisoner in the second half, but the new guy was equally unhelpful. He held a T-shirt in his hand to use as an improvised flag, sticking it straight up in the air whenever anything happened on the field.
Technically, this gesture signaled offsides, but because he used his flag in the same manner when the ball went out of bounds, when a handball occurred or when a player put his spikes in another man’s face, the gesture told me exactly nothing.
A majority of players were Spanish speakers. The complaints — at least I assume they were complaints based on the tone of voice and the death stares that accompanied them — always came at me in a blur I couldn’t understand.
Most people probably think of prison sports in terms of “The Longest Yard” movies, but to me the game was indistinguishable from other amateur sports I’d seen elsewhere.
As I walked away with my food, I passed some of the players. “Good game,” I told them.”Good job,” they responded. I detected no sarcasm or tension. Any nerves I had faded. One guy, who I was fairly certain had said some uncomplimentary things about my mother in Spanish less than an hour earlier, clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Sorry about the stress, mano.”
