Setting a Bad Example

Me, 1984.

A few weeks ago, Number One came close to fisticuffs in a soccer game. She's an aggressive defender, and often up against equally aggressive offensive players. Once in a while, things escalate slightly beyond the norm. This other girl went a little too far, Number One fought back, and when the girl looked about to punch my kid in the face, Number One held her off with a pointed finger and a bit of verbal ferocity.

The ref has had it out for her ever since.

Unfortunately, she seems to come by it naturally. My sister-in-law told me I HAD to post this, so here it is. :)

We were at a game last night, and there was a woman in the stands near us who wasn't well versed in the game. She was asking the kid with her lots of questions, and making lots of comments. Her voice was strident and carried, and the subject matter was poking at me. When people ask questions, I have a need to answer. Of course, she wasn't asking me, so I wasn't saying anything, but this sets the background a little bit.

The girls play on an old hockey rink with walls and a solid floor. One girl on the other team ran out of her shoe, but instead of stopping to put it on, she kept going after the ball (instinct, of course). She tried to stop, slid, and slide-tackled our forward. FYI, a slide tackle is when the player goes to the ground feet first. If they kick or knock the feet out from under the opponent, it's a foul, whether it was intentional or not. And whether they slid deliberately, going for the ball, or slipped on the surface accidentally. Slide tackles indoors are illegal.

So the woman cries out, "What, her shoe comes off and it's a penalty?" in a very annoyed tone. That was all I could handle. The following exchange is paraphrased for the most part. Except the part in bold.

Me: "No, she was penalized because she tackled our player."

Before I can explain as I did above, the woman yells at me. "She did not! She lost her shoe!"

Me: "She was supposed to stop and put it back on. It's dangerous. She could have hurt herself and the other player."

By the time I said "stop," the woman was yelling again. Then she says:

"You know what?" *sticks her fingers in her ears* "LALALALALALA" 

And THEN she says, "Forget it. I'm mature. I'm not having this conversation."

Seriously.

I'm like, "Okay, yeah, that's mature." I turn back to watch the game. She keeps yelling at me, and I know I should have just kept my mouth shut at that point, but I couldn't help it. I was still operating under the delusion that I could make her understand that it was the rule, that's all. I don't even remember what either of us said, but she let the F word fly at the top of her lungs.

The stands erupted around me. I told her to watch her mouth. Several other parents scolded her. She yelled at them. The woman behind me said her child was sitting right there and she didn't deserve to be subject to that. My mild-mannered husband, who probably had been fairly unaware of the exchange before that, told her this was a family environment. She went quiet for a minute, then complained that apparently profanity is a felony.

I was lucky this was an informal, indoor event, and the ref was on the other side of the wall. If it had been a league game outdoors, the line judge probably would have thrown us both out. As it was, she subsided completely for ten or so blessed minutes before she started complaining about the fouls. Never mind that every time two players got in the same space, no matter what they did or didn't do, the ref blew a foul on us.

We won, 2-0.

My sister-in-law assured me that she had my back, that she wouldn't let that woman attack me. I'm pretty sure I could have taken her if she had, but you never know. I haven't been in a fistfight since middle school.

Have you ever suddenly found yourself in a confrontation? How did you handle it?