A Wheelchair-bound Referee is Wheeling the Lines
By: Bob | April 12th, 2007
One of my favorite writers passed away yesterday. Kurt Vonnegut was 84. While reading some of the obituaries that have been written about him, I came across the fact that when he was growing up in Indianapolis he worked on the first daily high school newspaper in the United States, The Daily Echo. It is in the paper of the same name that a football story appears today that is Vonnegutesque - it is unusual, funny and touching.
The online version is just a snippet about the story of a 17-year-old named Lee Steege, who suffers from cerebral palsy and who has been in a wheelchair since birth. He also happens to be a football referee who recently passed an FA refereeing course in England and now is ready to take charge of some games.
“I think I would be able to do kids small-sided matches and five a side but my aim is to one day do a full 11 a-side game though I know it will be pretty hard getting up and down a full size pitch,” Steege says.
The image of a referee in a wheelchair is one that has probably crossed many a fan’s mind after witnessing a blown call against their team, but seeing one actually officiate a game is another thing entirely. It might seem absurd, but life is full of absurdities. One of the things that reading Vonnegut taught me is to embrace the absurd. He also taught me that it is how you deal with a world that is sometimes unjust that really matters. A person like Lee Steege is an example of that idea in practice.
So it goes.
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