Padecky: What Sarah Thomas is in for as an NFL official

A man gets inches from a woman’s face and, with veins pulsing, arms flailing, screams at her. At a restaurant, at the office, at the gas pump, wherever, people watching such behavior will stop, stare and wait to see what happens next. Some might even call 911. Some might intercede, as they know all too well about domestic violence. That’s the real world.

The NFL is not the real world. An NFL game contains behavior that would be judged criminal outside a stadium. Sarah Thomas is stepping into that world this fall, the league’s first full-time female official, and one day she’s going to throw a penalty flag at a critical juncture, maybe even in her first game, and an enraged head coach will bull-rush her. Veins a-poppin’.

“If the coach is smart,” said Petaluma’s Pete Dardis, a high school football official for 38 years, a supervisor and assignee for North Bay officials, “he will keep his composure. If he uses common sense, if he makes his point under control, he’ll be fine. But he doesn’t, he’s gonna look like an ass. It’ll be a drastic mistake. He will pay the price.”

The television camera will linger and linger at the sight and every overreacting gesture and obscene lip-read will feed YouTube another million hits. The three people interviewed for this column - ex-NFL offensive lineman Keith Dorney, ex-Sonoma State University men’s assistant basketball coach Natalie Wisdom and Dardis - all agree it’s a positive development for the NFL. They all agree Thomas is qualified and capable. And all three want Thomas to be treated like every other official.

That pushes forward a few questions. Can it happen? Should it happen?

“The NFL had its eyes closed for a long time concerning domestic violence,” Dardis said. “Ray Rice opened them last year (a video caught the Baltimore running back abusing his fiancée in an elevator).”

Dorney, a college football Hall of Famer and a nine-year player with the Detroit Lions, thinks the elevation of Thomas to an NFL officiating crew did not happen just because she was qualified.

“Look, everything the NFL does has to do with public opinion,” said Dorney, a West County financial adviser. “They are motivated by the bottom line. It’s a good fiscal move for them. Public opinion has a lot to do with it. I don’t think they give a flying duck about integrity.”

Dorney’s skepticism is not without foundation. As an example, the league professes to be concerned about player safety, yet it wants to expand the season to 18 regular-season games. The NFL will never be thought of as a humanitarian enterprise.

Yet Thomas, 41 and a mother of three, is another example of women in America carving out identities once thought to belong only to male privilege. Women serve in the military, on the front lines. A woman may be our next president. An NFL team, the Arizona Cardinals, has added a woman to its coaching staff. In a perfect world, the only barrier to achievement and power should be competency, not gender or skin color.

“When we had a black president,” Dorney said, “I thought that was a great step to racial equality. Now it seems to have brought out more racism. With Thomas I wonder if there’s going to be more gender bias.”

The first person to do anything, whether it’s flying across the Atlantic Ocean for the first time or being the first African-American to play baseball, experiences the hot white light of a curious public.

“When you turn on an NFL game this fall,” said Dardis, 74, “you’ll know immediately if Sarah Thomas is working it.”

On a much smaller scale, Wisdom felt the public eye that never blinks.

“We’d be in an airport gate waiting for a flight,” said Wisdom, “people would come up to me all the time and ask if I was the men’s trainer. ‘Are you their sports psychologist?’ When I told them, they were embarrassed. The very last thing they would think was that I was their coach.

“You’re always in the spotlight,” added Wisdom, who is leaving SSU for law school. “People were very nice. But it gets tiring after a while.”

One question about Thomas is asked more than any other. How can she officiate a game she never played? In other words, do you have to be a hen to know how to lay an egg?

“I really don’t know how important that is,” Dorney said. “Will it (not playing) take away or add to her perception of the game?”

If all Thomas had done were what she is doing right now - a pharmaceutical rep - her non-participation would take on added suspicion. But Thomas is an athlete. She earned a basketball scholarship to the University of Mobile. Thomas is fifth in school history in four performance categories.

Of more significance and relevance is another question. It’s one that will decide her fate.

Can Sarah Thomas handle the heat of the moment?

Thomas can communicate better than a Sunday school preacher, recite the rules faster than her own name and run the field like a cross-fit Olympian. Yet, if she feels like she’s on the island and the clock is ticking and that flag needs to be thrown, will Thomas act with authority and take the heat she most certainly knows will result from it?

It is a complicated community, the crew of officials.

“A (officiating) crew can take one of theirs and hang out him out to dry (if there is disrespect),” Dardis said. “She also can go to the referee and tell him he missed the play. And do you think Nick Saban (Alabama’s coach) goes out to an official and says, ‘Oh shoot, I disagree with that call?’ ”

Oh shoot, what happens if Sarah gets it wrong? Oh well. It’s not like THAT ever happened before. All Sarah has to do is ask the men how they dealt with it.

To contact Bob Padecky email him at bobpadecky@gmail.com.