A 25-Year-Old Texan Shows Up to Ref Pickup Games Uninvited: Christian Ortiz's Viral Ref Videos Top 16 Million Views
In San Antonio, Texas, 25-year-old Christian Ortiz has gone viral on TikTok for doing something nobody asked him to do: instead of playing, he walks into pickup basketball games at local parks and gyms with a whistle and starts refereeing strangers' games. According to USA Today on November 11, his videos, posted under the usernames @whrissss and @whristan, routinely attract millions of views, and his most viral one has topped 16 million views on TikTok.
In that video, Ortiz jumps out of a car, reveals a full NBA-style referee outfit and hops onto the court. The players slowly accept his authority until one challenges his basketball skills. Ortiz takes him on, scores a basket and calls his own foul: "And-1!"
Ortiz's path to the whistle comes with a twist. At high school in Brownsville, Texas, he was the court troublemaker, by his own account holding a school record for ejections and technical fouls, always ready to give referees his opinions. He began refereeing local games in the summer of 2019, before his first year of college, and found that the referees who once gave him technicals were now his colleagues. He says the experience gave him a new respect for officials, and he jokes in his videos that reffing is harder than playing, because one wrong call makes everyone hate you.
He has refereed elementary school and college games, as well as men's league games at recreation centers, which he found the hardest to control. The pickup-ref idea began as revenge: he and a friend thought it would be funny to officiate men's league games and make bad calls to infuriate the players. But Ortiz dropped that plan, deciding it was not spreading positivity. His new thinking was that pickup games run on an honor system, an argument over one foul call can stop a game for five minutes, and having a referee there actually helps. Players may resist at first, he says, but most end up admitting the game runs better with him there.
It does not always work. When he tried filming in his hometown of Brownsville, the players were not receptive. His day job is making NBA content for the sports social media company House of Highlights. Ortiz says his end goal is to make sure his presence makes the game better, not worse, for pickup players, and he has given himself a title: "professional unofficial pickup ref."
Source: USA Today
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 街头野球场篮球比赛资料图（PixelManiatiK摄，CC BY-SA 2.0，经Wikimedia Commons）
