OFF THE MARK - Instant replay makes me sick

Instant replay is ruining sports.

My grandmother would have slapped me if she had heard all the foul words I used during the five-minute timeout at the end of the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight game between Arizona and Wisconsin in which the referees looked at 37 different replays to determine which player knocked the ball out of bounds … and they got it wrong.

Luckily for Wisconsin, which was on the poor end of that wrong call, it didn’t cost their narrow lead or the game.

The real casualty of the replay fiasco wasn’t the blown call; it was the end of a really, really exciting basketball game.

That’s what I love about March Madness. I can be on the edge of my seat in the waning minutes of a basketball game I wouldn’t give a lick about in the regular season. (Where is Tucson anyway?) Going to the monitor every stinking time the ball goes out of bounds drains the excitement out of the game faster than Justin Bieber would if he played halftime at the Super Bowl.

It got even worse a few days later when I saw Major League Baseball umpires go under the hood at the insistence of a coach. And they reversed the call! Umpires should be to baseball what Mussolini was to pre-World War II Italy: you may not like what they say, but you’re darn well going to do to it, and there ain’t anything that’s going to change the way it is.

I almost cried.

The days of Lou Pinella tossing second base halfway into center field are gone, and I hate it.

What we love about sports is the human element. The fact that one man’s (or a team’s) fate lies entirely in his fallibility as man. That humanness extends to the referees. There is no way to automate a block-or-charge decision in basketball or a pass interference in football. That’s the great part about it.

The officials are human just like the athletes. They can miss a call just like an outfielder can misjudge a fly ball.

They call them how they see them.

If you don’t like it, go watch golf.