Andy says when he was a teenager, he used to go to the matches his father was officiating and hear the taunts directed at him.<\/p>\n
“Being the white son of a black father, I would be sat in the stands and be somewhat invisible to others. <\/p>\n
“I would sometimes hear racial slurs being hurled at him; ‘black this’ and ‘black that’.”<\/p>\n
“Being a linesman, you are exposed to that abuse more than anyone else involved in the match,” he says.<\/p>\n
“You are on the touchline with your back to the crowd. You can’t see the people behind you; they are within touching distance sometimes. <\/p>\n
“It’s a scary situation to be in if the crowd is against you. I really don’t know how he put up with it.”<\/p>\n
It wasn’t just fans on the terraces displaying racist attitudes.<\/p>\n
“I would often be sat in, or close to, the directors’ box. I’m white, so people had no idea Emerson was my dad. I’d often hear racist remarks from directors or chairmen around me.<\/p>\n
“At the end of the match they would then be putting their arm round my dad, laughing and joking with him and thanking him.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andy says when he was a teenager, he used to go to the matches his father was officiating…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-219507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}