The Delicate Etiquette of a Sporting Pat

Slapping someone’s ass in broad daylight is an extraordinary way to announce that you believe in them.

The confidence required is considerable. You must believe not only in the person’s abilities, but in your own understanding of when his bottom becomes an appropriate place to express that belief. Presumably the achievement matters, although encouragement extends eligibility to people who have just performed terribly. Success and failure both qualify. Standing near someone who has an opinion about your performance may be sufficient.

The custom is passed along as though the finer points will become obvious through participation. Watch the adults. Join the team. Eventually you, too, will know precisely which person to hit and how affectionately.

Not everyone in youth sports accepts the arrangement. The Oregon Park District’s coaching manual states: “DO NOT TAP, PAT, OR SLAP a child’s buttocks.”

Tap, pat, or slap. Someone has anticipated the coach who believes the distinction will help him.

The U.S. Center for SafeSport likewise identifies intentional buttocks contact by an adult with power over someone as inappropriate physical contact. Two adult teammates enjoying a familiar ritual is one thing. A coach deciding that a child should become familiar with it is another.

The adult version is quite a picture on its own. Imagine grown men fresh from the showers exchanging little smacks while discussing pass protection. Caption it “acceptable sexual assault” and the room looks deranged. Caption it “team chemistry” and somebody wants to make a documentary.

To appreciate how much explaining the sport is doing, keep the praise and change the occupation.

Imagine your mother’s surgeon emerging to tell the family that the operation was a complete success, and your father turning him around for a firm smack across the scrubs. “That’s my fucking guy.”

Or a male passenger thanking the female captain for getting everyone through the storm, then giving her a firm smack at the cockpit door. His wife is directly behind him, waiting to say that she also enjoyed the flight.

Or a cardinal slapping the new pope onto the balcony: “Go get ’em, big fella.”

A cropped clip of Tracy Wolfson and Josh Allen has prompted speculation about whether she patted him after an interview. The relevant contact point isn’t visible. We cannot settle that particular question by becoming more certain about the missing footage.

That Wolfson is a woman makes the question harder to tuck away under “it’s a sports thing.” If it happened, would she be joining in, crossing a line, or revealing that the line was mostly an assumption about who would be doing the touching? Try the same postgame interview with a male reporter and a female soccer player. “It’s a sports thing” suddenly has considerably more work to do.

Even if we could establish what happened, we would still have to work out which rules applied.

Key & Peele expose the arrangement by giving it a very enthusiastic participant. Rafi keeps doing the normal thing until everyone would like him to stop being such a creep. He has become objectionable without introducing a new activity.

Actual competition offers no certainty.

On January 17, 2020, Tristan Thompson was ejected after receiving his second technical foul for slapping Jae Crowder’s backside. In the NBA’s official pool report, crew chief Kenny Mauer called it a “physical taunt.” Asked whether words were involved, he answered: “Just simply the butt slap.”

Thompson’s mistake was apparently not the choice of body part but what he meant by it. A remarkable exercise in interpretation of an ass slap at that particular juncture.

Which brings us back to Allen and Wolfson. A clearer picture might tell us whether she did it. It would not tell us why the familiar version requires so little explaining. “That’s what we do” is a remarkably durable defense of a fairly astonishing tradition.

Perhaps the broadcast should bring in an expert. Freeze the picture, draw an arrow, ask a former coach to distinguish unacceptable touching from excellent support. Within minutes he is standing beside a colleague, demonstrating the proper technique.

“Now, you don’t want to come in tentative.”

He bends his knees and asks his colleague to reset.

“Good. Now do it at game speed.”

Perhaps Wolfson did slap Allen after all. A wider angle could settle that, though it would hardly explain the custom. There would still be an entire stadium applauding with its hands while, down on the field, somebody felt obliged to involve a man’s ass.