Once upon a time, no self-respecting sports official would have been caught dead wearing sunglasses. The reason? “Hey, ump, whadaya, blind?”

The simple idea that an official might be judged as having poor eyesight if they were seen sporting shades kept millions of umpires and referees squinting in the sun.

I know this because I spent 40 years officiating sports: football, baseball, ice hockey, soccer, and basketball to varying degrees, but I spent the vast majority of my officiating career out on fields calling football and baseball games. So perhaps my eye doctor’s response should not have been surprising.

He peered at my eyeballs through his ophthalmoscope. (Just wanted to sound smart there. That’s the round thingy with the little ledge that the eye doctor makes you put your chin on so he can look inside your eyes.) “You need to wear sunglasses,” he said.

“But I can’t!” I whined. “It’s not allowed.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“The officiating group I work for says we’re not allowed to wear sunglasses on the field.”

He moved the ophthalmoscope out of the way and sat back. “That’s ridiculous. We live in a desert. Do you want to go blind?”

I shook my head.

“Then tell your boss you want that in writing.”

While I considered that idea, I looked into how sunlight can damage our eyes. According to Web.MD, “One type of UV radiation— UVA rays—harm something in the back of your eye called the macula. It helps you see detail clearly. It’s part of the retina, which sends signals to your brain to translate light into images. The blue and violet parts of the sun’s rays can also hurt your retina.

“The front part of your eye, where your cornea and lens are, can get damaged by another type of UV radiation called UVB rays. The lens of your eye lets in light and works with the cornea to focus it on the retina.”

I found a whole bunch of bad stuff sunlight can do to your eyes, things like macular degeneration, cataracts, and even eye skin cancer. Sufficiently scared, I asked my boss for a letter explaining why we weren’t allowed to wear sunglasses when officiating. “It’s for my eye doctor,” I said.

He stared at me for a few beats and then a miracle occurred. The policy was dropped and sports officials in Arizona could now wear sunglasses while working games. (I’m still waiting for a thank you from me peers.)

Sadly, the miracle didn’t happen early enough to save my eyes. When I was in my early 50s, I started having trouble seeing baseballs. One evening, while working a men’s league game, I was in the infield when a player ripped a line drive right at me. I couldn’t see the ball and took a shot in the thigh. If you’ve never been hit by a baseball, let me say it hurts. But the nasty bruise on my leg wasn’t the only outcome. I suddenly found myself uncomfortable working in the field, fearful I might get hit in the face. Then I started having trouble seeing footballs on kicks as I would lose the ball in the lights, so off to the doctor I went.

I had cataracts in both eyes. And while many people get the cloudy vision and sparkly glare caused by cataracts, mostly it happens when they’re really old. My parents had them in their eighties. Had I been allowed to wear sunglasses, I too might have gone another 30 years or so with clear vision. Instead, I had surgery on both eyes and can now see a mile or two, but the operation left me needing glasses to read.

Today, it’s common to see sports officials wearing sunglasses. The stigma is gone. That there was ever any concern about appearances seems silly and ironic, because when officials don’t wear sunglasses, they might indeed go blind.

Anne Montgomery’s novels can be found wherever books are sold.

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