The desire for perfection is an integral and formative aspect of sport in America.  The goal of a perfect season, championship or setting new records helps define success and failure in athletics.  Competition itself is a reflection of the desire to be better than one’s competitor and to outdo one’s self.  In the past few decades, professional and amateur sport has increasingly been influenced by the use of new technologies in equipment, training, evaluating and officiating.  New technology allows for stronger and faster athletes as well as more accurate assessment and governing of various sports.  However, implementation of new technologies has not been uniform:  football and baseball differ greatly in their use of video replay technology and soccer has yet to introduce it.  The use  of technology in officiating—reversing wrong or missed calls with the aid of slow-motion replay—is especially fascinating because a ‘human element’ of the game is reduced or removed. This is certainly the main concern for soccer purists who claim that video replay introduction will ‘ruin’ the beautiful game.  My paper will argue that American culture—with its conscious, determined strive to be the very best—is more amenable to the use of technology in sport officiating than traditional European sports such as rugby and soccer.  American sport is culturally distinct from other traditions and as such its relationship to technology is necessarily different.  This presentation will compare the use of technology in traditional American and European sports to highlight the differences in sporting culture in the Western world.