NFL Draft, Tiger and Phil on a golf course a bad look as coronavirus pandemic worsens | Opinion
The Wimbledon tennis tournament has been canceled. Not delayed indefinitely but erased from the calendar. The IOC has postponed the Summer Olympics an entire year until 2021.
Meantime in the United States, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell refuses the wishes of most of his own team general managers and says the draft will go on scheduled in three weeks. And Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are planning a round of golf on an unnamed Florida course, and quarterback buddies Tom Brady and Peyton Manning might join them.
This as the NBA and NHL still delude themselves to think their seasons might yet resume, or somehow should. Basketball, hockey, baseball and soccer all envision playing games soon or by summer, albeit likely with no spectators allowed, amid a horror show likely to result in the most American deaths since the more than 400,000 in World War II.
Why is U.S. sports not facing this coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic or taking it as seriously as the rest of the world?
Is it a cue from an American federal government that still has not enacted a nationwide stay-at-home order the way some other hard-hit countries have? Is it that such edicts have been left to individual states and that so many, including Florida, have been so slow to act?
The idea of Tiger and Phil and Tom and Peyton playing golf at this time is an optics thing. It isn’t a good look. Comes off as tone deaf.
Yes, it would raise money for charities fighting the coronavirus. Those four gentlemen writing big checks from their living rooms would so the same.
Instead they want to be seen yukking it up and fist-pumping long birdie putts on a golf course? While doctors and nurses are in a relentless national triage? When we’re all supposed to be staying at home except when unavoidable? As the coronavirus death toll metastasizes? While there is a growing outcry that so many golf courses are still open when only “essential businesses” are supposed to be?
I cannot think of many businesses less essential than a golf course.
(Quick aside: Gun shops are still open, too. Warning: The coronavirus is not something you can prevent from attacking you by shooting it. Better you should stay home and wash your hands a lot).
The NFL Draft on April 23-25 in Las Vegas goes on as scheduled, albeit with no fans, and with each team’s pick submitted electronically. It will still be televised by ABC, ESPN and NFL Network. Goodell presumably will be in one box on your TV screen announcing a name while the player chosen will be in another box celebrating only with (hopefully) a small cluster of family in his home.
Again, it’s an optics thing. The pandemic’s upward arc is expected to peak right around the time of the draft. The tsunami will be at its worst, after which the deaths and the threat will remain for weeks or even months as we try to contain this threat such as American has not seen since the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.
“And with the fifth pick, the Miami Dolphins select...”
By the way, an NFL agent named Buddy Baker lost both of his previously healthy parents to COVID-19 earlier this week. They died six minutes apart.
Like most American leagues, the NFL is delusional if it thinks its 2020 season will go on, business as usual.
There will be no offseason programs or minicamps for those newly drafted players to attend. The likelihood of training camps starting on time in late July seems remote, when you consider that’s when the Olympics were to begin — the Olympics they just postponed for an entire year.
Late training camps likely would mean a delayed season. The idea of games eventually being played in gigantic, empty stadiums is a possibility.
ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit said this on the air this week: “I’ll be shocked if we have NFL football this fall, if we have college football.”
I won’t be shocked, because I know how much TV and sponsor revenue means to the NFL. The U.S. economy is shutting down in this national fight, but Goodell doesn’t think his economy has to.
Sports seems to think it is indispensable. That we have to have it to amuse and uplift ourselves. That watching Tiger and Phil on a golf course in the middle of a battlefield is some sort of public service.
Sports, we can take a season off, we can take a year off. We will look forward to your eventual return. We will miss you. We will not forget you while you’re gone. We will love you as just as much, maybe more, when you eventually return.
Right now, we have more important things on our mind.
This story was originally published April 2, 2020 at 10:46 AM.
