Outrage in Alamance County: One small example why sports won’t be back to normal soon | Opinion
Engines were revving Saturday night as Ace Speedway in Alamance County, North Carolina, ran its first race of the season. The bleachers were filled with some 4,000 fans sitting shoulder to shoulder, hardly any of them wearing protective face coverings.
Memorial Day on Monday found huge crowds at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks, in Daytona Beach, in New York City and around the country, social distancing not a part of the partying and mandates against large gatherings be damned.
The United States death toll from the ongoing coronavirus/COVID-19 plague was on the verge of 100,000 on Tuesday and likely will have surpassed that grim milestone by the time you are reading this.
Meantime MLB and the NBA, NHL and MLS all plan to resume their seasons with no spectators allowed, the games television-only for fans. Football, the NFL and the college game, still hope to proceed on time and as usual in the fall, with full stadiums, although that prospect seems more and more in doubt.
Sports fans, you may not be seeing your favorite teams in person and being among a large, cheering crowd again for a long while, and the reason goes being the pandemic itself.
Blame the idiots among us.
Blame the morons who packed Ace Speedway. Blame the racetrack’s owners. And the local sheriff, Terry Johnson, who refused to enforce the state’s shutdown order, refused to do his job, because he found the order “unconstitutional.”
Blame the countless thousands who gathered on Memorial Day in defiance of local edicts — laws designed to save us from ourselves.
Blame the reckless, dangerously selfish among us who simply lack the resolve to be patient, to not socialize.
Blame the science deniers, the conspiracy theorists who thought this coronavirus thing was all a hoax.
Blame anybody who thought it was fake news when they heard about those two Missouri hairdressers who worked while positive with the virus and quickly infected an estimated 140 customers, who in turn then immediately put everyone around them at risk.
The spread of the pandemic and the death toll will never be adequately contained, it will only linger malignantly and metastasize, if enough Americans adopt the mindset of those race fans in North Carolina and those holiday party people who gathered so obliviously in crowds on Monday, volunteering themselves as modern day lepers.
Sports — its full stadiums and arenas the ultimate example of large social gatherings — will never get back to normal, to cheering crowds, until the virus is contained enough to do so safely, something delayed exponentially by examples such as the outrageous scene at North Carolina’s Ace Speedway.
The dangerous fissures in our collective resolve, coupled with experts’ fears that the spreed could spike in wintertime, casts football season in some doubt in terms of welcoming back large crowds.
Officials in California already have said college football games in the state may not happen this year. University of Michigan president Dr. Mark Schlissel said he doubts there will be collegiate athletics anywhere this fall. The NCAA says no students on campus will mean no student athletes playing fall sports.
University of Miami director of athletics Blake James remains hopeful to have football season as usual, with fans — and Florida has reopened more than many states — but the NCAA and Atlantic Coast Conference will make those decisions, not individual schools.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell hopes for full stadiums in three months but tempers that optimism with realism, saying, “We will continue to make our decisions based on the latest medical and public health advice, in compliance with government regulations and with appropriate safety protocols to protect the health of our fans, players, club and league personnel and our communities.”
If only a sheriff and a racetrack owner in Alamance County, North Carolina, did the same.
Because if the mindset that filled those stands at the Ace Speedway is an American microcosm that spreads, it will do so like a disease.
And it will continue to delay the return of sports as we once knew them.
