Reality, loss, comeback: How sports has been guiding light in America’s awful past year | Opinion
It got real for a lot of us when the basketballs stopped bouncing and the sneakers stopped squeaking. When arenas were full of cheering fans one night and empty and dark the next.
It was one year ago.
That is when everything changed, when that strange new word, “coronavirus,” entered our lives, the invisible deadly plague not knocking but kicking in our doors, and sports had little choice but to surrender.
The role of sports in helping America get through this tragic past year is remarkable, and not spoken of enough, because it is our collective national pasttime — us, loving our teams and games — that led us by the hand.
Sports first told us how serious this was.
Then made us miss so dearly what was a very part of our fabric.
Now sports is out front in the careful, gradual progress toward normalcy again.
The past year has been devastating for our pro leagues and colleges in terms of revenue, but what our teams and games mean in our lives and hearts nourishes the future of sports. Being forced to miss them, to miss part of the taken-for-granted rhythm of our lives, has defined and steeled the depth of our love.
Sports never stopped for anything — until it did, the sobering reality of that alone telling the world how serious this pandemic really was, in a way that even government and science warnings could not. Long before the mounting death toll, sports utterly stopping was literally hitting home.
Most major sports had barred media from lockerrooms and clubhouses last March 9, and the Ivy League quietly had canceled its conference basketball tournament last March 10. But it was on the 11th and 12th when it all happened, sudden as a slap.
On the morning of the 11th last year a man we would come to know, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warned that large crowds at sporting events posed a serious risk. By early that afternoon the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.
That night, an Oklahoma City-Utah NBA game was abruptly postponed moments before tipoff due to what the PA called “unforeseen circumstances. Jazz center Rudy Gobert had become the first athlete to test positive for the virus.
By last March 12 the NBA had suspended its season, major conference college tournaments were canceled, MLB postponed its Opening Day and, almost unfathomably, for ther first time in its 82-year history, the NCAA canceled March Madness.
Soon after that the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo were postponed a full year.
Sports out front, American was coming to grips with a pandemic whose U.S. death toll would be 542,230 as of this Thursday morning.
We experienced the void of sports, that hole in our lives.
Then we experienced the gradual return, but with cardboard-cutout or virtual fans populating empty arenas and games.
Reporters became accustomed to virtual interviews with coaches and players via Zoom links.
All we took for granted, right? Fans cheering in packed bleachers and standing in concession lines ... “social distancing” — what was that!? Reporters lingering in baseball clubhouses, crowding around lockers, chatting with players.
Gradually small amounts of fans were welcomed back at games, typically 10 to 20 percent of capacity. Even then, wariness kept many crowds (including those at Dolphins and Canes games last fall) below the maximum allowed.
In morning consult.com’s most recent survey in its “Tracking the Return to Normal” series, only 22 percent of U.S. adults said they are comfortable attending sporting events. The number presumably will rise and more and more of us get vaccinated against the virus.
Now some teams whose states have done away with mask mandates and other restrictions say they are ready for full crowds, the Texas Rangers and Dallas Cowboys among them.
But is that smart? Will the full crowds be there? Might those become super-spreader events to remind us that getting past the virus and being past it are far different things?
We continue to feel our way through this as one would feel his way through an unfamiliar, pitch-black room.
Progress. The tracking group covid19.healthdata.org estimates the death toll will be 576,026 by July 1. That is roughly 30,000 more deaths between now and summer. And it mirrors the brutality of what we have been through as a nation to think of that as “only” 30,000 more deaths by then.
Sports continue to be our signpost, our gauge, in the return to normalcy.
College basketball conference tournaments are going on right now, baseball’s Opening Day is on schedule, the NBA and NHL play on and the ‘21 Summer Olympics are on. In fact the four-month Torch Run is about to get underway, though Japanese officials are advising fans along the route to socially-distance and applaud -- not open their mouths to cheer.
And on the horizon: March Madness again!
Different, yes. All the games will be played in and around Indianapolis, not nationwide. Arenas will be limited attendance.
Still, the rite of American spring, basketball fans filling our brackets and diving into office pools, teams striving to reach the hallowed mountain Final Four, is back.
In ways both symbolic and somehow very real, it means we are coming back, too.
This story was originally published March 11, 2021 at 11:31 AM.
