In time of coronavirus crisis, here’s why we’ll struggle with absence of ‘just sports’
At least when it comes to merely how this COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and accompanying pandemonium affects sports, this moment of hard truth hardly approximates dates that shall forever live in infamy in this country.
For that matter, this bewildering day that our ever-churning sports world became paralyzed is a blip in the broader landscape.
Within a world in crisis. And a country convulsed as it tries to comprehend, and contend with, the evolving scope of the virus and reconcile the blurry line between the pragmatic and panic — a line any rational person can now see must be straddled toward erring in caution.
Nevertheless, Thursday, March 12, 2020, will come to be remembered as a pivotal, momentous date of unprecedented actions that seemed unfathomable only days ago.
All major sports leagues have suspended their operations.
The Big 12 scrubbed, so to speak, its men’s and women’s tournaments in Kansas City.
Baseball’s regular season won’t commence until mid-April … at the earliest.
And the NCAA canceled remaining winter and spring championships ... including the NCAA Tournament.
A day after pondering how fascinating it might be to witness games played without fans in the stands, the notion almost instantly became so quaint and outdated as to be tin-eared.
If it wasn’t exactly the day the music died or the Earth stood still, it sure was the sports version of it.
Particularly because there seems to be no foolproof way to understand just how far any of this will extend before it is contained and a credible all-clear is sounded.
Abruptly, the question went from how many institutions and sports were hitting pause to how many were still going forward.
And if so, why, given the circumstances?
As of Thursday afternoon, the scant few still conducting competitions included the Missouri and Kansas high school activities associations and their basketball tournaments.
Now, there is something particularly compelling and poignant about the last opportunities in the life of a senior high school athlete, perhaps at once enjoying the culmination and pinnacle of his or her athletic career. The athletes are young and strong and presumably less at risk, yes, but how does that factor into with whom they are in contact?
So it’s sure hard to understand how and why those environments can be literally and figuratively considered immune to a virus with potential lethal consequences that has been deemed too amorphous to be suppressed by all those other institutions.
But the idea speaks to something elemental in all this, something perhaps most amplified and illuminated by the scrapping of the NCAA Tournament played continuously since 1939 … even through such unrest as the impending “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003.
Speaking with a handful of media members Tuesday before the complexion of all this shifted radically, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby reflected on that time as part of the NCAA’s Division I Men’s Basketball Committee.
“There was a lot of talk quietly about whether we would play the tournament,” he said. “And what we heard back from (the Department of Defense) and from others was that the NCAA Tournament is a huge part of our American culture. And that they would like us to play the tournament and have it be as normal as possible.”
The circumstances are quite different, of course. But a key thread of his point still connects and resonates right here, right now.
Sports are so much more to us than diversion or amusement or a gambling fixation or billions of dollars in economic impact and TV rights and recreation, aren’t they?
Sure, they’re all of those things, in some ways all of those at once.
But they ultimately also reside in a more fundamental place in our culture and lives.
Whether you’re a fan or coach or player or parent or son or administrator or media type, sports have seeped into our identities and have been seared into our souls.
Most pertinent and potent case in point, March Madness is a living, breathing slice of Americana and undisputed rite of spring: the filling out of brackets, in all our distinct styles; the overstimulation of the early rounds; the agonies and ecstasies of the upsets; the intriguing narrative of the eventual champion.
And now it’s as if Marvel’s Thanos snapped his fingers and just vaporized half our universe, leaving the rest of us in limbo.
Now, it might well be argued that the emptiness we feel suggests a distorted and unhealthy world view.
But just as easily and with more conviction, we could stress how much we learn and grow from playing these games.
Just as readily and with more evidence, we can highlight sports’ capacity to galvanize a community across economic and racial boundaries, a special phenomenon that is otherwise elusive.
You need only think back little over a month to what that feels like, a Chiefs Super Bowl victory for the first time in 50 years.
And you need only think about the void you’d be trying to resolve for years to come if the coronavirus had emerged here in, say, mid-January. If you’re affiliated with or a fan of top-ranked Kansas Jayhawks basketball, you must be trying to come to terms with that sensation right about now — that anguish of vast promise transformed into the hollow reverberations of what might have been.
Sure, it’s all only a sliver of everything else at play.
But in times of turmoil, like, say, pandemics, we tend to turn to sports. This time around, alas, the so-called mirror of society is a disconcerting, mournful look.
Now what do we do?
And with all these vital outlets in suspension, no wonder if feels like our very lives are, too.
Until when, we don’t know, but we’ll always remember the day it came into a focus we’ve never quite known before.