Amid pandemic pandemonium, sports show way forward through actions and perspectives
In the once-sacrosanct biosphere of American sports, hope seldom springs more eternal and universal than in these few days on the annual calendar. That’s particularly so in an Olympic year, with the dreams attached to so many U.S. trials typically scheduled in the next few months.
Front and center, on this Sunday in the world we had taken for granted, the NCAA Tournament compels us with the bracket reveals that we instantly process for the inevitable captivating upsets.
Negated, now, by the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis.
Beware the ides of March, Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar.
But what about the idleness of March?
The pining for what’s missing will extend across the land, but we’ve got a fine glimpse of the sorts of stuff those dreams are made of right here.
On one end is the Kansas men’s basketball team, ranked No. 1 in the nation and brimming with the talent and coaching and mojo that converted a season of wild circumstances into one of enormous postseason promise. Instead …
“This is going to be a vacant championship,” coach Bill Self told The Star’s Gary Bedore.
On another end of what makes these tournaments special, the Kansas City Roos women’s basketball team was on the cusp of playing in the tourney for the first time after claiming the first conference title (now in the Western Athletic Conference) for either the men’s or women’s teams since UMKC joined Division I 33 years ago and began conference affiliations in 1994-95.
When the WAC canceled its tournament, the Roos on Thursday were awarded the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament … only to have the joy be fleeting when the NCAA canceled its tournament hours later.
But the spirit of this time of year in sports extends well beyond the tournaments, too.
It’s second nature to many of us to revel in the abiding annual senses of rebirth and renewal of spring training. All the more so when the local club is invigorated by new ownership and management as the Royals are.
Every NFL team, including your Super Bowl-champion Chiefs, surely is soon to improve through free agency and the draft — which the league has masterfully molded into a major event on the April sports calendar. The NBA and NHL playoffs perennially are mere weeks away, and so is the Masters Tournament, the so-called “tradition unlike any other.”
At least for the foreseeable next few weeks, though, we’ll be reckoning with a state of disruption unlike any other.
One with frightening ramifications in the very real world outside sports.
But even as the pandemic sprawls wider, even in a time of cynicism about what sports have become, let’s not overlook something sustaining that sports is providing even now:
The powerful example in willingly shutting down for the greater good, radical and influential measures that reveal a story in itself about their wider powers and capacity to make a positive difference.
The greater good
Perhaps those actions could have been taken sooner.
But the remarkable stances made this real in ways that weren’t resonating with enough impact before.
And they preceded — and arguably precipitated — more momentous ones, such as the national emergency finally declared Friday.
When I asked Royals general manager Dayton Moore during a conference call on Friday whether he’d had a chance to step back and process this, he said he’d been too much “in crisis management mode” to do that.
But even through what he called an eerie scene the other day of canceling a spring training game in Surprise as fans were entering the stadium and vendors were setting up booths, he felt “a sense of hurt for them.” He talked about the moral and social responsibility baseball and its players have, and he cited the awareness of star Whit Merrifield — who seems to understand how many potentially vulnerable older adults attend spring training or work around them there.
“Our bodies will fight it off,” Merrifield told reporters in Surprise on Thursday. “We’re young and healthy and our immune systems are strong. It’s not us (doctors) are worried about; it’s passing it to those that can’t fight it off.”
The movement essentially triggered by the NBA Wednesday night was on the mind of Mariya Dostzadah Goodbrake, the founder and director of Kansas City-based Global FC, which among its many notable endeavors has been providing an opportunity for refugees to play soccer.
As she spoke Friday, she considered the impact of the Herculean, iconic figures basically being declared mortal and equal and vulnerable. And she thought about how it helped her come to terms with the need to hit pause for her own organization.
In a new sort of way, the ripples affirmed the words of Nelson Mandela posted on her group’s webpage.
“Sport has the power to change the world,” Mandela said in part. “It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.”
Even with his Olympic wrestling trials in jeopardy (and who can definitively know whether the Tokyo Olympics will go on as scheduled for July 24 to Aug. 9?), two-time world champion and 2016 Olympic bronze medalist J’den Cox offered his customary thoughtful perspective on the circumstances.
“People’s (Olympic) dreams are slipping away, but at the same time so are people’s lives and health. Put it in that order,” Cox, the Mizzou product, said in a phone interview just hours before USA Wrestling postponed the trials scheduled for early April.
Like others, Cox noted the persuasive power of the recent actions by the professional leagues and NCAA — all the more striking when the disease itself has an intangible quality beyond the numbers that are hard to comprehend.
“We haven’t (directly) seen the repercussions, so it’s hard to be, like, ‘Oh, I completely understand it,’” said Cox, speaking from Ohio, hoping to get back to Colorado Springs and wondering how things are in Missouri. “You know how it’s easier to be angry when there’s a face to it? … Coronavirus doesn’t have a face.”
As he pondered the bigger picture, Cox was asked about the prospect of the Olympics being canceled — pointless as it might be to speculate at this stage. The athlete in him craves the competition, especially in the quadrennial event that occupies a global spotlight.
But he also relishes the idea of being at least some small part of a solution to something far bigger than him.
“You could never give me enough gold medals or whatever,” he said, “to choose my own success over someone else’s life or ability to breathe.”
Now is the time to stand on a different sort of world stage, he suggested. He thought about the ravages of this coronavirus in Iran and about how Iranians love wrestling and embrace their U.S. competitors.
(Former Olympic wrestler and Missouri native Sammie Henson’s world championship victory in Iran in 1998 inspired the home crowd to chant of “U-S-A, U-S-A.” And more recently, Cox recalled Olympian Jordan Burroughs telling of being mobbed by fans there.)
Sports has a way of healing and uniting people beyond their own hard-wired loyalties and divisions, Cox reminded.
Especially now with what might be considered a global cause, conjuring the sort of galvanized reaction you’d typically see in a movie about aliens invading Earth.
“This is something the entire world is facing,” he said, later adding, “I hope that in doing this, we can also see that this is the way it should be. We can come together. Why does it take a pandemic for the world to get here? Why does it take everything going wrong, a common enemy? …
“I hope we don’t lose that. I hope we learn from that and learn how much each country and each person has to offer … And that no life is worth more than another.”
‘We’re all just people’
The downshift from sensory overload to sensory deprivation ahead doubtless will leave us discombobulated in the realm where so many find diversion and inspiration and identity and more.
But if they can pause for us, for the world itself, we can pause too, can’t we?
Time’s yours, as Chiefs coach Andy Reid likes to say.
And we can fill the hours and hours and hours we just have been given in some constructive ways.
Perhaps with our own modest versions of the sorts of giving spirit being demonstrated by the likes of Zion Williamson and Kevin Love and Mark Cuban and others in donating money for arena and seasonal workers who will be struggling for work in the vacuum.
Or simpler kindnesses, watching out for our neighbors.
From chaos comes order, and this, too, shall pass. So until then?
Sticking just to the context of the sports world here, since the broader issues are too vast and damaging to try to include in this subset, a lot will be lost in the weeks to come.
But a lot could be found, too, with this chance to reset and perhaps even reprioritize that we can only hope never to have again.
“We’re all just people,” Cox said.