Players need to take this one for the team
Unvaccinated going against group mentality
As ever, it has a been a tumultuous few weeks in the ongoing saga of Trying to Get Pro Athletes to Take a Vaccine.
The Minnesota Vikings brought in an infectious disease specialist to try to convince their holdouts to take the shot, including expensive starting quarterback Kirk Cousins, who has famously suggested he would be willing to attend meetings while in a plastic box if that option was available to him.
Cole Beasley, the noted vaccine skeptic, is one of a few Buffalo Bills told to go home and isolate because they had been in close contact with a (vaccinated) coach who has since tested positive for COVID-19.
Cam Newton, would-be starting quarterback for the New England Patriots, has said he will not be vaccinated, and there is already speculation that famous crank Bill Belichick will use this as all the justification he needs to go ahead and bench Newton and start rookie Mac Jones in his place.
Perhaps most bizarrely, it is Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones who came out as the calm voice of reason and selflessness when he argued on a local radio station that the personal choice of vaccine refusers becomes a problem when it “impacts negatively many others.
Then the common good takes over.” To be clear, this isn’t pure altruism from Jones: having more Cowboys vaccinated improves the competitive advantage of his team. But still, it is funny to see the guy who fired Jimmy Johnson because he wanted more personal credit for his team’s success talking about the common good.
He’s not wrong, of course. While it’s true that there is a public good being done anytime someone is vaccinated, it has been particularly strange to see so many athletes choose to refuse, if only because they are literally on a team. Coaches, players, management, fans — everyone gets wrapped up in the deep meaning of teamwork from time to time, and in the importance of putting aside personal goals in service of a larger cause. Lord knows that we in the media love a good story of a player who accepts a lesser role in service of helping the team win. We eat that kind of self-sacrifice up. It is one of sport’s most enduring, if occasionally hoary, narratives.
And yet every day seemingly brings a new story of an athlete who considers taking a COVID vaccine and says, essentially, “No, that’s just not for me, thanks.” This even though such decisions can, have and will cause players to miss practice and game time to the detriment of their teams.
Football and hockey have rightly been criticized for fostering a culture where players are expected to throw themselves in harm’s way for the good of the team, and yet here’s a situation where players are asked to merely do something that is intended to protect themselves from serious illness for the good of the team and still there is reluctance.
In Canada we may soon see the sports-related impact of that reticence. Canadian Football League commissioner Randy Ambrosie told TSN’S Dave Naylor this week that he believes new federal rules requiring all passengers on domestic flights to be vaccinated will also apply to the charter flights used for CFL operations.
This would presumably force teams to be without their unvaccinated players for any game that required a flight, although it would also open the possibility of a cross-country road trip for vaccine refuseniks, which is pleasing in a way. Don’t want the vaccine? How do you feel about driving from Edmonton to Montreal after practice? (Ambrosie, it should be noted, might also be trying to increase vaccine uptake with his statement, given that the CFL season didn’t last long before a COVID outbreak on the Elks postponed Thursday’s scheduled game in Toronto).
And while Ottawa’s proposed new rules for air and train travel would only apply to flights within Canada, it’s at least possible that vaccination requirements could be extended to all travellers to this country, which would rather obviously be a problem for NHL, NBA and MLB teams that do not require 100 per cent vaccinations of their rosters, which is all of them. Even more likely would be border rules that allow the unvaccinated to enter Canada, but only under some sort of quarantine requirement.
For Canadian franchises that are desperate to resume play at home this fall in front of some sort of paying audience, it’s a nightmare scenario. Health officials in this country have eventually and with considerable reluctance granted exemptions to border requirements to travelling sports franchises, but would they continue to do so when the solution to the problem — getting all the players vaccinated — is staring the teams and leagues in the face? Especially when businesses are now making mandatory vaccination part of their workplace rules?
The various leagues and their player unions have so far gone with the carrot over the stick in terms of encouraging vaccination.
The CFL, unlike bigger and richer operations, has even threatened the stick, saying that teams that cause cancellations due to Covid-related absences will be hit with a forfeit, although it has yet to whack the Elks just yet.
It might be just what is needed. So far, the carrots have not done the trick.