Fans wants sports, sports want fans
But we shouldn’t expect anything that resembles a normal game between now and September
As much of the U.S. emerges from the cultural hibernation caused by the coronavirus, with varying degrees of concern and glee, American sports are now thrusting themselves headlong into the recovery effort.
It is not going particularly well.
Despite the announced comeback plans of several major North American sports leagues in the past days and weeks, there are no regular-season games on any public, revised schedules. There may be a lot of quarantining at single sites but no clue as to when teams might play again in home arenas and stadiums. There are no sturdy plans for having fans.
Even in a best-case scenario — and 2020 is where best-case scenarios go to die — there will be nothing that resembles a normal game between now and September.
“We have to get our sports back,” U.S. President Donald Trump said — in mid-April.
Two months later, all American sports have are loose plans and good intentions.
For weeks, Major League Baseball could not figure out how to play even a part of a season, creating the possibility that 2020 would be the first year without baseball in 150 years.
The National Basketball Association wants to quarantine teams in Florida to finish a season in August and perform a two-month post-season beyond that, though some players are balking at such confinement, partly over racial unrest.
The National Hockey League has similar ideas for finishing a season that would have ended by now, in a normal year, but nothing is truly scheduled.
In tennis, Wimbledon in late June and early July was wiped out. The U.S. Open in New York has vowed to start on time in late August, but some players do not want to go, raising questions about whether a fanless, star-depleted event is worth the effort.
National Football League teams are not sure about the start of training camps in July, and the NCAA has no cohesive plan and no real idea for what the seasons in college football or other sports might look like. The collective strategy is largely to cross fingers.
“One of my take-aways from all this is that we don’t have uniform risk tolerance in this country,” University of Washington epidemiologist Steve Mooney said. “I have some fear that people who have a higher tolerance of risk than I do are making these decisions.”
There are glints of optimism. Professional golf and NASCAR have returned, though more as made-for-TV events than as anything resembling a collective experience.
Fans, desperate to be entertained and discombobulated by the loss of traditional sports cycles, still do not know if there will be games or if they will be invited to attend them.
And as they see clips of normal-seeming games from around the world — soccer in Europe, baseball in Asia, rugby in New Zealand — nothing feels normal at home. When England’s Premier League became the latest to return to the field Wednesday, with soccer matches at home stadiums but without fans, even that modest reboot looked like a mirage from the American viewpoint.
Messages are mixed. Commissioners unveil plans. Scientists inject reality.
“The virus doesn’t watch football games,” said George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco.
The risk-versus-reward equation has never been more fraught. More than 116,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, and two million have tested positive for the coronavirus in the United States. Hopes that the virus would recede in the summer have been punctured by spikes in some parts of the country.
The risk remains of exacerbating the spread of a highly contagious and deadly virus.
The reward is entertainment, first on television, someday again in the bleachers and luxury boxes and sports bars. It is also economic. There are billions of dollars to be made and spent.
“People who are not sports fans, I could see how they might question if it’s responsible to restart sports, especially when somebody isn’t allowed to restart their job,” said Dawn Comstock, a sports epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health.
She and others also wonder about the ethics of spending finite resources on sports — testing, especially — that might be used elsewhere.
For now, it is mostly the professional leagues desperately trying to reboot, perhaps setting an example that will flow through colleges, high schools and youth sports.
Putting people in the stands is riskier. In a recent New York Times survey of more than 500 epidemiologists, 64 per cent said they would wait a year or more before attending a sporting event, concert or play. It was a higher percentage than any other activity.
“Not that I don’t love sporting events, but, for me, the risk-reward ratio is wrong,” Mooney said.
Rutherford, at UC-San Francisco, expects there will be major college football in the fall, partly because there is so much money at stake, and also some fans — spread out, masked, maybe even tested.
“Ten, 12, 15,000 fans, mostly season-ticket holders? Yeah, that strikes me as doable,” he said. “Trying to fill up the Rose Bowl? That’s another issue.”
Mooney is more pessimistic. Even classes on most campuses are not certain.
“I think it’s unlikely that there will be football games at UW in the fall,” he said of Washington, a member of the Pac-12 Conference. “I’d be pretty outraged if I need to teach my class remotely, but the football stadium is filled with people who intermingle.”
Still, plans are emerging, clunkily. On Monday, the Women’s NBA announced plans for a shortened, single-site season, beginning in July, though no schedule was released.
The same day, MLB’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, said he was “not confident” there would be a 2020 season, a week after saying “unequivocally” that he was “100 per cent” sure there would be.
The NBA’s plans to convene and quarantine at Disney World in July have met some resistance. Players worry about time secluded from family, and the racial turmoil and protests after the death of George Floyd have left some stars, including Dwight Howard and Kyrie Irving, questioning American priorities.
“Basketball, or entertainment period, isn’t needed at this moment and will only be a distraction,” said Howard, a veteran now with the Los Angeles Lakers.
A distraction is precisely the point, at least to some. Sports occupy an elevated place in American culture, and part of the mythology is that they are not just wanted, but needed, especially in times of crisis.
That might be a reasonable argument after a terrorist attack or a natural disaster. But it is a thorny one during a pandemic.
“We have an obligation to try this,” Adam Silver, commissioner of the NBA, told ESPN this week. “Because the alternative is to stay on the sideline. And the alternative is to, in essence, give in to this virus.”
Never have American sports fans been left without teams to cheer for for so long. Back in March, it was the decisive shutdown of the NBA, the halt of baseball’s spring training and the cancellation of the NCAA’s basketball tournaments that signalled the seriousness of the pandemic to many Americans. The anticipation was a short recess, maybe 30 days. Remember that?
Three months later, with Americans looking for plenty of distraction and signals that everything will be OK, the message from sports is that we have no real idea of what the coming months will bring — or which games will be a part of them.
The faded hopes of spring hopscotch into a summer of discontent, toward an ever-uncertain autumn.
“I have some fear that people who have a higher tolerance of risk than I do are making these decisions.”
STEVE MOONEY EPIDEMIOLOGIST