Can sport be sanitised by banning high-fives?
nNEWDELHI: In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, will sports return as we know it, or are there things that will become history, relics of a pre-pandemic past?
“I ain’t high-fiving nobody for the rest of my life after this,” NBA superstar Lebron James told the “Road Trippin’ Podcast”. “No more high-fiving. After this corona shit?”
The NBA, days before it had to shut down sporting operations, had anyway asked players not to high-five, or accept items such as balls of team-shirts to autograph. Seven-foot giants leaping into the air for 10-foot high high-fives will be a hard loss.
Cricket fans may expect a harder loss--the days of applying spit to the ball to encourage swing could be over. What fate awaits fast bowlers? What awaits the cricket lover so used to the between-deliveries ritual of the ball being tossed around from player to player, each of whom apply saliva and give the ball a rub before it makes its way back to the bowler, who tops it up with a bit of his own spit, and furiously rubs it near his crotch? The gentleman’s game is under threat. “As a bowler I think it would be pretty tough going if we couldn’t shine the ball in a Test match,” said Australia quick Pat Cummins. Spit-shining the cricket ball is as much a staple of cricket as the high-five is to basketball. But here’s a question: Since passing a single object around a group of people with their bare hands is the basic principle of many sports, will a little saliva or a couple of palms touching each other make much of a difference?
US women’s football star Megan Rapinoe says edicts to ban handshakes or even high-fives may be counter-productive anyway. “We’re going to be sweating all over each other all game, so it sort of defeats the purpose of not doing a handshake,” she told the New York Times in March.
Most football leagues abandoned the customary pre-match handshake when the pandemic had just started. Yet football is a sport with plenty of contact between players--just picture the jostling that goes on in the penalty box, and then imagine the phrase “social distancing”--or imagine a bunch of indignant players rushing towards the referee and screaming in his face.
What, then, happens to full contact sports like wrestling, or boxing, with its blood, sweat, tears, and saliva flying around like rain shower? Imagine sweating, sputtering boxers in a clinch. Watch Tyson Fury lick Deontay Wilder’s blood--yes, lick--in their storied heavyweight championship re-match on February 23. Imagine the rugby scrum, or the winger flying down the lines before being brought down brutally by a whole lot of people crashing into him. There is no such thing as sanitized sport. Well, there’s fencing, which would do brilliantly in these times--the players basically wear a full PPE, and the whole point of the game is to maintain distance.
The one change that has more than a fair chance of actually coming to fruition is tennis players throwing their sweat-soaked towels at ball boys and girls. Even fans sympathise with the youngsters. Moves by officials to tackle the issue took on greater urgency in March when the coronavirus was taking a global grip. Behind closed doors in Miki, ball boys and girls on duty at the Davis Cup tie between Japan and Ecuador wore gloves.
Baskets were made available for players to deposit their towels. Back in 2018, the ATP introduced towel racks at some events on a trial basis, but not everyone was overjoyed. “I think having the towel whenever you need it, it’s very helpful. It’s one thing less that you have to think about,” said Greece’s Stefanos Tsitsipas when he was playing at the Nextgen Finals in Milan. “I think, it’s the job of the ball kids.”