Tough year made tougher by athlete deaths
From Kobe Bryant to Tom Seaver, Stanley Robinson to Cliff Robinson, an already bleak 2020 has seen the loss of many prominent sports figures
Every time you catch your breath these days, it gets taken away again. One death at a time, one depressing news flash or conversation after another, the feeling of loss is ever present, a consistent companion to all the unique challenges of 2020.
Word of the latest departure from the sporting landscape swept through social media Wednesday evening. Tom Seaver had passed at age 75, taken by dementia and COVID-19. That first idol for so many baseball fans of a certain age, the greatest Met of all, a pitching giant, Tom Terrific. Gone.
So many of certain impact have been taken in a year so complicated but so simply sad. They were people we’ve admired from up close and afar, those who shaped our childhoods and memories, people whose larger-thanlife existences continued to feed us joy and stoke our imagination at a time when the current sports world offers only a flat and sterile experience, with empty stadiums the perfect optic to represent a nation’s lost joy and deflated soul.
It’s not that we wouldn’t have cared as much about the death of a sports icon in years past. It doesn’t mean that we only care now. But death in 2020, with the backdrop of a pandemic and its own emotional challenges, do sting a little differently, perhaps more acutely for our existing vulnerabilities.
Stanley Robinson, the gentle young man who thrilled UConn fans with his ferocious dunks, died in July and I found myself crying over a chicken and waffle breakfast as texts rolled in. Cliff Robinson, an early pillar to what Jim Calhoun built in Storrs, died last week and I could feel the pain through the words of his former coaches and teammates.
Months earlier, the deaths of Kobe Bryant, 41, and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna on a helicopter that crashed into a hillside in Calabasas, Calif. were among the first hands-tothe-forehead moment of disbelief that lasted … well, has it ended? Kobe and Gianna are gone and, yes, it’s still difficult to believe.
The Bryants’ death shook the world for his stardom, and their connection to UConn created an immediate and lasting pain in Storrs. Geno Auriemma and Diana Taurasi spoke during a memorial service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, celebrating life and mourning loss before a crowd of about 20,000 in February.
Weeks later, the pandemic changed most everything — including the way we memorialize. We’ve been forced to reconcile heartbreak amid the cruel inability to gather.
We’ve lost coaching legends, people who defined eras and were the face of organizations and programs. Georgetown’s John Thompson, a towering figure for his success on the court and his success with young people and the Black community, passed away this week and what came forth through various words of tribute was a better understanding for what change he created in a sport, in a conference and in players he was charged with protecting.
We’ve lost people of particular star power — Seaver, Bryant, Wes Unseld and Chadwick Boseman, whose film portrayal of Jackie Robinson gave him a unique place in our sports psyche.
We’ve lost people beloved in certain towns or neighborhoods, too.
Duffy Jernigan, a playground and Hartford Public High basketball legend, died in April after a battle with COVID-19, a blow to proud basketball circles in Hartford. Longtime Farmington
High athletic director Jack Phelan, a versatile and accomplished man revered for his kindness and contributions, departed last month. Just this week Pete Mazza, a standout for some of the best football teams in state history at Cheshire High in the 1990s later a Yale captain who went on to work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, succumbed to cancer.
This has been a year unlike any other in its ability to remind us of what can be taken without notice, and a year without proper goodbyes. There was no moment of silence with some 45,000 fans paying tribute to Seaver this week at Citi Field. There was no shoulder-to-shoulder, hand-in-hand, gathering in Washington for Thompson. Who knows if and when UConn will be able to allow either Robinson to be remembered in ways that allow a Gampel Pavilion crowd to smile and cry in
unison?
Because 2020 is a year that has stolen our ability to share grief and fully support one another. There are online tributes and socially-distant memorial services, or none at all, with communities and families having to fit their sorrow and confusion into a little slot between health and safety protocols.
It’s all just so sad.
More than we understood at the time, some goodbyes that we were forced to say in March really did mean goodbye forever.
The list is long, too many to name in this space, and 2020 started taking immediately. On New Year’s
Day, David Stern, longtime NBA commissioner, died weeks after suffering a brain hemorrhage. Baseball legends Don Larsen and Al Kaline. Don Shula, the winningest coach in NFL history. Bob Watson, the first Black general manager in Major League history.
Wes Unseld, Lute Olson, Jerry Sloan, Eddie Sutton. All of them gone. All are in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Bryant will join them in May 2021 — as part of the 2020 class. Enshrinement ceremonies have been pushed back due to the pandemic.
The year, meanwhile, is just moving along, plucking people from our lives and leaving us to deal in such strange ways. We have the memories, at least. Those can’t be stolen.
Eventually, hopefully, we can get back to actually sharing, in person, all the joy and pain that the world offers. But for now we’re essentially left alone to our own reflections at a time when it’s most important to come together. It’s become almost impossible to catch your breath and set your mind right in 2020.