Does sports have healing power? Yes
As Houston tries to pick itself up, its teams can help give the Bayou City a needed lift.
So here we are, some of us only muddied but others bloodied, starting to stagger back toward normal or whatever that’s going to look like in the traumatic weeks ahead. Best case, we’ll be a city flooded — literally — by lots of people who never identified with the homeless but suddenly found themselves in the same boat. Again, literally. § Thousands have lost most if not all their material goods thanks to Harvey’s unrelenting fury, and cruelty. Several have lost their lives. Practically a third of Harris County was under water. This wasn’t just a merciless storm. This wasn’t just a merciless storm. This seemed personal.
Why us, we ask? A fan of Houston sports, subjected over the past year to Brock Osweiler’s abject incompetence, J.J. Watt’s bad back, James Harden’s seasonending disappearing act, Carlos Correa’s wrecked wrist and his Astros’ coinciding malaise, probably sees the diabolical weather as terribly unnecessary roughness, as piling on to the nth degree.
But the question going forward is, can the Astros finish strong enough and the Texans start fast enough to provide a meaningful distraction from the misery?
That’s the plan, coach Bill O’Brien promises.
“Football’s big, anyway,” O’Brien said, “but when you put it in Houston and take into consideration such a catastrophic event, football becomes even bigger. It gives fans a chance to cheer and let off some steam. Hopefully, we can play some good football for them.”
The games matter
Some might also ask, should these games that rich people play have any impact whatsoever on our emotional well-being? But the point is moot. Fact is, they do, and there’s no better example than New Orleans a few years back.
As hard as we’ve been punched by Harvey — expense-wise, it’s going to be unprecedented in the U.S. — Katrina arguably delivered a worse emotional blow to the Crescent City in September 2005. The Superdome, having nearly lost its roof, was rendered unusable and the city’s population ultimately shrunk by more than a half (with,
ironically, a significant number of the folks who left resettling in Houston’s now inundated, unrecognizable suburbs).
The Saints had to play their home games in Baton Rouge and San Antonio and staggered to a 3-13 finish. Talk was widespread that they’d likely move elsewhere because New Orleans, already a troubled community before the storm, never would fully recover.
Linebacker Scott Fujita, who had signed as a free agent that offseason despite being told by many of his NFL peers not to go there because of the nearly unfathomable decimation, remembers arriving in New Orleans for the first time postKatrina.
“There’s only one way to describe what I saw: postapocalyptic,” he told Sports Illustrated. “But the community needed us. We needed the community. And it worked. This is why the marriage is so special between the team and the town, why the Saints are now so deeply rooted in the community and you just can’t imagine New Orleans without the Saints.”
A year later, they rebounded to 10-6 and nearly reached the Super Bowl. Three seasons later, they won the Lombardi Trophy. And New Orleans is still with us. Not because of football by any stretch of the imagination, of course, but you’ll have no trouble finding people in every neighborhood, from the Garden District to the French Quarter to the Lower Ninth Ward, who credit the Saints for helping with the healing process.
The players themselves find catharses in these cataclysms, too.
Seth Payne, the former Texan defensive lineman and current co-host of the morning drivetime show on Sports Radio 610, was a Jacksonville Jaguar on 9-11. His coach, Tom Coughlin, had a brother who was in the World Trade Center but survived and, therefore, a good many first responders got plenty of face time with the Jaguars.
Payne was routinely humbled by how many of them thanked him for his service, for providing an important outlet to, as O’Brien put it, “cheer and let off some steam.”
“That really drove home to me how professional athletes can and do impact people’s lives,” Payne said. “It would blow me away the kind of response I would get for just sending a video to a soldier serving in Afghanistan.”
Time to change history
Houston’s now-greatest trauma — and challenge going forward — came at a time when low oil prices had already taken a mean toll, leading to thousands of lost jobs and myriad square feet of empty commercial property. But at least this wasn’t a reprisal of 2008, when Hurricane Ike tore through town simultaneous with a near-collapse of the global financial system. The stock market actually rose Tuesday, when things were at their worst in Houston.
Sadly, recent precedent isn’t on the side of our current sports teams rising to challenge and helping with the healing process — with one spectacular if, in the end, disheartening, exception. When Hurricane Rita, following not long after Katrina drowned New Orleans, caused massive and what proved to be unnecessary evacuations, the Texans fortuitously already had a bye week scheduled after a pair of opening losses. As the storm approached, coach Dom Capers told his players to get out of town as well, and the way the season played out, those that took his advice should have stayed gone.
Four more losses followed in succession when the team re-convened and the Texans tumbled to 2-14, which got Capers fired.
The Astros were in the middle of a nine-game road and wouldn’t be directly impacted save for the concern the players felt for their families back in Houston. Safely out of Rita’s reach, they went 6-3 and returned to a largely unscathed city, primed and ready for the
franchise’s first World Series run. By the time they beat the Cardinals in St. Louis to win the National League pennant, Houstonians who hadn’t endured the horrors of the ill-advised exodus, when expected three-hour drives required up to 20, had largely forgotten the hurricane that wasn’t.
Nonetheless, a world championship would have been a welcome reward for the inconveniences incurred. Instead, the Astros got swept by the Chicago White Sox and that was that.
Like Harvey, if not quite of the same far-reaching magnitude as Harvey, Ike was the real deal. And that season neither the Texans — again — nor the Astros were sufficiently stocked in talent to cheer the town up. Gary Kubiak’s third team was coming off a 3817 thrashing from the Steelers in Pittsburgh when its second game against Baltimore had to be postponed because of significant damage to the NRG Stadium roof (Small blessing: It would be stuck in the open position for the rest of the year).
Upon returning to the field, the Texans dropped three in a row to their AFC South rivals. In the first, a 31-12 debacle at Tennessee, Matt Schaub threw three interceptions, giving him five in two games and, yes, providing a peek at what we’d see again at the end of his Houston career.
It took a 5-1 run in November and December for the Texans to achieve their first .500 finish, a milestone in its own right but hardly enough of a feel-good story to cancel out the feel-bad stories left behind in Ike’s wake.
The Astros, for their part, would be directly impacted by the ferocious wind and rain, losing a three-game home series against the Chicago Cubs when they were 8067 and appearing at least playoffworthy, if not championship ready. With Minute Maid Park a non-option because of the same multiple logistics issues we’re confronting now, then commissioner Bud Selig decreed the games would be played in his native Milwaukee, turning them into de facto home games for the Cubs, who already owned the National League’s best record and whose hometown fans lived less than two hours away.
The Astros got outscored 11-1 in Miller Park, then suffered at sweep at the Marlins’ hands in Florida. Even with a 6-3 closing run, they missed the postseason by 3½ games. The name Bud has been a local epithet since, as the name Harvey will also forever be.
Then there was 1994, when a largely forgotten but massive flood lifted Lake Conroe’s water level to a record that wouldn’t be surpassed until this week. Fortunately, the Rockets already had Houston in a great mood with their first NBA championship, but the Oilers failed completely to brighten the city’s mood in the immediate wake of that deluge. After a 12-4 season that ended with an 11-game winning streak, they became the first NFL team to 10 more times than during a previous season. Worse, the 2-14 debacle set in motion the forces that led to the franchise’s leaving for Nashville three seasons later.
No, the omens aren’t good. But Payne, speaking from experience, remains confidence of one
thing, the weight of local history be hanged. Although he can’t guarantee the Texans and the Astros will find a way to dig deeper and push harder now on Houston’s behalf, he believes they will.
“Sometimes we get cynical about what motivates professional athletes,” Payne said, “But a lot of these guys, most of these guys, really do care about (the big picture). They’ll always play harder for someone else than they will for themselves, whether it’s teammates or fans who have lost their houses.”