Iconic sports cities are ghost towns during shutdown

They are cities defined by iconic sporting events.

When Augusta comes up, one instantly thinks of the Masters. If Omaha is mentioned, it’s often in the same breath with the College World Series. It’s hard to imagine Louisville without the Kentucky Derby.

In the coming weeks, The Associated Press will look at those cities and others like them — from Williamsport to Oklahoma City to Cheyenne — to examine how the shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic is an especially wrenching blow.

“This is who we are,” said

Jason Fink, the chamber of commerce president in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, which has been synonymous with the Little League World Series since it was founded in 1947.

They can certainly relate to that sentiment in Augusta.

The Masters got its start in 1934 on the grounds of a former nursery and the golf tournament is usually held the first full week of April.

This week, the city looks like a ghost town.

August National Golf Club is all locked up. Washington Road, which should’ve been teeming with cars and commerce and humanity, is desolate instead.

A tradition unlike any other has become a year unlike any since the end of World II.

While the Masters has been rescheduled for November, it won’t be quite the same.

Another event seeping in tradition, the Kentucky Derby is headed for quite a shakeup — assuming it actually gets to the starting gate.

The Run For The Roses is usually held on the first Saturday of May. Because of the pandemic, hold those mint juleps until Labor Day weekend, when the first leg of the Triple Crown is crammed into a slot that also marks the start of college football season.

Not so fortunate: the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska and the Women’s College World Series in Oklahoma City, both of which have already been wiped from the 2020 calendar.

The NCAA Division I baseball championship has been decided in Omaha for the past 70 years. The eightteam tournament is such a part of the city’s identity that $100 million TD Ameritrade Park was constructed a decade ago in exchange for a 25-year promise not to move the event.

Rich Tokheim’s sports apparel shop is right across the street from the 24,000seat stadium, which is dark most of the year other than the occasional local college game played before sparse crowds. More than half Tokheim’s annual revenue comes from those 11 or 12 days when the CWS is held each June.

Oklahoma City will feel a similar blow in late May and early June, when it was supposed to host the Division I softball tournament for the 30th time.

To accommodate what were expected to be record crowds, USA Softball Hall of Fame Stadium underwent a 4,000-seat expansion that raised its capacity to about 13,000.

All the new seats were already sold out.

Turns out, they won’t be needed this year.

The Masters is even more intertwined with the local community because of all the private homes that are rented out to handle the huge influx of tournament spectators, sponsors and media who descend on Augusta each year — far more than can be handled by the limited hotel space.

This is usually a week when thousands of locals head for the beach or take a cruise.

Now, most everyone stuck at home.

Sports — and some of its most iconic cities — have gone dark.

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