Face of U.S. coronavirus actually sped up response
None of this happens without Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz. Gobert didn’t set out to become one of the most famous and influential athletes in history. But that is exactly what he became this past week when it was announced that he had tested positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus, leading to Adam Silver immediately suspending operations of the National Basketball Association for now, and maybe for a while. Here’s why: Silver was the first commissioner in sports, but not the last, to realize that if you don’t get out in front of an event like the coronavirus, it will run you right over. Ask the federal government.
Now, you’re allowed to see Gobert as one of those meathead Republicans like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) who had himself photographed wearing a gas mask before somebody died of the virus in his district and Gaetz himself thought he might have been exposed to it at a the CPAC convention and ended up stuck in a closet on Air Force One. You’re allowed to see Gobert as the NBA version of the meatheads on Fox and on the radio who kept trying to tell you that COVID-19 was some hyped-up version of the common cold. Sure it is. People with common colds shut down sports leagues and March Madness and the golf tour and the tennis tour and maybe the Olympics eventually all the time.
But if you look at where we were with the virus just one week ago and where we are now, Rudy Gobert might have had more to do than anybody with shutting down the sports world. But he also saved it.
“What’s wrong with Rudy?” Chris Paul was saying on the court before his Thunder’s game with the Utah Jazz was cancelled last Tuesday night.
We know what was wrong with Rudy. Wasn’t the flu. It was COVID-19. And just like that, the NBA season was suspended. And then the dominoes began to fall, hockey and conference tournaments in college basketball and then the big one, the NCAA men’s tournament. Spring training in Florida and Arizona was called after Thursday’s games. The regular season was postponed for two weeks, and that is just for now. On Friday the Masters was postponed, something you thought would happen when oceans dried up. On and on. And on.
The president of the United States was originally talking about this virus disappearing when the weather got warm, and still saying a week ago that it would go away. And thinking that he was the one who could save the world by not allowing planes from most European countries to land in this one.
But if you don’t think the way this virus was viewed changed with Gobert and with the NBA, even before we found out that at least one of Gobert’s teammates – Donovan Mitchell, a great kid out of Greenwich, Ct. – then you are watching the wrong movie here. For all the wrong reasons, Rudy Gobert, who seemed to think coronavirus was a joke until it came for him, really did become one of the most important figures his sport or any sport has ever produced. No. 27 of the Utah Jazz, out of France, became Patient Zero in the eyes of the American public.
Understand: He didn’t volunteer. The virus drafted him. This was after he did act like a meathead, foolishly and frivolously and recklessly touching microphones and reporters’ cell phones after a press conference. Maybe he listens to Rush Limbaugh.
Stories came out later that he had been acting like an idiot in the locker room with his teammates. Then it wasn’t the flu. It was the virus that has created a new normal in American life unlike any we have seen since the days and weeks after the planes hit our buildings on Sept. 11.
No one would ever suggest that those days, and that tragedy, are the same as what we’re experiencing now in the early innings of a medical and health crisis like this, certainly not in New York City. But across the country, there was the same kind of fear, and uncertainty, mostly about when we would get anywhere near the old normal in America. It is why no one knows when the NBA will return, or baseball, or the NHL, or whether or not they will be playing tennis again by the French Open, the year’s second major, in May. Two weeks is completely arbitrary in baseball. Six weeks is completely arbitrary in tennis. A month is arbitrary in men’s professional golf.
My dear friend, the great William Goldman, once