SHOOTING FROM THE LIP
We can’t even think about returning to normal until it’s safe
As much as we want sports to bring us together, we can’t go back to normal until we have a coronavirus vaccine
There is this brave notion from the National Football League that the season will start on schedule in September. Somebody tell me how. Tell me how any big sport resumes any sort of normalcy before there is a vaccine for the coronavirus. Tell me the next time you see yourself, or your son or daughter, or sister or brother or friend, sitting in a crowded stadium and pretending that the world, and not just the world of sports, is what it used to be.
This is not meant as some doomsday scenario for sports. But in the new reality for all of us, here is another: Sports may never be the same the way going to a rock concert may never be the same, or the theater, or to the movies.
Sports needs a respirator. There will be a vaccine for the coronavirus someday, and perhaps sooner rather than later. The best and brightest minds in medicine and science are trying to come up with one right now, and will come up with one, because they always do. But until they do, ask yourself again:
When do you see yourself feeling safe to be crowded into seats at any stadium in this country, or any arena, feeling as if you’re on the F train at rush hour?
Here is something Bob
Costas told me when the Summer Games in Tokyo were pushed back to 2021:
“We keep hoping that we can return to normal as soon as possible, and not just in sports. As if by June or July, people can say (the coronavirus) is over now, everybody can come out and play. Well right now, I’m not so sure about that. Nobody knows what normal is going to look like in two or three months. No one is even sure what ‘as soon as possible’ means either.”
We have lost the Olympics, at least for now. Lost March Madness. We have lost Wimbledon. The French Open has grabbed a date at the end of September, after the US Open is scheduled to be played in this city, now the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in America. Who in the world knows about either of those events in the current world? We lost the end of spring training and the beginning of the regular season in baseball, and there is no telling when the season will start. If it ever does. This is what Rob Manfred, the 10th commissioner of baseball, said to me the other day:
“I’ve made hundreds of decisions (over the past few weeks). Every one of those decisions have been influenced by my hope that Baseball can play a similar role (as it did after 9/11) in this crisis. The unifying, healing power of our game makes it different than any other sport. We have an obligation to do more than survive. We have an obligation to rise above this challenge and lift the spirts of our nation.”
It is a most noble ambition, and ideal, for all of us who love baseball. We saw the healing powers of baseball after Sept. 11, 2001. We saw how Mike Piazza’s home run one Friday night at old Shea Stadium didn’t just lift a city, but a country. We lost baseball for a week-and-ahalf that time. Now we have no idea when we will get it back. Or professional basketball. Or the NHL. Or soccer or tennis or golf.
Or anything.
The whole idea of sports as we have known it might not ever be the same. And if we do go the rest of this year without sports, which is a very real possibility, if we lose all sports and not just the Olympics for a year or 18 months, then we lose something else:
The idea of sports as the same pillar of society that it has always been.
Understand something: If this had all happened two months ago, if it had become a self-quarantine world at the end of January and not at the end of February, there would have been no Super Bowl this season.
You look down the road, look at the politicians and the frontline heroes in the hospitals, heroes as great as we ever saw at Ground Zero or in my father’s war, World War II, and wonder which sport will be the first to even try to put athletes back into play in a hospital mask, social distancing, hand sanitizing world.
Of course the virus may be treatable soon. Maybe we won’t need a year or 18 months to get a vaccine that
will be available to everybody, and allow us all to live without constant fear again. But there is no way of knowing that. And no way of knowing if we will see sports again in 2020.
Look down the road again: Do they test every single athlete in every single sport? How does that happen at a time when the biggest lie told in this thing came from the president of the United States exactly one month ago, when he said “Everyone who wants a test can get a test”? Seriously? Go online and read the horror stories about that. Go ask people in Florida what it’s like to try to get a test for the virus there, under
Gov. Ron (Party On) DeSantis.
So little works now with the coronavirus, the way so little of the federal government’s handling of it works. So how can anybody reasonably believe that we can get sports up and running and back to work before 2021? Why?
Now we are where we are, without sports, basically since Rudy Gobert tested positive for the virus less than one month ago. Think about that. Less than a month. Look at the world we had then and the world we have now. Once, after Sept. 11, sports brought us together, absolutely. Now we have a country and a world where we do everything humanly possible not to be together.
I have loved sports my whole life. Sports has given me a career, the professional life I have been blessed enough to lead. Now it’s gone. And may not be coming back anytime soon. And, truly, the idea that things will ever be exactly the same ever again is something else on a respirator. If sports can find one, that is.