What it takes
Have a healthy society
camps in a month — with 2,000 players and coaches as a virus rages like wildfire in many of the regions where the virus is threatening to overwhelm hospitals.
As Mike Tyson put it, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Sure, people want sports back. We’d also like to hug our best friends and have healthcare workers supplied with adequate protective gear. How about getting businesses back and people employed. Add to the wish list not having meatpacking workers and nursing home patients die in clusters. Anyone looking to baseball to distract them from a federal leadership vacuum that has contributed to the 120,000-person death toll needs to go back to civics class.
We aren’t going to get sports back until we get a healthy society back.
It can be done. Bundesliga in Germany has weathered a small outbreak but continued to play. But Germany had just 587 cases diagnosed on Wednesday. In the US that number was 36,975. Adjusted for population, they are still crushing us in the most important competition of all — Humans vs. Virus.
Maybe players like Jenkins don’t want to be guinea pigs for public consumption, especially when people are going around coughing in each other’s faces during disagreements about masks. We can’t even follow basic public health recommendations, but expect an NBA player to leave his family for a month during this infection hurricane in the name of bread and circus.
Sports are the least of our societal problems. What this pandemic has revealed is that we are not a functional country anymore. We have ceased to be a society where people are willing to pull in the same direction to save lives and get our transmission rate down like other western democracies have been able to do. We cry liberty as a way of removing all civic obligation.
If these leagues really want to get back in business, a few PSAs about wearing masks and social distancing might help, as would applying pressure on Washington to actually lead by example and fund testing in places where these outbreaks are occurring.
Our American sensibility, that positive thinking will get us the outcomes we seek, is inadequate. Hope is not a strategy, to quote a better aphorism, and we need to get to work, together, if we want to get sports, and everything else, through this crisis.