FLYING IN FEAR
Tragic reminder of sports travel risks
WE KEEP the thousand-pound elephant locked in the closet of every room in which we talk sports. But invariably, every now and then, it emerges.
Every four years, for instance, whenever they contest the Winter Olympics, there invariably will be a story, somewhere, about 1961, when the entire 18-member U.S. figure skating team was killed in a plane crash in Berg-Kampenhout, Belgium, while en rout to the World Figure Skating Championships in Prague.
Every other day, it seems some cable channel broadcasts “We Are Marshall,” the Matthew McConaughey movie that tells the tale of the recovery of the Marshall University football team, devastated by a 1970 plane crash that killed 37 players and nine coaches.
“Seinfeld,” of course, famously lent voice to the question so many American sports fans silently harbor on one of its quintessential episodes, “The Boyfriend,” when Jerry and George meet Keith Hernandez in a health club locker room, and George, not knowing what else to say to a famous baseball player, goes for the most uncomfortable common denominator possible.
“You know, Keith, what I’ve always wondered, with all these ball clubs flying around all season, don’t you think there’d be a plane crash ...?”
“If you think about it, 26 teams, 162 games a season, you’d think eventually an entire team would get wiped out ...”
“It’s only a matter of time ...
And then back it always goes, into the very back of our minds, where we do our very best to not think about things we don’t want to think about.
Except this week, with the unspeakable tragedy in Colombia, we are forced to confront some of our darkest fears as sports fans whether we want to or not. The Chapecoense soccer club, which recently had become one the most popular teams in football-mad Brazil, was on its way to the finals of the Copa Sudamericana, one of South America’s most important tournaments. Except the plane ran out of fuel, dooming 71 of the 77 passengers, sending shock waves of grief around the sporting world.
And it was inevitable Americans would all think similar thoughts:
What if that happened to the Yankees?
What if that happened to the Cowboys?
What if that happened to the Maple Leafs/Warriors/Cubs/49ers?
There really are contingency plans in all four major sports leagues for such a tragic event, though it is hard (understandably) to get anyone to talk about it on the record. I called someone I know at MLB, for instance, and that person said, in a quiet solemn voice, “Look, you can look it up pretty easily on the internet, OK? But you’ll have to understand if I don’t want to actually talk about this, right?” Of course. For the record, MLB, as with the other leagues, has in its protocols what is called, as euphemistically as possible, a “Disaster Draft,” in which the lost team is restocked with players from the other clubs, those teams allowed to protect a certain amount of players. In baseball, for instance, every team would make five players available: a pitcher, a catcher, an infielder, an outfielder and one other. In the NFL there is actually a distinction between a “near disaster” in which there would be a draft and the team would be given preferred waiver status the rest of the year, and a “disaster” in which the season likely would be cancelled; the threshold is 15 players, and ...
And, well, yes, you can understand why it’s hard for anyone to think about, and hard for anyone to talk about, because it really is unthinkable how a sport would react in the aftermath. There have been pro sports leagues in this country since 1869, after all, and teams mostly have traveled in the air since 1950 or so. And believe me, athletes know the arithmetic of all of that. Privately, a New York athlete who has retired within the past five years once told me that though there were a thousand things he would miss about the life, when you got right down to it, they were all neutralized by one simple thing.
“I’ll be on a plane 30 or 40 times less next year than I was this year,” he said, “which means 300 or 400 fewer times the next 10 years as the last 10 years,” and his expression underlined that he clearly wasn’t talking about leg-room hassles or bad airline food. He didn’t want to say what was really on his mind. Could you blame him?