San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A year of sports was seen from a distance
Without fans in attendance, biggest events in athletics were just games, not festivities
On the heels of the 49ers’ loss to the Washington Football Team on Dec. 13 came a moment that, in any other year, might have seemed strange.
In his postgame news conference, Washington rookie Chase Young invited his mom to evaluate his play for reporters. Only Young’s mom wasn’t in the room with him. Nor were the reporters.
With his mom, Carla, on FaceTime, Young held up his phone to face reporters who were present only virtually, by video call. As she raved about a touchdown he’d scored, Young sat quietly and grinned. Sweet and surreal, the scene befit a year in which sports, reflecting sociLOOKING ety in the midst of a global pandemic, forged ahead with an emphasis on distance.
The year 2020 in sports was one of games without fans. The NBA, WNBA and NHL played out their postseasons in bubble environments. Broadcasters called games remotely from studios and homes. The NFL required masks on sidelines. Major League Baseball discouraged highfives.
Outside the lines, the now familiar video conference became a fixture. The NFL and NBA held their drafts virtually for the first time. Zoom and other conferencing apps replaced locker rooms as primary settings for media interviews.
Teams shifted other operations online — locally, the
Warriors as an organization have held more than 30,000 meetings using RingCentral since March, a spokesman said. On the basketball side, those included draft preparations and film study sessions between coaches and players.
“It’s probably similar to everybody else … it’s just a different vibe,” Warriors head coach Steve Kerr said, in a video call, following a recent practice. “It’s a totally different vibe. You don’t get the same personal connection. It’s quiet.
“Life is different for all of us. We’re getting used to it. But hopefully we don’t have to do this forever. We’re all happy there’s a light at the end of the tunnel with the vaccines, and hopefully everybody is out there being smart, wearing masks and trying to help get us to the finish line.”
As sports in the U. S. halted in the spring, the NFL was early in its offseason. The 49ers later held a virtual spring program with team meetings over Zoom. At first, head coach Kyle Shanahan said he was “surprised by how normal it felt.”
“Everyone was in quarantine and we had some of our most fun meetings. … You’d get done with the football stuff but no one had anywhere to go, so we’d all just sit there and hang out with each other, just talking on Zoom,” Shanahan said.
“But in the long haul you miss a lot. You miss the interaction of being around groups of people — and the teaching aspect of it. You can learn, and it’s good, but it’s not as good.”
Interaction changed widely in response to the coronavirus, which has caused nearly 350,000 deaths in the U. S. and more than 1.8 million globally. At sporting events, it was visibly different or missing.
The Giants, A’s and many other teams filled seats with cutout fans in lieu of humans. Wins and losses played out against a soundtrack of artificial crowd noise. In its Orlando bubble, the NBA hosted “virtual fans” — livestreaming feeds of people watching the games from home onto videoboards set up around the court. But the impact of thousands of fans reacting in person to a buzzerbeater — or a walkoff home run or goahead touchdown — is impossible to replicate.
“One of the intrinsic parts of sport is it’s a social facilitator,” said Dennis Deninger, a professor of practice in sports communication at Syracuse University. “It’s a spectacle and it’s also meant to be a festival, and those two things work together. When you’re seeing not only the action but the reaction of the people around you, that turns the spectacle part into a festival as well.
“We’re getting the spectacle — they’re still catching the balls and hitting the balls and sinking 3pointers. … But we’re watching something that is just the action, it’s not the event.”
Daniel Durbin, director of the USC Annenberg Institute of Sports, Media and Society, said sports have long relied on consistent scheduling, fans and pageantry at games to create “a sense of moment.”
“That’s what they’ve had for generations,” Durbin said. “And this is really the one time when all three of those things are in question.”
Starting March 11, when the NBA hit pause on its season, 2020 upended sports constancy. Major League Baseball held its Opening Day in late July. The NBA Finals, normally in late spring, pushed into October. March Madness and the minorleague baseball season were canceled, the Tokyo Olympics postponed a year. The Masters, an April rite, took place in November, the Stanley Cup Finals in September for the first time. The NFL played a Wednesday game for just the second time since 1949.
In Bay Area sports, the A’s played a “home” playoff series in Los Angeles and the 49ers moved operations to Arizona after a Santa Clara County health order temporarily banned contact sports to combat the virus. The Warriors went nine months between games. San Francisco’s Harding Park hosted the PGA Championship, believed to be the first major held without spectators.
Interest seemed to waver. Ratings were reportedly down significantly for the NBA playoffs ( 37% lower than last year), Stanley Cup Finals ( 61%) and World Series ( 32% lower than its previous record low), while NFL ratings were down 7% through Week 14 — numbers some attribute to the odd scheduling, the rising use of streaming services, and public attention on the pandemic and presidential election.
Reporters covering sports faced their own adjustments as leagues closed locker rooms and clubhouses to outsiders under health protocols. Interviews, like Young’s, often occurred in group settings by video conference. In March, the NBA, NHL, MLB and Major League Soccer termed those “temporary changes.”
“The changes in access have made it more difficult to cover professional sports, including the NBA,” Josh Robbins, a reporter for the Athletic and president of the Professional Basketball Writers Association, wrote in an email, “but it should be noted that these problems pale in importance to the real costs of the pandemic, most notably the tragic loss of life.”
Robbins wrote the NBA has promised the reporters group that “access — including locker room access — will return to normal once the pandemic subsides.”
Among Warriors players, said longtime media relations director Raymond Ridder, there hasn’t been much reaction to the video call format. “No guy has really given me a, ‘ Hey, I like it’ or ‘ I don’t like it,’ ” Ridder said. “They’ve kind of just gone with the flow so far.”
“Like anything in 2020, it’s not perfect,” he added. “But it’s given us a way to continue to do our job in the best way possible.”
Athletes found many ways to make significant statements in 2020, a year marked by protests against racism and police violence in the U. S.
When it reconvened in July, the WNBA dedicated its season to Breonna Taylor, a Black woman who was fatally shot by police in Louisville, Ky., in March. Players wore Taylor’s name on the back of their jerseys. The NBA and WNBA, in their respective bubbles, painted courts with the words “Black Lives Matter.” Many NBA players wore jerseys featuring social justice messages, echoing words heard at demonstrations following the police killings of Taylor and George Floyd.
On Aug. 26, the Milwaukee Bucks decided not to play a playoff game in protest of the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wis. The NBA did not play for three days, and the Bucks’ decision sparked similar actions across sports. That night, Mets outfielder Dominic Smith knelt during the national anthem at Citi Field, then wept in his postgame video conference discussing the difficulty of being Black in America.
On Aug. 27, the A’s sat out their game against the Rangers, then held a striking group interview — again, by video call — with players Marcus Semien and Tony Kemp and staff, who dialed in from their Texas hotel rooms in street clothes to discuss the decision not to play. “This is not a time to just push this stuff to the wayside anymore,” Kemp said. “This is at the forefront now.”
The Warriors were not among the teams in the NBA’s bubble. Forward Draymond Green took to social media at the time to laud players who sat out games and urge continued action — a message he reiterated recently when asked about watching events from outside.
“I thought it was great, the way guys stood up for everyone else that doesn’t have a voice,” said Green. “I think, continue to get the ball moving in the right direction. Understanding that this issue goes back hundreds of years, nothing’s going to change overnight, but if we can continue to push that message and continue to try to do all that we can to create change, it’s powerful.”
How else might 2020 sports leave a lasting effect? Deninger, the Syracuse professor, said media companies will likely continue to produce more games remotely, saving costs but reducing jobs. Kerr said the Warriors could continue to hold film sessions with players over video call. At least one former athlete, NFL linebacker turned analyst Jonathan Vilma, has posited Zoom interviews will live on after the pandemic ends.
Durbin, of USC, said he hopes virtual interaction will scale back eventually — in sports and life.
“We have been losing some sense of human closeness and intimacy and contact just through the use of media for some time, but this has really accelerated during COVID,” Durbin said.
“You would certainly hope that at some time in the future, we look back on this and go, ‘ Wow, that 2020 was one freaking weird year, and we’re back to being humans now.’ ”