The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘It’s only a game’
With sports gone silent, Auriemma reminds us of priorities
The Red Sox ending their 86-year-old curse. The Cubs ending their 108-year drought. Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, the U.S. women’s national soccer team. Tiger Woods, after all his health and personal problems, winning the Masters. A 3-year-old named American Pharoah.
Here in Connecticut, where we pause our lives and brace for the coronavirus, we have had UConn men and UConn women basketball to unite us from Storrs to Stamford.
Yet if you think about it, no sports moment in the 21st century brought our country closer together than the first pitch George Bush threw before Game 3 of the 2001 World Series. The president bounded out of the dugout, walked tall to the pitcher’s mound like he was John Wayne, stepped on the rubber and gave the thumb’s up to Yankee Stadium, to America.
Terrorists, the most despicable cowards, had dropped us to our knees for a moment in history. They leveled the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, went after the Pentagon, ditched the fourth highjacked plane into the earth of Western Pennsylvania. We were frightened. We were scared. Yet from the great pile of dust and twisted steel, we got up from our knees and grew more determined.
Yeah, from the rubber, from the full 60 feet, six inches, President Bush threw a strike. Yankee Stadium erupted. Bush waved as he made his way off the field. Late, legendary Yankees public address announcer Bob Sheppard said, simply, poignantly, “Thank you, Mr. Presi
dent.”
There is nothing like sports to bring us together and, at least for a few hours, take our minds off the worst fears of the unknown.
Geno Auriemma, Hall of Fame basketball coach, winner of a record 11 national champions, media scrum laureate, saw the UConn women’s drive for a 13th consecutive Final Four appearance end Thursday when the NCAA announced the cancellation of all its winter tournaments. In his gut, Auriemma knew it was over Wednesday night when the NBA suspended its season because of the coronavirus. By late Friday morning, he had concluded, “It’s not normal, but what is anymore?”
Nothing is.
“Over the last 24 hours I’ve tried to rationalize all this,” Auriemma said Friday. “Sports is a huge part of the American fabric. It has been for 100 years and then some. Sports is what we use in every local community to bring people together. The local high school teams. Sports is what separates people from worrying about color or religion and race. Sports is the one thing that makes people come together and rally around: My team vs. your team.
“And now the one thing that sports does, bringing people together in one place to share that experience — the sharing of the experience — is what causes people to get sick and some people to eventually die from this disease. All the great things sports brings are a negative at this point and time, which is totally, incredibly mindboggling. Then to add insult to injury, OK you can’t go the game. Now not only that, I can’t sit home and watch it.”
The NBA is suspended. The NCAA Tournament, men and women, is canceled. NHL suspended. MLS suspended and in Europe so are the Premier League, Le Liga. Ligue 1, Serie A and Bundesliga. The XFL season canceled. Major League Baseball ended spring training and pushed back the start of the season. The PGA Tour stopped The Players Championship after one round and canceled the next three events. The Masters has been postponed. NASCAR has called off the next two racing weekends. The Boston
Marathon has been postponed until September. Locally, the CIAC canceled the winter tournaments. Colleges everywhere are canceling spring sports. It is the right thing to do. To gather in great numbers to celebrate our games is the worst thing we can do for our health and safety.
Looking back to Monday night, celebrating the American Athletic Conference Tournament victory at Mohegan Sun, closing the door on a 139-0 seven-year run through the AAC, Auriemma said he never would have imagined all this would have changed so quickly.
“So what are we left with?” Auriemma said. “I don’t know. But you know me, I’ve always talked in terms of people make too much of a big deal of winning and losing. People treat winning and losing as if it’s life and death. ‘I’m going to war with my team … Hey, we were just in a big battle … We were fighting for our lives.’ All the crazy stuff sports fans, coaches, players have talked about for years and years and years.
“Maybe, I don’t know, in some philosophical way that you’re asking, maybe this is a reminder that this is a game, man. You didn’t go with your travel team, because you didn’t have a travel team when you were 10, 11, 12. You played in your local neighborhood. You won. You lost. You went home and played again tomorrow. Somewhere along the line, it became completely different than that. It became all about everything except the product on the field, on the court, on the ice.”
Look, Auriemma is as competitive as anyone. He occasionally can be combative. I’ve known that edge of the sword. Yet over the quarter-century I’ve known him it is not his competitiveness that makes him unique. I’ve seen many more sore losers. It his relentless care, often disguised in a sharp or motivating remark. It is his generosity afforded him with his salary and the generosity with his time. Auriemma is the son of an immigrant, up from little, and he lives his life as if it all could disappear tomorrow. So he works. He worries. He jokes. He keeps pushing himself and others. I’ve always thought the further away you are from Auriemma, hearing only the wiseguy remarks, the more you fail to appreciate that. The closer you are, the more you absorb the
fuller picture, the more you appreciate him.
His line that people care to much about the winning and the losing may seem a tad disingenuous. Easy for Geno, to say, he has 11 rings, right? Go back to that buzzer-beater shot that Morgan William hit to end UConn’s record 111game winning streak and run of four consecutive national champs. Auriemma simply turned, smiled and went directly over to Mississippi State coach Vic Schafer to hug him. That moment said everything.
Auriemma is a reader and an eater. He studies Caesar and Caesar salads. He studies his wines as well as his history. He loves all sports and he loves movies, too. As soon as The Irishman went on Netflix a few months ago, there Auriemma was ready to discuss the acting roles of Pacino, De Niro and Pesci and the life of Jimmy Hoffa.
His one-liners belie the fact that in a quick, missile strike world he delivers slower, more thoughtful aircraft-carrier perspective. So when I asked him on a conference call Friday that for a country addicted to sports what are we going to do now, I shouldn’t have been surprised he gave a four-minute, 20-second answer. One that centered on how mind-blowing it is to digest that the thing that most unites us can kill us. Ultimately, he looked to other side of our dark national tunnel.
“Maybe this is a reminder, hey, guys this a game,” Auriemma said. “We don’t need TV stations, radio stations devoting 24 hours to talking nonsense involving the game, people playing the game, what they should have done in the game. That’s the way I’m choosing to look at it. Shut up. Get off the air. Nobody cares anymore what you think. Maybe it should be like that when the games come back. Shut up. Watch the game. Go to the game. And leave it at that. God, wouldn’t that be a godsend? Wouldn’t that be worth it to get all that nonsense out of the space of the games? Let’s turn it back over to the athletes. That’s how I’m choosing to look at it …
“As I do interview and do TV spots. Stupid right?”
Not even if we can remember and keep remembering what should be important in our lives.