Once there was sport, the real live stuff on TV
Thursday was day six or seven of unsocial isolation and things began to get a little twitchy. There was a world of sorts outside, a form of life as we once knew it was going on and we missed it.
The news has been of transmission, quarantine, hoarding and travel bans. In the US, the child president has told flat-out lies about the pandemic. In the UK, the child prime minister all but ran away from it all until he was backed into a corner.
There is fear and loathing all over the world. Fear at not being able to stop the pandemic. Loathing at having to be a leader and make a stand. Now some are playing catch-up in a race they started well after the pistol was fired.
Sport moved quickly for the most part. Basketball shut down. The Premier League suspended play.
By Thursday the list was long and almost complete. Rugby, cricket, cycling, tennis, golf, Formula One, MotoGP, triathlon, rowing, UFC and darts followed suit.
The world of sport is pretty much shut down. Well, except for the Turkish Super Lig, Australia’s A-League, Belarus and Honduras who, by the information on my sports betting app, will still be playing. The app was also taking bets on E-sports, a frontier perhaps too far for my money.
This country’s Premier Soccer League (PSL) is taking a break, which was confirmed by the SA Football Association (Safa), which suspended all football despite the hopeful, desperate populist nonsense put out by Nathi Mthethwa, the minister of sport, arts & culture, saying PSL games could be played behind closed doors.
Had he not been listening to the president the other night?
Did he not see the president laugh when the childcommander-in-chief made another in a long line of Trumpesque statements he will never be able to back up?
Sometimes, there is a time when you should just stop trying to be liked by someone or, in Nathi’s case, anyone in sport, arts and culture who isn’t in administration.
Coming to terms with the shutdown of society and, thus, sport at all levels takes a big mind shift.
It feels selfish to lock the door and hunker down, and it feels selfish to want to have sport to watch on the telly to while the hours away.
But it is not selfish to be a part of the problem, and sport is doing its best to ensure that it is not by showing, to use an old phrase, that there can be no normal sport in an abnormal society.
It hasn’t been such a big jump for me to work from home. I’ve worked from home since 2008 after returning from the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics
I decided that dragging myself all the way to the office to tell jokes, watch TV and waffle the hours away was an incredibly stupid waste of time.
I simply stopped going in, save for Tuesday lunchtimes when we would head down to the SAB World of Beer for The Star’s sports department’s weekly planning meeting and bonding sessions.
There were editors who did not take this well. One insisted I come into the office when not on assignment. I do not know why. I suspect neither did he. To keep him happy, I would stop past a few times a week, do a loop of the office, wave at him through his office door and then leave.
This will be our new normal for the coming months. We do not have a true time frame for when the curve will flatten, only hopeful and vague predictions based on scenarios in lands far different to ours.
We do not know when Super Rugby will return and when, if it does, what form it will take.
Will my lifelong love Liverpool get to play and win their first title in 30 years? I went cold when the Premiership was suspended.
Opposition fans have joked that should Liverpool be given the title it will always have an asterisk next to it. They call it banter. They think it’s all fun.
There is nothing funny about any of this. There is a sense of dread in the streets of Jozi and the world. Death is potentially a sneeze, a cough, an eye scratch and a nose-pick away. We will not have the wonderful distraction of sport during this time. That is sad, but it is good.