WEATHER
Sports, normally, are a wonderful distraction from the real world.
We obsess over, debate and celebrate thousands of small, mostly inconsequential things.
A 3-pointer that perfectly glides through a net or clanks off iron by falling a half-inch short. The sweet sound a mitt makes when a pitcher throws fire for the first time. Deshaun Watson’s $156 million contract extension and which new NFL team J.J. Watt will choose.
But it’s hard to be happily (or maddeningly) distracted by the Rockets, Astros, Texans, University of Houston men’s basketball team, etc., when you don’t have electricity. Heat.
Running water. Heck, just the simple, old-fashioned things so many of us were taking for granted last weekend: a working high-definition television and a reliable internet connection.
I spent a decent part of my Wednesday waiting in long lines that kept getting longer: Home Depot (Lowe’s was closed), Randalls (H-E-B was closed) and three gas stations.
The first ran out of fuel after I waited in line for more than 30 minutes, gradually inching forward minute by minute, only to end up as the second-place car when the winner sucked up the last bit of gas.
After writing this column, I returned home to magically discover that once-lifeless lights were back on and the heater worked again.
My puppy also wasn’t freezing anymore.
Hope is always alive, Houston.
I will acknowledge, however, that the 11-17 Rockets don’t feel very necessary at the moment, Watt tweeting that “free agency is wild” looks like a frozen hallucination, and MLB pitchers and catchers reporting in Florida feels like a bad tease.
The great state of Texas will eventually figure out how to function and live in 2021 again. Houston, the fourth-largest city in America and easily the greatest city in Texas, will eventually look and operate like big ol’ Houston again.
But let’s be honest: Who are you more angry at right now — Jack Easterby or ERCOT?
Who’s more reliable:
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas or the consistently dysfunctional Texans?
And who sounds more out of touch: Rick Perry or Cal McNair?
At least McNair still has D4 as his franchise quarterback.
For now.
The new normal is that nothing is ever normal. In the far-too-real world and our wildly unpredictable sports world.
The eventual reward for Texas warmly emerging from The Great Freeze of 2021: wearing two masks at once and getting back to overcoming the endless coronavirus pandemic.
Normal has been missing since March of 2020. We’ve been painfully reminded
the last few days that normal is still an elusive ideal almost a full year after everything changed for the first time.
The sports world was frozen by the pandemic. Then there was a powerful summer devoted to social change and racial protests. Then the political world got really crazy. Then it got really cold in Houston, and it snowed throughout Texas and … poof!
We lost touch with normal again.
Just look at Wednesday’s headlines:
Texas A&M's men's and women's basketball games postponed.
Sam Houston State reschedules football season opener.
UH basketball schedule up in the air.
Girls state swimming meet delayed by weather.
Spurs games postponed
after four players positive for COVID-19.
All the uncertainty and instability make sense
when you remember that 2020 was followed by 2021, and so far the latter hasn’t been any better
than the former.
At least 2020 had electricity, heat, and a couple months when COVID-19 wasn’t getting in the way of everything.
We’ll get excited about the return of Dusty Baker’s Astros — at some point.
We’ll really get into March Madness. But midMarch currently feels like a long time away.
I saw Texans sweatshirts and ski caps while waiting in line for a few gallons of gas.
I smiled when a staticky voice on the radio said the Texans were a mess but there were obviously much more important things going on in Houston than the Texans.
We’ll eventually get back to the joy, frustration and chaos of our sports world.
But first the real world has to get its act together.
Again.