Embracing the absurd.

Idea that once sounded crazy will bring joy to sports-starved fans

LeBron James found the idea preposterous, and like many others he dismissed it out of hand. Sports without fans? Who even could conceive of such a thing?

In the 10 weeks since that night, we’ve learned a lot about the unthinkable. The good news is not all of it has been terrible.

Back in early March, would you have known you could use Zoom to conduct interviews with sources, take questions from college kids, play poker with friends and enjoy a family Mother’s Day celebration? Well, I didn’t, and now I’ve done all four.

Not everything has changed, and not every connection we’ve lost will be gone forever. Some routines, like eating out, will come back. Others, like serving yourself from the allyou-can-eat breakfast buffet, might need to be replaced.

It will be a while before we figure out which adjustments are temporary and which should be more permanent, and we’ll need to be smart about it. But in the meantime, it might be worth it to redefine the unthinkable.

And find the parts of the preposterous worth embracing.

Nobody is arguing that playing games in empty arenas and ballparks is a perfect solution, and nobody is advocating for fans to be kept away forever. There’s nothing quite like the collective gasp of a packed stadium in the split second when tens of thousands of people realize something remarkable is about to occur, and there’s nothing quite like the roar of that crowd after it happens.

You want that back. I want that back. Everybody does.

But there can be just as much

drama found in silence as there is in noise, and if the first safe step in returning to the latter is exploring the former, then sign me up. Sports will come back, piece by piece, and we don’t need the whole thing to return at once.

As Oklahoma football coach Lincoln Riley told reporters this week, “We’ve got to be patient. We get one shot at this, and we’ve got to do it right.”

There are some, like Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who don’t see much value in the slow-andsteady approach. In a guest editorial in the Dallas Morning News, Patrick argued “there is no reason (fans) can’t attend the games when they begin again,” and suggested large outdoor stadiums can “easily accommodate about 30 percent attendance to start.”

This, of course, was not the boldest suggestion Patrick has made since the coronavirus pandemic began. And his ideas about computer-generated seating charts, controlled concourse access and limited concession sales are not new. Versions of those plans surely have been batted around by executives in every professional franchise and every major college athletic department in the country.

It’s easy to imagine those details coming to fruition someday. But it’s also easy to understand how staging sports events will be safer more quickly by bringing the games back first, and the fans a bit later.

It’s what’s already happening with Korean baseball and German

soccer. Before the end of the summer, it might happen with the NBA and Major League Baseball.

And if those leagues do return in largely empty venues, it won’t be a defeat. It will be one victory in what could become a series of them. Again, it will be imperfect, but that can be compelling, just the same.

The truth is, we’ve been heading in this direction for a long time. Attendance at college football games, for example, has declined in eight of the last nine years, and hit a 24-year low last season. MLB attendance in 2019 was down 14 percent from 2007, and the NFL, NBA and NHL all experienced dips during the same time period.

The reasons were myriad and complicated, but one simple one is this: Some viewers decided that watching games at home was either more pleasurable or more convenient.

To be clear, millions of fans still paid for tickets and sat in the grandstands, and every league is counting on them to do so again.

But in the interim, will plenty of people appreciate being able to hear what exactly James says as he drives by Kawhi Leonard, or still find a thrill in seeing Texas play Oklahoma, even if the Cotton Bowl isn’t packed? I suspect they will.

In the middle of so much heartbreak, and so much devastation, people have found ways to improvise and to innovate in their daily lives, and that will happen in sports, too. Every now and then, they might even stumble on some improvements.

And what seemed preposterous not so long ago?

We might just find some joy in it.

Martin Meissner / Associated Press Borussia Dortmund’s Erling Haaland takes a corner kick Saturday in his team’s 4-0 home win over Schalke with no fans in the stands. The German Bundesliga is the world’s first major pro sports league to restart amid the pandemic.

Sascha Schuermann / Associated Press Soccer balls are disinfected during the Bundesliga match Saturday between host Duesseldorf and Paderborn at the empty Merkur Spiel-Arena. Even with no fans, sports are still worth watching.