Sports gets dose of reality in crisis
Fans need their teams — teams need them too
This week, on the oneyear anniversary of the shutdown, there is much pandemic reflection: where you were, most memorable moment, scariest development, strangest silver lining, most unforgettable scene. And, always, the heartbreak of 530,000 deaths from the coronavirus in the United States.
In terms of the sports world, there is absolutely no doubt about the quote of the pandemic.
It came from Sean Doolittle, the always insightful and quotable former A’s pitcher. In July, as baseball haltingly tried to begin its shrunken season, Doolittle, then with the Washington Nationals, said:
“Sports are like the reward for a functioning society.” Bingo.
For much of the past year,
our society wasn’t functioning. And sports took a welldeserved backseat.
At the heart of Doolittle’s quote was perspective. And that’s the biggest takeaway from a pandemic year in sports. The sports world got a muchneeded dose of perspective. Most fans put sports in its appropriate perspective. After decades of ballooning out of control, of increasing selfimportance, a healthy dose of reality was in order.
One of the best developments is that everyone recognized the importance of fans. Sometimes in our world of multiple screens and streaming and delayed viewing, we forget about what actually makes sports special. Why it draws us, in a way that other entertainment doesn’t.
It’s the community. The energy. The interaction. The shared pride. The combined belief.
Fans aren’t just the cash cow for team owners. As it turns out, they’re an integral component of the game. Athletes truly missed the fans. You heard it over and over and I’m pretty sure that the athletes who played through this era will never take fans for granted again.
Players and coaches tried, and usually failed, to manufacture their own energy, their own urgency. But you could see how much work it took, how draining it was. Many of the games fell flat. The pipedin fake crowd noise was, by and large, annoying. The cutouts — which sort of gave fans a chance to feel part of it — were cardboard reminders that real people weren’t allowed.
Today’s athletes may get paid lots of money and be cogs in a giant corporate machine, but the heart of what they do is play a game for fans to enjoy. Take away the fans and the equation doesn’t solve.
Perspective also came quickly for sports fans. It was clear from the ratings that much of the public took Doolittle’s quote to heart. Many people simply didn’t have the bandwidth for sports.
As sports lobbied for a return, and in many cases became a political weapon, many platitudes were dropped about how much the public needed sports. In the Roman tradition of bread and circuses, sports were expected to placate the troubled population. We were told how the mere presence of sports would not only distract from our woes but somehow fix things. Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred selfservingly vowed that baseball would be part of “the healing of this country.”
But, across the board, television ratings for sports were down. MLB, NBA, NHL, golf, horse racing, tennis — all suffered huge ratings declines. (Interestingly, an exception was women’s sports: both the WNBA and NWSL saw an increase in viewership). Even the behemoth of them all, the NFL, saw its ratings drop. The Super Bowl had its lowest number of viewers in 15 years.
This seems like a counterintuitive development, considering how many people were stuck at home with nowhere to go. There are a variety of theories for the tepid interest in sports. One is that the craziness of the sports calendar confused fans and made games and seasons tough to follow. The NBA Finals in October and the Masters in November?
Another is that the pandemic took a competitive toll that compromised the viewing experience: college football games canceled by the handful, an NFL game (Denver vs. New Orleans) played with one team fielding zero quarterbacks. Another is that this just accelerated a trend: Younger viewers are less interested in sports and certainly less interested in watching them on conventional platforms. And, back to those cardboard cutouts — the games had a flatness to them that came through even on a television screen.
But another — in my mind more viable — reason involves new perspective. Experiencing a historic pandemic, living in a country wrenched by political division, many people, it seems, simply didn’t have the bandwidth to engage with sports. Settling in to enjoy a game just wasn’t very enjoyable. Easier to go back in time with Netflix, get involved in a fictional narrative, learn to cook pasta Bolognese. Investing in a game and a team just didn’t seem very important.
Society wasn’t functioning. So, we didn’t deserve our reward.
The pandemic has revealed other things about sports and the fallout will continue. We learned (though we already knew) that when colleges say they value studentathletes, they really only mean “studentathletes who bring in revenue.” We learned that college football coaches really don’t have to prepare for a football game as though they’re readying for space flight: When the pandemic upended schedules, teams found new opponents with only a day or two notice. We learned that being “a good member of the community” only goes so far if that community puts strict pandemic protocols in place.
It will be a long time before sports return to normal. And the new normal may not look like the old normal. The sports world will continue to evolve and change.
But one lesson is clear: Enjoying sports is the perk of a wellrun society. That’s it.