With Coronavirus, Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures
After I wrote this on Thursday morning, the Big Ten canceled its men's tournament, shortly before the 11 a.m. Central Time tipoff of the first game, Rutgers-Michigan. ``I didn't get much sleep last night. But this is the right thing to do,'' said new commissioner Kevin Warren, taking a strong stance in his first crisis as Jim Delany's successor. Not long after that, the rest of the college basketball world reached the same conclusion and canceled their tournaments. By the end of the day, the men's and women's NCAA tournaments had been canceled. All the pro sports leagues had been halted. Broadway shows have gone dark. The Players was stopped after one round. The Masters, a beloved rite of spring, has been postponed. It's a sobering and unprecedented time.
We think we have seen it all. That’s especially true if we’re older and have been in the media for decades.
I remember being part of a team of news reporters dispatched to hospitals near O’Hare airport after a DC-10 crash in 1979. There was nothing to do at hospitals, we soon learned. An engine had fallen off a wing. The plane had flown into the ground. There were no survivors.
We all watched—an entire nation—when two jetliners flew into the World Trade Center. Sporting events across America were canceled for a time. Many of us got on planes warily, if we got on them at all, for a long time after that.
We all have seen the natural disasters and weather events. An earthquake in the Bay Area that rocked a World Series. Hurricanes, tornadoes and floods that have claimed lives and damaged property that would forever change things for many people.
But this is different, this coronavirus. Because it's likely to be everywhere—to affect us all. And because we don’t know enough about it yet to know exactly what it is.
All credit to the Ivy League, which took the first bold action; the NCAA, the NBA in sports, and countless other organizations outside of sports, for taking strong action in canceling events that could potentially spread this disease of frightening and unknown proportions. If that means calling off an NBA game right before tipoff, as the Oklahoma City Thunder did (photo above), that's the right thing to do.
I was supposed to participate in a Book Fest for the Chicago chapter of the Society of American Baseball Research on Saturday at the ballpark in suburban Joliet. It was going to be a fun time, talking about my 1908 Cubs novel, The Run Don’t Count.
I sent an email to the woman handling the arrangements. Because this is a virus that spreads very easily from people who show no symptoms, I said, I am wondering whether the event will be held.
Her response was that, while they hadn’t discussed it, they certainly would. And she said I should expect the Book Fest to be canceled.
Which is the right thing to do. Because of what we know—and don’t know—about this disease yet.
You probably have heard or read the same thing as me. That 80 percent of the people who get coronavirus will have mild flu-like symptoms that will go away in a few days. We all want to think we’re in the fortunate 80 percent. Even those of us in the higher-risk over-60 category.
We tell ourselves we are healthy enough to deal with this. But we don’t know. And we don’t want to find out, if we can avoid it.
At moments like this, I find myself thinking of all strange circumstances I have encountered during decades of covering NCAA tournaments.
There were the long security-check delays going into a 1994 regional final in Dallas because President Clinton was going to be there to watch Arkansas. This became even more problematic because in those days, water wasn’t readily available in press rooms. And the caffeinated soft drinks that were available wreaked havoc with my soon-to-be diagnosed a-fib.
There was the 1995 tournament, when Michael Jordan announced his return to the NBA. Which left me scrapping game coverage in Albany, N.Y., to interview players who wore jersey No. 23.
There was the arena evacuation before the start of first-round games in San Diego in 2006 after a bomb-sniffing dog sensed something strange in a box at a concession stand. After a 70-minute delay, the games went on as scheduled. Illini forward James Augustine said later that he had heard the delay was attributed to some bad mustard, which gave us all a chuckle.
This is different.
For all that we have seen, this seems like some scary sci-fi movie, the kind of movie I always make a point of avoiding.
There is no avoiding this. For all the inconvenience and disappointment, the only approach to take is to err on the side of caution. Big-time.