Coronavirus and Sports: The 'New Normal', For Now, is Life Without Something We Love
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Does anyone remember normal anymore? I’m having trouble with the concept. And I think things were ‘normal’ about 36 hours ago. Maybe 48?
The NBA’s decision to suspend the regular season due to the COVID-19 coronavirus was jarring, even from afar, as I experienced it Wednesday night while covering the Big 12 Tournament. While my DallasBasketball.com colleagues were scrambling to cover an unfolding sports story like no other, I was doing pretty much the same in Kansas City from a collegiate standpoint.
The NBA had no games on Thursday. At least I was lucky enough to get one in. Or at least that’s what I thought Thursday morning.
About 15 minutes after I took that video, in the amount of time it took me to scarf down my pre-game meal, the Big 12 pulled the players off the floor and canceled the tournament, in part because the Mayor of Kansas City declared a state of emergency due to the coronavirus. There were new cases in an outlying area of Kansas City reported on Thursday morning.
So the Big 12 Tournament will not go on. I’m now unsure if I’ll come back to Dallas early or just want to come home on Saturday like I had planned.
There isn’t a thing that isn’t surreal about this entire situation. Wednesday was one of the most monumental days in sports history. Bryan Fischer, who writes for College Football Talk, put together a timeline of Wednesday’s events. It’s unfathomable that THIS MUCH happened in the world of sports in one day.
In the 12 hours I spent at the Spirit Center in Kansas City on Wednesday, we went from business as usual to Dr. Strangelove, sports version.
Same with the NBA. In the middle of the Mavs game we knew the season would be suspended and head coach Rick Carlisle pushed for the win. He used players in different ways. Owner Mark Cuban gave us one of the most priceless reactions we’ll see to anything in this world - and then some leadership. We saw our last Luka Doncic step-back for a while. And Cuban is working to take care of his hourly employees, a move that I hope all professional sports owners take him up on.
Turn off the lights, the party’s over, as Don Meredith used to sing.
At least, for now.
This stings, of course. It absolutely stings and hurts if you love sports. It’s almost incomprehensible. I went back to my hotel on Saturday night, had a stiff Vodka soda, and tried to make sense of all of this.
What. Is. This?
All of us here at DallasBasketball.com love sports. It’s why we do this. Sports is a part of who we are. It's the fabric of what we do. We're lucky we get to do this for a living. We're lucky we get to go to games on a regular basis. We're lucky we get to cover players like Luka Doncic and Dirk Nowitzki, and everyone else in the DFW area. I'm lucky that I get to go on a plane and go to Kansas City and cover one of the best college basketball tournaments in the country.
But if I were a fan today, and purely just a fan, I would feel hurt, angry and disrespected by the games that I love. The emotional range would measure the widest part of the Grand Canyon. Too much? Maybe. But this is what I love, and I don’t wish it to be taken away from me.
Yes, there are games to watch on TV (or maybe not, as MLB and NHL followed suit on Thursday, suspending operations). But we all know it's different when you're in the arena.
The first game I can remember going to see in person was a Cowboys-49ers game in 1980. It's so far back that Steve DeBerg was the starting quarterback for the 49ers. Yes. I actually saw the 49ers play before Joe Montana was the starting quarterback. I was a voracious sports fan, like many kids. I arranged my calendar by games (which I imagine explains my current status on my dating profile as ‘single’).
But as I grew up, and I became an adult, and I started making my own money, I realized that what I wanted to do more than anything else was to go to these places around the country that I only saw on television and see them in person. And that’s what I’ve done.
I've been on the best baseball trip I've ever been on in my entire life, which took me everywhere from Yankee Stadium and Wrigley Field to Fenway Park and old Tiger Stadium. It's taken me north of the border for hockey and Montreal and Ottawa. It's taken me to the West Coast, for California baseball in San Francisco and San Diego. It's taken me to Florida for football in Tampa Bay in Miami. Countless college football games around the country, everywhere from Ohio State and Notre Dame to Cal and Miami of Florida. Even a Cornell-Dartmouth game in Ithaca, N.Y.
I love going to sporting events because, while the hum of the game is the same, the rhythm of the venue is different everywhere you go. A Mavericks game has its own unique feel to it. Same with a Suns game, or a Nuggets game, or even a Rockets game. It's that rhythm that gets us excited to be in the arena, to be at that game, to be a fan. It’s what gets us, period.
Some people love opera. Some people love stamps.
I love sports. I collect games. I love being in the arena. I can’t do without it.
But, for a while, when it comes to the Mavs, I’ll have to. Is the coronavirus cramping my style, so to speak? Sure it is. I had tickets for Pearl Jam next month. They canceled their show. I was going to go to two A’s games during that weekend. That’s out, too. I had tickets for the Mavs-Jazz game later this month, a night out with a friend. That’s out, too. I have Rangers-Cardinals exhibition game tickets. Those are toast. So are my tickets for the Chris Stapleton show at Globe Life Park, at least for now.
My sports life is on hold for now. And, you know what? I’m good with it.
I’m a pretty astute reader of the news. I dive into different sites every day while I’m on my train ride to and from my day job in Dallas (yes, I have an ACTUAL normal day job like you do). Did you know there are already two strains of the coronavirus? One is less severe, and one is more severe.
Do you know how it's transmitted? I actually don’t know much. Problem is, I’m not sure the scientists tracking this disease fully understand how it’s transmitted, either. As we get more and more positive cases every day it is abundantly clear that there's a lot we don't know about this disease and how to contain it.
Is this drastic? Yes. But I’m actually not thinking about myself right now. I’m healthy. I’m taking as many precautions as I can. I’m even taking cold medicine, even though I don’t have a cold, just in case it helps.
I’m thinking of my parents.
My dad is 81. He's relatively healthy and he could probably pass for 65. But he's in that category of people who are, as he would put it, ‘just plain old.’ He might get the coronavirus just for that reason. My mom is 70 and she has a chronic health condition. She's at risk, too. As far as I know, neither one of them has it. And I would rather they not get it. And if shutting down the sports that I love for a couple of months is the ONE thing that helps keep them healthy and helps give everyone time to figure out what needs to happen next, then I'm OK with that.
I shared this on Twitter yesterday. A co-worker shared it with me. It’s from the CDC. It shows how "social distancing'' and preventative measures like the NBA is taking can help slow an outbreak of a disease. The red shows cases without preventative measures. The black shows cases with preventative measures. That dotted line about a third of the way from the bottom? That’s health-care capacity. You don’t want to be over that line. Right now, I think it’s safe to say that in some parts of this country, and this world, we are over that line.
The doctors and scientists trying to control this need time, and time isn’t as easy as calling a timeout to move the ball up the floor, like in the NBA. It marches on in the real world. There is no pause button. Shutting down a sport like the NBA temporarily is as close as you’re going to get.
Mavs owner Mark Cuban said that the NBA Finals may take place in August. Sounds insane, right? But at least, in that scenario, we would have an NBA Finals. And fans could, theoretically, be there to watch the game in person. Given time, I think, we will be back to normal when it comes to the sports we love.
We don’t like the disruption. I get it. You may think this is only the flu, and that's fine. You may think that six months from now we'll look back on this and realize we simply overreacted, and that’s fine, too. But we don't have hindsight to help us right now. We don't have the luxury of being able to look down the road six months from now and see whether this is going to be more serious or less serious than we're taking it. All we have is what's happening right now. What's happening right now is scaring the heck out of people that I know that usually aren’t scared of anything. And that scares me.
And it should scare you, too. Not to the point that you stop living your life. But to the point where, at least for a while, we’ll have to sacrifice our precious games for the greater good. We will get our games back in due time. We’ll be back in the arena. The Mavs will be back on the floor.
And when the Mavs do come back, the upside is they’ll be healthy. And, theoretically, so will we.
