Category Archives: coronavirus

Don’t worry. Be happy.

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STONEHAVEN, Scotland—The longest queues outside the local shops have been at the butcher’s and the sweets’ store. There are signs in most windows that only three persons are allowed inside simultaneously. Masking is prevalent.

A reader can go pages into the local newspapers without seeing a story on anything unrelated to the coronavirus—the Queen’s cancelled Christmas plans, warnings to the hoi polloi against large gatherings, shifting official restrictions from 10 Downing Street, ominous Omicron variant statistics, postponements of soccer’s Premier League games. We almost truncated this two-week Holiday visit to the United Kingdom when I was “pinged”—alerted by the National Health Service that I was “a contact of someone with COVID-19.”

That was just two days after arrival from the Across the Pond. “You do not have to self-isolate,” the email said. “You should take rapid lateral flow tests for 7 days….You may become infectious even if you’re fully vaccinated or do not have symptoms.”

We had just tested ourselves with the home kits widely available in the U.K. but it took four days before we got an email confirmation that I was negative. (We would not have been allowed to fly here in the first place without being fully vaccinated and providing negative tests two days before departure.)

Our daughter, her husband and their 19-month-old live in London and her husband’s mother is in this village on Scotland’s East coast. They convinced us to stick to our original itinerary, so after five days in London we took a sleeper train to Scotland.

We’re here, still healthy. Or, anyway, asymptomatic. Amid the bracing chill, wind and rain, far enough North that the sun doesn’t rise until quarter to 9 and sets at 3:30, it’s a fine adventure. At least when varying waves of anxiety subside a bit.

On the sleeper train segment, some malfunction—very likely a staff shortage precipitated by COVID positives or contact-tracing protocols—had forced our transfer to a standard commuter train still two hours short of Stonehaven. No worries; the trip was completed without further incident. But the fear of widespread cancellations of train and air travel theoretically could get us stuck here past our Dec. 30 return date.

Already, Stonehaven officials have cancelled their annual Hogmanay festival, a fireballs ceremony in the town square to ring in the new year. Worse—to me, anyway—COVID’s impact on employees has temporarily closed The Bay, twice named Scotland’s best fish-and-chips shop.

What to do? Have some giggles with the grandson. Marvel at the hardiness of the locals—my son-in-law’s mother swims in the North Sea, even this time of year when the air temperature barely reaches 40 and the wind howls incessantly, taking the chill factor down below freezing. My morning runs are slowed and shortened not only by the slanting rain but by the hilly landscape. We Yanks, frankly, are comparative wimps (although my wife has matched the locals’ sturdiness with her typically long daily walks).

And we’re working on a stiff upper lip.

Questionable

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As a Jeopardy! fan, I now see the wisdom in that franchise’s decision not to hire Aaron Rodgers as permanent host. It is “the spirit of Jeopardy!,” the New York Times’ James Poniewozik wrote in an appreciation of the departed Alex Trebek, “to care about getting things right…a place to go where it is OK to know things.”

In the past week Rodgers, the Green Bay Packers star quarterback, hardly came across as someone who has all the answers. Amid a stream of misinformation, he argued that he had done his own research about Covid vaccines and, as a “critical thinker,” had come to the conclusion that the shots are linked with infertility and that NFL protocols to fight the virus are “shame-based…not based in science” and don’t make sense to him.

His claim in August, when asked this summer if he was vaccinated, that he was “immunized” was a fabulist dodge, and now that he has tested positive for the virus, is insisting he was better protected by the veterinary de-worming drug ivermectin, which has been dismissed by the CDC as ineffective.

Critical thinking, indeed. Though Rodgers is an exceptionally gifted athlete, a 17th-year pro and the league’s reigning MVP, he is no epidemiologist schooled in medical science. In fact, he did not graduate from the University of California, where he majored in American Studies while he played football.

Rodgers does have an honorary degree, awarded him in 2018 by the Medical College of Wisconsin for helping raise money for cancer research. But his recent funhouse mirror distortions regarding Covid protection have severely dented any medical credentials he may have had, causing him to lose a nine-year health-care sponsorship deal with a Green Bay-based physicians group.

His assertion of having surpassing knowledge of Covid is no more coherent than that of basketball star Kylie Irving, suspended by the Brooklyn Nets for refusing vaccination. Irving, who once insisted that the Earth is flat, also has cited personal research for his decision.

To that, former New York Knicks coach and ESPN basketball commentator Jeff Van Gundy told Richard Dietsch on Dietsch’s Sports Media podcast, “If you choose not to get a vaccine, as crazy as it sounds to me, please don’t insult us all with, you know, that your research is going to turn up something that all these brilliant doctors, around the world, so heavily invested,” have learned. “It would be as absurd to me as asking a doctor how Kylie Irving should work on his crossover game and his handle. Like, that guy thinks that he knows more about that than a basketball guy?”

(Irving, like Rodgers, also is operating without a college degree. He attended Duke University for one year and did not study medicine.)

Whether it is Covid fever settling in, or just how Rodgers has felt all along about his superior knowledge of all things, he is calling himself a victim of “cancel culture,” “woke mobs” and media “witch hunts;” maintaining that the NFL denied his appeal to be exempted from protocols, agreed upon by the players’ union that included mask-wearing in press conferences and player meetings, because league officials “thought I was a quack” for his immunization alternative.

So, regarding Rodgers’ Jeopardy! tryout: Poniewozik’s Times evaluation was that, on the show, “there were not alternative facts, only actual ones. They did not change depending on how you felt about them or the person revealing them.” Trebek, the man Rodgers hoped to replace, was seen as perfect for the role by all-time Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings because he was “the voice of fact in a post-fact world.”

Here’s the question, Jeopardy! style: Who is Aaron Rodgers?

How to be a good teammate

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(A version of this appeared in Newsday’s Opinion pages)

Start with the obvious. Social distancing will not facilitate sacking the quarterback. Or just about any other jock endeavor. Competitive sports cannot happen from home via Zoom on a laptop. And masking, though helpful in some situations, clearly isn’t the answer for athletic duties that involve physical proximity, relentless travel and adhering to schedules that are not conducive to quarantine interruptions.

You can see where this is going. Incapable of operating remotely, sports leagues, more than most businesses, need their employees to be vaccinated to avoid Covid cooties and the attendant headaches.

Just as clear, in a land where the sports establishment is deeply embedded in our culture and its wars, is the fact that some high-profile athletes are protesting the inoculation push. So let’s consider how their arguments are not particularly sound.

The freedom-and-personal-choice claim, for instance. What are the chances that the National Football League will stand still for having unvaccinated players gumming up its massive financial commitments to provide televised entertainment? This, after all, is the so-called No Fun League, known for meting out punishment against such picayune violations as untucked jerseys and touchdown celebrations.

In an occupation that promises Darwinian competition for jobs and historically short careers, the NFL has further tightened the noose for survival: Unvaccinated players this season will face the loss of paychecks if they are the cause of Covid outbreaks resulting in forfeitures.

The National Hockey League reportedly is considering withholding per-game salaries for any player sidelined by the virus. Major League Baseball so far has opted for extending more personal privileges—more freedom!—to vaccinated players while stopping short of a vaccine mandate, aware that it must negotiate the matter with the players union and that their collective bargaining agreement expires in December.

Since athletes’ livelihoods are based on their physical well-being, there certainly are those who (irrationally) reject the vaccine in the belief that they possess greater knowledge of the human body than the medical community. (“I’m not a doctor but I’m playing one now…”) Or that they don’t yet have enough information regarding vaccine safety, though league officials, team doctors, union reps and government officials have been broadcasting the relevant data for months. Now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given its stamp of approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, that player defense has collapsed.

So here’s a quid pro quo that sounds overwhelmingly reasonable for both sides: If all players do their teams (and the general public) the kindness of submitting to vaccines, the players in exchange will be freed from enduring last year’s annoying protocols of competing in fan-less “bubbles” away from home and family, traveling in split parties, quarantining, undergoing constant testing and holding team meetings on Zoom.

And here might be a bonus, beyond providing the safe resumption of spectator fun and games for the masses: As semi-celebrities, accomplished athletes often are granted the status of role-modeling. They don’t necessarily have the expertise, nor the intellectual horsepower, to discourse on matters of science. But that doesn’t stop them from receiving disproportionate attention whenever they air wide-ranging pronouncements.

Given that reality, doesn’t it follow that professional athletes’ public acceptance of Covid vaccines would reinforce mandates similar to New York City’s requirement that all public high school athletes and coaches be inoculated to participate in the “high-risk” sports—defined as football, basketball, wresting, volleyball, lacrosse and rugby? (Nassau and Suffolk officials have not taken this step.)

As a sports journalist for half a century, I am a fan of athletic performance, drawn to the drama of games, the participants’ physical feats, the presence of quirky characters. But when it comes to a pandemic and the anti-vaccine blatherings from the likes of baseball’s Anthony Rizzo and football’s Cole Beasley, among other impressively skilled athletes, I’m convinced that our real freedom is having access to the educated judgement of all-star epidemiologists.

These players need to take one for the team.

The Covid rules

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LONDON—By 1 p.m. on the day after arrival here from across The Pond, the authorities had telephoned twice and texted once. We were reminded repeatedly that we faced a fine if we were not quarantined for 10 days and did not undergo a COVID-19 test twice in eight days.

Prior to our flight here, we had passed an original test—flying colors to go with the sparks in our heads from having that swab so far up our noses—and spent approximately five frustrating hours navigating question-and-answer forms to confirm our temporary London address and phone number, and to provide detailed travel specifics, as well as evidence of being fully vaccinated. Most unsettling was the lack of confirmation that any of this information had been received by either the airlines or the British government.

Once in the U.K., we were not to leave our rented flat, not to go for a morning run or walk (ooops), although the parks and paths were well populated with foot and bicycle traffic (minus face masks). We were not to go visiting, which was the purpose of the trip, since our daughter is a London resident and we came to finally meet the grandboy, born just a couple of months into the pandemic.

Understand that we believe in anti-pestilence protocols. Masks. Distancing. The kind of thing that most people had ignored during the 1 1/2-hour slog through the line to clear customs. Avoiding pubs, restaurants and humans in general is not a problem. Accepting the uncertainty of the plague is frustrating but understandable.

But the moving goalposts and changing signals in this venture have been more exhausting than the 15 months of Zooming and day-to-day activity detours wrought by the coronavirus. Two days before the flight here, our airline—no names, but it might have been American—emailed with the shocking revelation that it had moved our departure up a day.

It took my wife five hours on the phone, until 2 a.m.—most of that time waiting on hold—to correct that.

That and the flight successfully accomplished, the calls from health officials, with the same warnings and orders each day, came at various hours. We were able to report that we had self-administered a COVID test on Day 2 in the English capital, and put the testing kit in the mail. “You might get a visit to see you are quarantined,” was the added threat.

Email confirmation of the negative results arrived the next day. Meanwhile, we read that Health Services volunteers were contacting only 20 percent of visitors to monitor quarantine rules. Still, Big Brother kept calling, and our cell phone twice wouldn’t connect, and a callback from us produced only a recorded message that BB had missed us and would try later.

When the clocks strike thirteen? Were we busted? My wife’s telephone search for advice to confirm that we were conforming led to three half-hour delays on hold, then to a person apologizing that she was unable to offer help, and finally a nice fellow’s easier-said-than-done recommendation: “Don’t panic.”

We already had. Repeatedly.

News of the Delta variant was rampant. Britain’s health chief had just resigned after reports he had violated his own rule to mask up and not go around hugging unrelated people. Yet two major international sports events—Wimbledon tennis and soccer’s European championship tournament—are being contested in London this month. Before large crowds.

When the TV in our quarantine bunker failed on the first day, it magnified the isolation experience. (The television somehow recovered the next evening, in time to watch British champion Andy Murray’s first-round Wimbledon victory.) There remains a constant, nerve wracking feeling that misinterpretation of sheltering requirements will lead to unnecessary grief—multiplied by the helpless freakout when technology fails to complete the checkup process.

Here are the pluses: The flight here—masked throughout—was uneventful. There was no evidence of the passenger violence we had been reading about. Brief, long-awaited gatherings with immediate family are the extent of our activity, but worth it, as well as a general sense that muddling through this plague is possible.

Quarantined, still

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(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

Going on a year now, they have been strictly quarantined. Distanced from the rest of society. Haven’t been out in public at all.

I speak of my neckties.

Wait. Don’t assume the standard coronavirus cliché. I get fully dressed every day. Haven’t worn sweatpants since about 1992, and only then to referee beginners’ basketball games for young grade-school kids. Shirts-with-collars have remained standard equipment.

But given the COVID reality, that my semi-retirement duties teaching a college journalism course are restricted to Zoom sessions, my neckwear continues to shelter in its place. Arrayed there on a downsized version of the dry-cleaners’ rotating racks.

There are scores of ties. Stripes, paisleys, polka dots, plaids, knits, solids. Novelty specials with miniature paper airplanes, license plates, animals. I have ties with stars, flowers, Peanuts characters, images of Beatles lyrics, a much-favored “marathon” tie featuring literally hundreds of little cartoon runners.

All hanging around in three separate closets. Frankly, the majority of them have been there since pre-pandemic days, waiting to become fashionable again—the far-too-wide ones and really skinny ones. The Fatty Arbuckle kinds and Blues Brothers versions. But thanks to my wife’s good taste, keen eye for style and commitment to keep me presentable, I have plenty of ties that—just to stick with the raiment metaphor—will knock your socks off.

To be perfectly clear: In a half-century as a newspaper reporter, I’d guess I wore a tie maybe 50 percent of the time, which hardly qualifies me as a Beau Brummel. Typically, in that line of work, to include a tie in one’s wardrobe is something of a default position, as with my boxing-beat colleague who told me he did own a single necktie, but kept it in his car in case of emergency. To show up in the newsroom with a tie could bring a sarcastic, “D’ya get the job?”

A friend who spent several years in the reporting business—always better dressed than the rest of us—wound up going to law school and now, as an attorney, not only wears a tie all the time but told me he has a different suit for every day of the week. Which only reminds me that, despite the Oscar Wilde observation that “a well-tied tie is the first serious step in life,” I still wouldn’t know a Windsor knot from a Gordian Knot.

Anyway, academics always seemed more formal—more grown-up—than us ink-stained wretches, so when I began teaching parttime a decade ago, I committed to wearing a tie whenever on campus. And it wasn’t as if that was totally unfamiliar territory. As a child of the ‘50s and ‘60s, before T-shirts with writing on them somehow became chic, I was surrounded by tie-wearing as a daily routine. My father would transition from his day at the office to after-work play with his wood-working tools without bothering to ditch the dress shirt and tie; he merely added a pair of overalls to his look.

I must have been about 10 when, expected to don a tie for dress-up occasions, I opted for a Dick Tracy red-with-small-black-stripes model. (I skipped the yellow Tracy fedora.) When members of our high school basketball team were required to wear ties to away games, I briefly undertook the renegade photo-negative gangster look—black shirt, white tie—probably inspired by some forgettable movie about Prohibition.

Fresh out of college, with a job in Manhattan and determined to look professional, I discovered a hole-in-the-wall place next to a Midtown newspaper stand, Tie City, where one could purchase ties for $1 apiece—and splurged on two or three. Hardly fashionista stuff. Nor were later attempts—chintzy clip-ons, psychedelic tie-dyed cloth ties, a pre-tied bowtie—particularly successful at substantiating an especially jaunty appearance.

There is a quote by one John T. Molloy, author of the book “Dress for Success,” that proclaims, “Show me a man’s ties and I’ll tell you who he is trying to be.”

Actually, if I show you my ties—still in the closets where they have been since last March—they mostly tell you about my wife’s good judgment regarding apparel. And their location reminds everyone that the pestilence—the monster under our beds—is still lurking.

Time out!

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I’m thinking of Billy Pilgrim, the central character in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, who “came unstuck in time.” According to newspaper reports, the Indianapolis 500—previously contested on Memorial Day weekend since its inaugural race in 1911—just happened this past Sunday. On August 23.

The NBA and NHL playoffs are going on; shouldn’t that mean it’s the middle of May? The Kentucky Derby will be run a couple weeks hence, which sounds like May still is on the horizon. Baseball season is in its fifth week, so it must still be April!

Except, if it’s April, why aren’t golf commentators whispering worshipfully from Augusta, Ga., about the “timeless” Masters, its relationship to springtime amid the magnolias and azaleas? Instead of anticipating that the golf biggie isn’t due until mid-November.

Are we Rip Van Winkle-ing in reverse? And, calendars aside, where are we? Half of hockey’s playoff teams—from Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay and Boston and Washington—have been playing “home” games in Toronto. Road games, too, while the other half of the NHL has been in Edmonton. So everybody is neither here nor there.

For anyone watching the annual Western & Southern tennis tournament on television—and that’s the only way to watch it, since no spectators are allowed on site—the on-court signage says they are in “Cincinnati.” In fact, the matches are in the New York City borough of Queens. (Never mind that the event never is in Cincinnati; its permanent base is the Cincy suburb of Mason, Ohio. That’s another story, before the dawn of bubbles.)

The W&S is a traditional warm-up for the U.S. Open, coming to the same Queens location which, just to emphasize the dominant theme of these disorienting days and weeks and months, borders the neighborhood of Corona, home to the New York City ZIP code hardest hit by the coronavirus.

The Open will happen shortly before the French Open commences—even though the French Open should already be roughly four months in the rear-view mirror. And the pandemic time warp includes the fact that the Tokyo Olympics now are scheduled for the summer of 2021. But will be called “Tokyo 2020.”

This is what a plague will do to sports, let along life in general. Beyond all these high-profile competitions, of course, everything from high school field hockey to international cricket has been re-scheduled, relocated, redirected, reduced or re-imagined.

Synchronize your watches?

If fans had a choice….

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What is so different about Major League Baseball’s current absence, not counting the familiar owners- vs.-players wrangle over money, is the total lack of options for sports spectators. Three previous work stoppages resulted in cancelled games, but in each of those cases—in 1972, 1981 and 1994-95—other forms of sporting frivolity were readily available.

There was some shock in ’72 over history’s first player strike, which left big-league parks briefly empty from April 1 to 13. That unprecedented labor action by professional jocks disrupted “normal” routine, but it certainly was not in a league with the real-world crises of 2020—a global pandemic, crashing economy and roiling demonstrations against racial injustice.

Think of this: ESPN has been so desperate for sports news that its website’s lead headline on Tuesday ballyhooed, “Bucs release photos of Tom Brady in his new uniform.”

In April of ’72, among the plentiful alternative sporting entertainment in a MLB-free nation were NBA and/or NHL playoffs progressing in 13 major-league cities. It happens I was on assignment in Los Angeles for Newsday at the time, covering the NBA semifinals between the Lakers and Milwaukee Bucks. Yet even on an off day in that series, I found live baseball—with a decidedly big-league feel—on the University of Southern California campus.

SC was the reigning national collegiate champion then, playing a non-conference game against nearby Westmont College. One of the game’s umpires was Emmett Ashford, who had been MLB’s first black umpire and regularly worked SC games following his retirement from the Bigs two years earlier.

There was a high school lad sitting behind home plate that day, having set up a microphone and tape recorder to work on his play-by-play voice. Instead of referring to the teams as SC and Westmont, he called them the Angels and the Twins. So when SC outfielder Fred Lynn, who two years later would make his debut with the Boston Red Sox and went on to play 17 years in the Majors, struck out, poor Tony Oliva—a 15-year veteran with the Twins then on strike with his fellow pros—got blamed for it by the prep announcer.

That SC team resembled the L.A. Dodgers of 1972, relying on pitching and, in that particular game, going hitless until the sixth inning. The SC coach, for that year and 44 others, was Rod Dedeaux, who won 11 NCAA titles and played annual exhibitions against the Dodgers. (SC won their 1971 meeting, 10-9, before 31,000 fans.)

Dedeaux’s close relationship with Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda brought offers (which Dedeaux declined) to join the Dodger coaching staff. Besides Lynn, Dedeaux’s former SC players who enjoyed significant big-league success included Tom Seaver, Mark McGwire, Dave Kingman, Ron Fairly, Don Buford, Roy Smalley, Steve Kemp and Randy Johnson. Kingman was among the handful of striking players who worked out at SC during the work stoppage.

Back to the future: The coronavirus—the monster under our beds—is still there, and now baseball commissioner Rob Manfred is frightening the sport’s followers with noises about cancelling the 2020 season to show the players’ union who’s boss.

Other pro sports may return to action before the Majors do, which has moved fivethirtyeight.com to ask whether MLB’s labor fight might remind potential customers that there will be other choices out there soon.

“If history is any guide,” fivethirtyeight concluded, “a labor dispute isn’t likely to dampen enthusiasm for the game for long. In the past, fans have returned—and often quickly.” The piece cited a 3.7 percent drop in attendance in 1972 that was reversed with a 6.8 increase the next season. And “fans weren’t likely to attend games in a shortened 2020 season anyway because of COVID-19 concerns.”

Still, when the NBA comes back. And the NHL. And the NFL. And USC….

The Times didn’t bury the news

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Because he was almost two decades my senior, Stan Isaacs seemed the right person to ask what it was like to have been around during something as consequential as World War II. He barely was a teenager at the time, but might he have pondered what would happen if the bad guys won?

“I mostly wondered,” he said, “when the war was over, what they’d put on the front page.”

That conversation was years ago. But I had been thinking, these last couple of months, about what they’re going to put on the front page when this modern plague is over. Then came the New York Times dramatic Sunday cover. Isaacs, who was among my newspapering mentors and heroes at Long Island’s Newsday, surely would have appreciated the Times’ powerful text-only presentation—the numbing, seemingly endless list of American victims of the coronavirus.

In condensed type over six grey columns (and continued on two more inside pages) was a roll call of names, ages, hometowns, occupations and personal anecdotes of 1,000 people—and those a mere one percent of the pandemic’s U.S. toll. No photos, ads, news articles, references to other sections of the publication. Just miniature obituaries. The rival New York Post summed up the effect as “unusual, chilling…heartbreakingly sweet, one-line anecdotes of the lives lost to the virus…”

U.S. DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS was the sobering headline.

It was the day’s essential information, and there was no getting away from it. It was not a plot or a hoax or alarmist. It was cold, hard fact, to be dismissed at our peril. Cutting edge journalism.

My friend Bill Glauber, who can cover anything that moves and these days works for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, recently messaged, “Tell your journalism students to take notes. I tell all the younger reporters that 20 years from now, some kid is going to ask you what it was like in the 2020 pandemic. You will have a hell of a story to tell.”

Since we all began living on Coronavirus Standard Time in mid-March, the best ink-stained wretches have been telling the story every day on front pages. Reports of how the virus has devastated nursing homes. How the search for testing and a vaccine is going. How supply chains are disrupted, jobs lost, bankruptcies declared. How social distancing is crucial. How weird, unscientific treatments are being pushed by the president.

We have been kept up to date on how mandated quarantines are crushing the travel industry while shelter-in-place rules meanwhile cut down on pollution resulting from reduced traffic. How demonstrations have broken out against the medically wise lockdowns regarding bars, restaurants and houses of worship. How black and brown people, poor people, have been hit hardest by the disease. How students have been disoriented by remote schooling and colleges are frantic over losing enrollment. How traumatized doctors and nurses are searching for coping mechanisms while operating in fear that a second wave of infections is coming. How the sports and entertainment industries are pining for the clearance to return.

How people have died at a staggering rate.

World War II ended. Pretty soon there was other news on the front page. Pretty soon there was some degree of certainty about the future. Pretty soon life was “normal” again.

Surely that will happen again. In the meantime, we know where to look to see the current state of affairs.

Going, going, gone…..

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There are sports fans who consider “loser” a four-letter word. A slur, a label of failure. Maybe this coronavirus thing will help strip away the negative connotation.

That’s because, with the pandemic, the sudden and total absence of sports “is a loss,” Hofstra psychology professor William Sanderson confirmed. Sports “is something that’s part of the fabric of our lives and now it’s gone. And there literally is a grief reaction. Just like when someone dies….”

Certainly for my Hofstra sportswriting students, not having sports is a deprivation. Their semester assignments were to include coverage of a high school game, a college game, a press conference with some university official, coach or athlete. That those possibilities—and all other sporting activity—disappeared in mid-March is hardly some scarlet letter of disgrace.

So to discuss the mental and emotional aspects of the situation—and to keep the journalistic gears oiled—we invited Sanderson to our recent life-without-sports remote-class Zoom session.

“Think about this,” he said. “The fact is that, unless you bet on the game—and hopefully you’re not—it has no bearing on your life. You’re not a member of the team. You didn’t accomplish anything….but watching sports and aligning with a team satisfies a need” which he traced to evolutionary history of warfare and competition. (It’s kind of a guy thing, he noted, yet a cultural reality.)

“In the scheme of things,” Sanderson said, “is this really important? No. Is it in our DNA and therefore important? Absolutely.”

People are dying. Jobs are disappearing. No end to the plague—no medical solution—is in sight. Yet among the widespread accounts of public sorrow and bewilderment are these prominent laments over cancelled ball games. That is partly because “we don’t really have a lot of distractions now,” Sanderson said. “So we right now miss [sports] even more. The absence is probably more profound in the context of so many other losses.”

There is the issue of fractured routine. “Humans are creatures of habit,” he said. “We like predictability, certainty, schedules, and the disruption of schedule is creating a huge problem for people.”

There is the matter of sharing. “Humans are a social species, and that’s another loss. People like to go to games, be part of a group; say, be with other Yankee fans.”

There is—for the athletes as well as fans—that “many are suffering from a [misplaced] sense of meaning, and when you lose your meaning, you become more depressed. It’s a more abstract loss than losing your job, but definitely a factor.”

To a degree, Sanderson said, people are adjusting to being on Coronavirus Standard Time. “If you go back to March 10, there was more anxiety, people fearful of getting sick, and I think we’ve seen a lessening of that anxiety. People get used to circumstances. Even being bombed in Europe in World War II, people sort of got used to that; people are remarkably resilient.

“But the concern now is more sadness and depression, because the losses—and that’s the key word in depression—the losses are enormous. Things cancelled, lost jobs, lost loved ones, and even lost sports, which are so important to us. Everyone is suffering right now.

“I imagine that people who are gamblers and now have lost this, it would be equivalent to smokers all of a sudden having their cigarettes disappear, without a chance to wean off them. Some are fans and some are not, but this is their dopamine rush, and all of a sudden it’s gone.”

There could be a silver lining, Sanderson said. Maybe sports gamblers would be “forced to deal with this and, once they stop, if they can go through that difficult phase….”

More likely, those folks will find something else on which to play odds. As for the rest of us, staggered by this pandemic sucker punch, Sanderson expects a sports recovery. A win somewhere down the road when the metaphorical “watch this space” signs will disappear from empty stadiums and arenas.

Meanwhile, we’re all losers. Or, more accurately, victims.

It’s all speculation now

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(My alma mater. Now. Not then.)

 

What if something like this coronavirus thing had happened 50 years ago? I was graduating college then, just as several of the students in my Hofstra University sportswriting class hope to do—virtually, no doubt—next month. What if, during my senior year, shelter-in-place orders and social distancing had gone into effect?

I would have been cornered in my off-campus apartment with two other lads. We had no television and no reason to be there beyond getting a night’s sleep. We never cooked; there never was any food in the place. What if all on-campus dining had been shuttered as well as the townie restaurants. How often could I have stomached the old Ku-Ku Burger drive-through? (15-cent burgers.)

The Journalism School building—my real home at the time, where I spent most of my waking hours on the Columbia Missourian staff—would have been off limits. My daily routine of reporting and writing about local and regional sports would have been kaput because, as we now know, all sports are suspended during a pandemic. Besides, with the Internet and digital journalism still decades in the future, how likely was it that the Missourian could have pivoted to being produced remotely? We had typewriters and telephones (dial; not smart) but none of the fall-back technology so crucial to 21st Century communication.

Restrictions on travel and on the gathering of crowds would have cancelled the University’s annual Journalism Week conference, which would have meant that prominent guests such as the vice president of United Press International, who flew in from New York City, would not have participated in what resembled a jobs fair. Which meant he would not have stumbled onto some of my work in the Missourian. Which meant he would not have offered me immediate gainful employment in the real world. Which meant….

I’m of the belief that alternative history belongs in novels, unsettling what-ifs such as Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” and Stephen King’s “11/22/63.” Or poems—Frost’s “Road Not Taken.” In real time, our lives play out in a series of developments that, in retrospect, feel like simple twists of fate. And we carry on.

There was no communicable disease raging a half-century ago. The only minor interruptions in my senior year were a split lip sustained in an intramural softball game and a brief bout with mono. The UPI offer came through. I set off for the Big Town the day after graduation. Moved to Long Island’s Newsday a year later and stayed for 44 years. Met my wife at Newsday. Had a daughter. Traveled widely on assignments. Met fascinating people. Learned stuff. Had a lot of yukks.

Some people have all the luck. But suppose such a discombobulating event as COVID-19 had hit in 1969 or ’70, when I was looking no farther down the road than another day of newspapering, experiencing just what I had wanted to be when I grew up.

Now, part of my duty is to offer those Hofstra students some insight into the journalism business, but the world is shifting under all our feet. Maybe the best advice is the John Lennon lyric—“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” I have no answer to “What if?”