Category Archives: coronavirus

Social distancing

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There was a time when running spread like a communicable disease. In the 1970s, the bug was caught by hundreds, then thousands, of ordinary folks. Citizen road races and marathons sprang up, drawing increasing crowds, giving lie to the expression associated with a 1959 short story, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.”

In short order, runners weren’t lonely at all. The first few infected by Frank Shorter’s televised 1972 Olympic marathon victory began to pass on what Shorter has benignly called a “disease.” Underlying causes included the headline feats of high school mile phenom Jim Ryun, the dawning of cross country and track opportunities for women opened by the passage of Title IX, and a contagion of fitness. Over the next five decades, those contributed to such developments as the New York City Marathon’s more than 400-fold increase in participation.

So the new irony, now that we’re on Coronavirus Standard Time, is that running suddenly can represent a form of social distancing. It is, by nature, a solitary pursuit. Once described by Shorter as “selfish,” running in fact can be altogether altruistic, a handy way to stay away from other people and thus to avoid contributing to the problem. It is “the perfect sport,” according to a recent New York Times item, “for a pandemic.”

With New York City banning all contact sports in local parks and shuttering playgrounds as part of restrictions on gatherings of more than five people, running need not violate such decrees. It requires nothing more than a pair of shoes and open space, with the simple proviso of staying at least six feet from fellow runners. Runners World magazine is advising that “the best plan for running right now is to go out for a solo run and enjoy the outdoors, in non-crowded areas.”

Further, running serves as an antidote for cabin fever in these shelter-in-place times and has been touted—like all exercise—as a boost to the immune system and to mental health.

But, yes, there are more incongruities. Because running has become so mainstream—a reported 60 million Americans participate in running and jogging each year—vastly populated Spring races, including the 30,000-strong Boston Marathon, are among the rash of postponed events triggered by the current health crisis.

In “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” English author Alan Sillitoe used running as a metaphor for his protagonist, an impoverished teenager guilty of petty crime, to run away from society. But Texas-based historian James McWilliams, in a 2016 essay on the Boston Marathon for the Paris Review that referenced Sillitoe’s tale, nevertheless conflated contemporary society and running, community and individuality.

“When the Boston Marathon ends,” McWilliams wrote, “there will be tens of thousands of runners marked by a shared experience, even if each runner will ultimately be alone, a novella unto himself.”

There is no getting around the reality of having to share this coronavirus situation. Still, might a leisurely daily run—alone—be doing one’s part in slowing the galloping chain reaction?

Keep your hands to yourself

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The New York Times headline asked, “Is this the end of the high five?” Another timely question in the age of coronavirus.

With hand-to-hand contact identified as a primary culprit in spreading the contagion, the familiar palm-slap above the head is being seriously frowned upon. For more than 40 years, it has been a hallmark ritual of jockdom celebration, commiseration and congratulation. Yet—“out of an abundance of caution,” as the operative phrase goes—the high five act already had segued into fist bumps and elbow knocks in the days before the sports industry shut down completely. Who’s to say that, even upon a return to normal existence, it won’t be gone forever?

On the one hand (and keep washing it), old habits don’t die easily. The basic handshake, for instance, is said to have originated thousands of years ago, possibly to demonstrate that the offered shake indicated the lack of a weapon. Or was merely to suggest friendship, seal a deal or show respect.

One of the great civil traditions in sports is the hockey handshake at the conclusion of playoff series, when members of opposing teams—after having gone at each other, hammer and tongs—line up for polite individual greetings and let bygones be bygones. “That’s the kind of thing,” former Islanders goaltender Glenn Resch told me years ago, “that raises sport to being a sport. It raises us above being just animals.”

Sports being sports, though, there is plenty over-the-top exuberance, and elaborate variations of saluting colleagues’ accomplishments evolved. Pairing the ubiquitous presence of televised games with human nature’s bent toward mimicry, we arrived at the high five as everyday fashion.

The custom long ago spread far beyond the playing fields and has become something of a cliché. In 1981, “high five” was added to the Oxford Dictionary. In 2002, a group of University of Virginia students invented National High Five Day, to be celebrated on the third Thursday of April with a 24-hour period for giving as many high fives as possible to friends and strangers alike. (Might that annual rite also be in jeopardy now?)

So, if this is the end of the high five, what exactly was the beginning? Most accounts cite a 1977 baseball game in which Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Glenn Burke, greeting teammate Dusty Baker after the latter’s home run, spontaneously stretched an arm overhead and giddily whacked hands with Baker.

Others cite the 1978-79 University of Louisville’s basketball players as high five authors, and there also is a tale that late 1970s Murray State basketball player Lamont Sleets practiced the maneuver and attributed the name to his father’s Vietnam unit, “The Fives.”

Some claim that women’s volleyball players created the move in the 1960s, and in my half-century of working as a sports journalist, the first time I witnessed anything resembling the modern high five was at a grass-roots Olympic volleyball event sometime in the ‘70s. That routine was closer to a “high 10,” in which teammates simultaneously smacked both hands, shoulder high, patty-cake style.

Anyway, before that, high school basketball players had been executing an early form of the fist bump—one fellow’s balled-up hand tapping the top of another’s. And, before that, there was the display in which a lad offered an open palm, about waist high, and his colleague gave him a downward strike.

Before that was the widespread practice of patting a teammate on the rump. And, eventually, we arrived at such yahoo toasts as the flying chest bump and football’s counterintuitive bashing of teammates’ helmets. As if a little more skull-rattling were in order during a grid contest.

Given the concussion epidemic in modern sports, who’s to say that attaboy! gesture shouldn’t go the way of the coronavirus high five?

A silent killer in sports

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Upon his retirement after 67 seasons as baseball play-by-play man for the Dodgers, preeminent sportscaster Vin Scully said the thing he would miss was “the roar of the crowd.”

Think about that in this suddenly-gone-quiet time throughout the sports world. With the dramatic but thoroughly reasonable strategy of limiting large gatherings to mitigate the spread of coronavirus, one consequence is no March Madness to cheer. Or NBA or NHL games. Not even Spring Training baseball.

So, for a while at least, we will not be seeing buzzer-beating baskets or majestic home runs or overtime goals. But what is really passing strange will be the eerily silent arenas and stadiums across the land.

It’s just sports—an alternate universe, an escape from serious issues such as pandemics. But sports’ everyday presence has come to be something we take for granted. And in considering the effects of quarantining the fun-and-games industry, Jack Holmes asked in an Esquire essay, “How about the roar of the crowd?”

How about, he noted, the fact that “our human experience is borne up in gathering together for events and festivities….which remind us we are not alone in a vast and lonely world…”

Amid the lightning-fast developments of the spreading coronavirus, NBA, NHL and NCAA officials briefly considered carrying on without spectators—sort of a hazmat solution in the face of the contagion. A weird version of what we know as spectator sports, to say the least.

“We play games without the fans?” was LeBron James’ initial reaction. “Nah, that’s impossible. I ain’t playing if I ain’t got the fans in the crowd. That’s who I play for.”

On the extremely rare occasions when a big-time sports event was played “behind closed doors”—without an audience—it proved to be an empty experience for all involved. In 2015, civil unrest in Baltimore following the death of a black man named Freddie Gray while in police custody led to the Orioles barring fans for a single game against the Chicago White Sox—the only time that happened in Major League history.

Jeff Samardzija, the White Sox pitcher that day, said at the time that he “wouldn’t recommend” such a move again. “This is a game to be played in front of fans,” he said. “I understand a lot of people watch on TV nowadays, but it’s definitely a spectator sport.”

Broadway shows have shut down because of new limitations on large gatherings—that is, an audience—and you can’t have a Broadway show without an audience. Same for sports, really; without fans, sports merely become a pantomime.

“It’s astonishing,” Esquire’s Holmes wrote, “how much of a sporting product’s value is generated by the roar of the crowd….All of these tournaments and championships we have designed and built for our own entertainment—their value is rooted solely in the fact that large numbers of us have decided to agree they are valuable….A lot of people care, so you should care, and share it with other people who care. People pay money—lots of money—to be in the crowd and create some of that value.”

Eric Nusbaum put it this way on Slate: “There are a million bad things about sports, but there is one good thing that transcends all of them: community. [Sports] only matter because we collectively decide they do.”

When this coronavirus thing is over, which will deserve a good roar from the crowd, we are not going to miss social distancing.

Olympic fever?

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Danger always is lurking at the Olympic door. Mexico’s government troops gunning down protesters days before the Opening Ceremonies in 1968. The Palestinian attack on the Israeli team compound in 1972. Massive debt for Montreal in 1976. Politically engineered boycotts in both 1980 and ’84. A deadly bomb during the Atlanta Games in 1996. Salt Lake City’s post-9/11 jitters in 2002. Fears of oppressive Chinese Communist censorship in 2008. Brazil’s mosquito-borne Zika virus in 2016.

The sky forever seems to be falling. With buttoned-up security, the Olympics go on—and with a remarkable ability to create a festive, peaceful island in an increasingly chaotic world. Not since 1940 and 1944, during World War II, have the Games been cancelled.

But what about this summer’s Tokyo Olympics as the coronavirus radiates from its outbreak in China, across Asia and now into Western nations? The Olympics not only is a hothouse for public dissent (because it is such a visible stage) but also for germs (because so many people, from everywhere, are packed together for three weeks with not enough rest and too much contact). Personal experience: Head colds and viral infections marched through the press facilities at all of the 11 Olympics I covered.

So far, Tokyo officials, who estimate welcoming 11,000 athletes and 600,000 overseas visitors, are insisting there is no Plan B—no thought of calling off, postponing or moving the Games. That, despite news that pre-Olympic qualifying events already have been moved out of China and other Asian venues, affecting athletes from several countries. Quarantines of potential Chinese Olympians have forced disruption of those athletes’ training or cancelled their pre-Olympic competitions. Schooling planned in Japan for 80,000 unpaid Olympic volunteers, hailing from around the world, has been delayed.

Japan already has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases outside of China, and the March 1 Tokyo Marathon, which normally has more than 30,000 mostly-amateur runners from home and abroad, will restrict its field to roughly 200 elite professionals. Possibly all wearing surgical masks.

The coronavirus reportedly is related to SARS, the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome which broke out in China in late 2002. That contagion forced the relocation of the 2003 women’s soccer World Cup, a high-profile 16-nation tournament that had been scheduled for four sites in China, to six cities in the United States.

The move worked, in part because of the Americans’ experience in hosting the previous World Cup four years earlier. So now Shaun Bailey, a London mayoral candidate, has suggested the 2020 Olympics likewise be transferred to his city, which staged the 2012 Games.

Except there is a marked difference between transporting a one-sport championship tournament and the massive Olympic show, with its 33 sports and 30 times the number of participants. Organizing the Olympics, a 1996 Atlanta official said at the time, amounted to “putting on a Super Bowl every day for 17 consecutive days.”

In fact, it is bigger than that. And getting bigger all the time. For Tokyo, 7.8 million tickets have been sold. More than $3 billion in local sponsorship deals have been finalized. NBC has paid $1.4 billion just for U.S. broadcasting rights (with the significant expectation that the Games will fit into its summer programming window before American football and baseball playoffs take over). More than 80,000 hotel rooms are in the mix. Organizers have spent about $25 billion on their Olympic operation.

For obvious reasons, Tokyo wants—and needs—to stick to its schedule. And the history of Olympic perseverance, in the face of multiple challenges, is exceptional. But the 2020 prognosis is iffy.