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.