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.