Let’s say spectator sports were to return tomorrow. A dominant theme in the nation’s sports pages, ever since the coronavirus shut down the world of fun and games almost three months ago, has been how badly we miss and need sports. To take our minds off our disrupted lives. To resume business as usual. To get back to “normal.”
But tomorrow, who would be comfortable with the health risks? The virus is still out there. More to the point, given the more urgent crisis—a white Minnesota policeman’s video-captured murder of a black man named George Floyd and the national rage it has triggered—who would be okay with the priorities? Who would buy into oft-cited function of sports “healing” during times of fear and uncertainty?
This is not like moving on from a hurricane. Or even 9/11. After that 2001 trauma, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, writing for ESPN’s web site, asked if sports in fact provided “badly needed relief from the darker concerns and burdens of our lives, as so many people (most of them connected to the world of sports, and therefore with no small amount of vested interest) keep saying?”
His answer was, “I have my doubts. Strong ones, as a matter of fact.”
In a piece for New York Magazine last week, Will Leitch acknowledged that, having sheltered in place since mid-March, “the populace seemed starved, downright lustful for live sports. But now? Would you find it appropriate to sit down and watch a baseball game? Or would you find it obscene?”
Especially given the irony of how Floyd’s death has revived the sports establishment’s traditional distancing from civil rights issues. And specifically, the juxtaposition of that cop violently kneeling on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes while—four years ago—San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt, peacefully, during the National Anthem to call attention to police mistreatment of blacks.
“Two knees,” Sally Jenkins wrote in the Washington Post. “One protesting in the grass, one pressing on the back of a man’s neck. Choose. You have to choose which knee you will defend. There are no half choices….only the knee of protest or the knee on the neck.”
The NFL chose the latter four years ago. Kaepernick was blackballed by the NFL, while a Greek chorus of many fans and media joined Donald Trump in branding Kaepernick anti-American. Only now has league commissioner Roger Goodell reversed field, confessing that “we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest.” He never mentioned—nor apologized to—Kaepernick.
In an interview on NPR, ESPN’s Howard Bryant noted how professional sports “have backed themselves into a corner. Especially post-9/11, they have embedded police into their business model. You have Armed Forces Appreciation Days. You have police as part of the entertainment of the game, in terms of hometown heroes and all of this. And when you have moments like this, these moments of unrest, these moments of police brutality or impropriety, you see the box these teams are put in.”
Sports Illustrated’s Michael Rosenberg argued that “mainstream white America is going to reconsider Kaepernick at some point—the way it reconsidered Muhammad Ali years after he refused to go to Vietnam, the way it reconsidered Jackie Robinson and Jack Johnson. Progress comes in fits and starts, and this country tends to punish those who urge it to move faster. The reconsideration of Kaepernick has begun.”
Maybe. Herman Edwards, the former NFL player and coach who now coaches at Arizona State, recently suggested that the nation needs to initiate a conversation not unlike how his gridiron lads strategize tactics that serve everyone going forward. “A huddle,” he said.
Better than just games. Better than business as usual.