TV: Reality?

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It’s true. Those of us in print journalism have been known to compare ourselves to our colleagues on the television side with the disdainful question, “Brains or a blow dryer?” The snide generalization was based on a sense that, while our witness-to-history preparations consisted of note-taking and research, theirs appeared to be mostly primping before the cameras rolled.

It was not universally fair, of course, and was at least partially rooted in a jealousy of TV’s widely accepted rank of superiority in the information food chain. Things take on an importance when they’re on TV. Celebrity and newsworthiness are conferred by TV. If a tree fell in the forest but it wasn’t on TV….

Now consider the current situation, that TV is a primary reason big-time sports are so intent on returning amid the raging pandemic. TV is what nourishes and sustains spectator sports.

The idea of carrying on with the world of Fun & Games when it is unsafe to allow fans in ballparks doesn’t make any sense—except that the NFL, NBA and NHL will survive despite empty seats as long as they can provide TV programming to fulfill (partially, anyway) television deals contracted to pay them $10 billion, $2.66 billion and $200 million, respectively, per season.

The same colleges that are hesitant to welcome students back to their classrooms meanwhile want football players on campus. Because, as USA Today reported, there is “at least $4.1 billion” in TV money at stake for the five major conferences to provide gridiron programming.

But here’s the thing: Sports on TV without live witnesses will just be a series of studio shows. Quarantining viewers will get what the camera sees and nothing more. Even the TV commentators, those folks with the enviably nice hair, regularly will not be on site to add context and flavor. (Newsday’s Neil Best detailed how the Yankees and Mets telecasters, for instance, will call their teams’ road games from their home press boxes in New York. While watching TV monitors.)

Worse, social distancing has forced teams to conjure thoroughly understandable guidelines that will prevent my print compatriots—the ink-stained wretches accustomed to ferreting out nuggets of information with original and independent reporting—from their typical canvassing of various participants and decision-makers associated with the games.

All will be restricted to press boxes and, often, to viewing games on TV monitors. Interviewing will be limited to Zoom sessions, with the teams—not the reporters—picking who will be interviewed. (In the case of the U.S. Open tennis championships, scheduled to begin in late August, a “no media on site” directive will reduce reporters to watching the tube and Zoom.)

Old friend Pat Borzi, writing for MinnPost, last week quoted editors and writers in the Twin Cities acknowledging their discomfort with traveling to road games. Especially since reporters will not have access to lockerrooms and clubhouses, they essentially will be working remotely. (Ask your favorite student how well that works.)

“Expect a sameness across all platforms—print, digital and TV,” Borzi wrote, and he quoted St. Paul Pioneer Press sports editor Tad Reeve: “People who are really into reading sports are going to notice really quickly, ‘Hey, I’ve already read this, I read this over at the [Minneapolis] Star Tribune or somewhere.’ [That’s] the problem with the coverage right now. Because we all get the exact same access at the same time and it’s all shared information, these stories are all going to read like all the other stories.”

In a previous century, when I was the New York Giants beat writer for Newsday, I one Monday bumped into a neighbor who was aware of my occupation.

“That was some Giants game against the Cowboys yesterday,” he said.

“It was,” I agreed. “And, boy was it a hot day in Dallas.”

He was startled.

“You went to the game?”

It was not worth attempting to explain that the quotes in my game story were the result of a face-to-face, question-and-answer, gumshoe situation. It was instead a reminder that you cannot give the world a journalism lesson. To most folks: The game was available on TV in your den; isn’t that how everyone follows it?

See, the fun part of being a sportswriter isn’t the spectating. It’s the off-the-field banter, the interrogation, the revelatory answers. Learning stuff you hadn’t known and passing it on to readers. Otherwise, a game-day reporter is like one of those cardboard cutouts that teams want to employ to occupy the stadium seats this fall. Just another pretty face.

It’s probably not relevant to this discussion that my wife has purchased for me a bottle of “News Anchor Hair Wash. (For news anchor thick hair.)” I don’t use a blow dryer.

 

Re-name that team

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For a new name, I suggest “Washington Pigskins.” That would check all the boxes: 1) History, by retaining a reference to the ‘Skins moniker that has been part of the NFL team’s identity since 1933. 2) The sport in question, since footballs, though never made from a pig’s skin, nevertheless have been stuck with the description for more than a century. 3) Washington fans’ particular fondness for members of the massive offensive line, known as the Hogs, that produced three Super Bowl titles in the 1980s and ‘90s. 4) and most important, it’s a handle that wouldn’t insult anyone.

Sports nicknames range from the geographically (Colorado Rockies) or historically (Philadelphia 76ers) appropriate to simple alliteration (Baylor Bears) and wieldiness (Minnesota Wild). They aren’t of great import and occasionally are downright wacky. A minor-league hockey team in Georgia was the Macon Whoopies. There was a high school in Illinois called the Polo Marcos. The UC Santa Cruz teams are known as the Banana Slugs.

But there is this obtuse old habit of pro, college and high school teams calling themselves Indians, Braves, Chiefs and so on—and employing wild-eyed, bloodthirsty-looking caricatures, feather-wearing fans and “war” chants as part of their act. At least since the early 1970s, indigenous peoples have been raising public objections. Please stop, Native American leaders said: “We’re people, not mascots.”

Some teams did stop, decades ago. Dartmouth College ditched “Indians” for “Big Green.” Stanford University replaced “Indians” with “Cardinal.” St. John’s University transitioned from “Redmen” to “Red Storm.” Just to cite a few. Yet the highest-profile of the offenders, the professional football team in the nation’s capital, has persistently used—and repeatedly defended—a racial slur as its brand for 87 years. The Washington Redskins.

Retired Washington Post reporter Leonard Shapiro this week recalled confronting then-team owner Jack Kent Cook in 1992 with Webster’s unabridged dictionary’s derogatory definition of the nickname. That was when activists attempted (but failed) to remove trademark rights to the name.

“I don’t care what Webster’s says,” Shapiro quoted Cook. “I use the Oxford Dictionary, and my dear boy, it says no such thing.”

In the same lordly fashion of Cook and George Preston Marshall—the avowed racist who founded the team, burdened it with the “Redskins” name and was the last NFL owner to integrate his roster—current owner Daniel Snyder has continued to belligerently resist demands to show a little respect.

In 2013, during yet another round of protests by Native American groups and an increasingly mainstream awareness of the disparaging term, Snyder swore “never” to change it. At the time, D.C. mayor Vincent Gray refused to utter the nickname, referring only to “our Washington team.” Sports Illustrated football maven Peter King and my former Newsday colleague Tom Rock did the same. A D.C. high school announced that it was barring all Washington team paraphernalia on its campus.

(On that occasion, the satirical “news” site, The Onion, acknowledged Snyder’s willfully tone-deaf stubbornness by recommending he change the name to “the D.C. Redskins.” Another snarky source proposed that, if he was so intent of keeping “Redskins,” Snyder could at least show a touch of sensitivity by tweaking the logo to a redskin potato.)

True to form, Snyder—backed by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell at the time—cited polls claiming that Native Americans weren’t put off by the name, and took refuge in the weak excuse that he was preserving the team’s sacred tradition and heritage.

That struck Duke University cultural anthropologist Orin Starn, who was teaching a Native American studies program, as a “spurious argument. You don’t want to keep the tradition of separate drinking fountains for blacks and whites or the tradition of keeping black players out of professional sports [as Marshall had].”

Except, of course: “Rich men don’t like to be told what to do,” Starn said.

So here’s what appears to be different now amid the nationwide demonstrations over minority human rights and social justice following George Floyd’s murder by a Minnesota policeman. The corporate giants FedEx and Nike, speaking Snyder’s language—big money—have sensed a different answer blowing in the wind and have let Snyder know it.

Snyder suddenly is saying the team is open to a “thorough review” of the nickname, and already alternatives are being offered on social media: The Washington Redtails—a nod to the nickname for the crimson-tailed planes flown by World War II’s Tuskegee Airmen, America’s first Black military aviators in World War II. The Washington Americans. Generals. Presidents. Lincolns. Memorials. Veterans. Jeffersons. Roosevelts. Monuments.

Snyder could take his pick. Or, he could keep his willfully degrading team name. And retain his personal appellation: the Washington Pigheaded.

 

 

Thinking about statues

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If we haven’t learned something in the last few months—about U.S. history, the inadequate health care system, economic inequality, flags, racism, policing—we haven’t been trying hard enough. These days there are lessons everywhere, and among them is the fact that our public education system pretty much fails us.

Take statues. Please.

That one topic is now covering a lot of ground left unearthed in our school-days history books. What do grandiose public statues mean? What are they for? Who are they for? When did they become fundamental pillars of the Constitution, as some have suggested? Are they really a preservation of our heritage amid the uprising that mostly is targeting Confederate symbols and sculptures of prominent slave owners?

One benefit to this uproar—as with the daunting coronavirus presence, Black Lives Matter protests, the Mississippi flag’s official rejection and Defund the Police rallies—is being forced to think about matters previously too easy to ignore. And learn a thing or two.

In a recent post on Medium.com, Australian Claire Baxter, whose master’s thesis was titled Conflict Archaeology & Heritage, argued that “the value of statues is not what they tell us about the individual being memorialized, but what they tell us of the society that created the statue and erected it….”

If these bronze and marble memorials “have the power to write history,” New York Times art critic Holland Cotter asked, “who, in any given case, is wielding that power? Was the history true when written, and has that truth changed over time? Does the history serve positive or negative ends? Promote inclusion or divisiveness? If monuments are, like history, intrinsically complex, not easily defined as ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ is complexity alone enough to justify a contested monument’s continuing presence?”

My past thoughts about statues never got much beyond the frivolous. During a long-ago assignment in Muleshoe, Tex., it was a giggle to be confronted in the main town square with the massive statue of a mule. Amid a reunion of University of Missouri newspaper pals, I made the trivial pilgrimage to the campus statue of Beetle Bailey—the comic-strip character created by Mort Walker when he was a Mizzou student.

This is different. Robert E. Lee, Andrew Jackson, Jefferson Davis and the like were not cartoon characters, and the toppling of images of blackguards and cads moved Yale history professor David Blight, in a New Yorker magazine essay, to compare such dramatic developments to the fall of the Berlin Wall 31 years ago.

Blight wrote of “some awe in seeing, during these past few weeks, Confederate monuments in America likewise reduced to pieces, relics of the collapse, after a hundred and fifty-five years, of the public vestiges of the Lost Cause tradition. The summer of 2020, like the autumn of 1989, could mark the death of a specific vision of history. If so, it has taken a long, long night—to borrow from Robbie Robertson and the Band—to drive old Dixie down.”

In a New York Times interview, art historian and John Jay College professor Erin Thompson noted that humans have been “making monuments to glorify people and ideas since we started making art, and since we started making statues, other people have started tearing them down….It’s not surprising that we are seeing people rebelling against ideas that are represented by these statues today.

“It’s not the statues themselves,” she said, “but the point of view that they represent. And these are statues in public places, right? So these are statues claiming that this version of history is the public version of history.”

What it feels like, to employ a terrible pun, is that these memorials have reached a statue of limitations. Cotter wrote: “Most of the commemorative statues now under attack across the land…have little visual charisma. They’re generic period images of white male power. You’re tempted to think: If they go, small loss. Let’s move on.”

As for “erasing the past,” Blight reminded that the “statues are being toppled, but the story that built them remains.” (He mentioned that he has bits of concrete from the demolished Berlin Wall. So do I. They still exist.) Just as true: Those statues weren’t going to leap from their pedestals. They needed a little push.

The sports time machine

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(Florence)

Maybe you have noticed, during the three-plus months of compulsory sports inertia due to the coronavirus pandemic, a forced nostalgia among the chroniclers of competitive fun and games.

With almost nothing happening on the world’s playing fields, we are hostage to video of bygone championships. Arguments over whether Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays or Duke Snider ruled center field in the 1950s. Personal yarns of having Been There when this or that “classic” unfolded.

Television, talk radio, newspapers and magazines have rolled out their version of the WABAC Machine—that delightful “Peabody’s Improbable History” segment in the old Rocky-and-Bullwinkle cartoons. (Talk about nostalgia.)

Okay. If you can’t beat ‘em….

Thirty years ago, Newsday dispatched me to Italy to cover soccer’s month-long World Cup tournament. At the time, the vast majority of Americans were thoroughly uninformed about, and mostly uninterested in, that no-hands sport. The 1990 U.S. team, furthermore, was the Yanks’ first to qualify for the Cup in 40 years, a collection of wet-behind-the-ears lads metaphorically doing the doggy paddle in a pool full of Michael Phelpses. No threat to capture a nation’s attention.

But the idea then was to acquaint our local readers with a significant global event that would be coming to the United States for the first time four years hence. (It’s an irony now not only that soccer has gotten a solid foothold on these shores but especially that, with the lack of other programming, soccer—from the professional European leagues—currently is the most available live sport on American TV.)

That 1990 adventure played out over 35 days, requiring travel via trains, cars, busses and, on one occasion to reach the island of Sardinia, a plane—24 trips among 11 cities—eight of them competition sites for the 24 national teams, the other three team training camps.

Florence on Sunday, Pisa on Monday, Florence on Tuesday, Montecantini of Wednesday, Florence on Thursday, Milan on Friday, Rome on Saturday….

As much as the soccer, geography and culture were stars of the show, all the stunning Renaissance architecture and layers of history to experience. (“Ancient footprints are everywhere,” as a Dylan lyric describing Rome goes.) To a furriner, of course, there were a few challenges among the plentiful visual and culinary delights.

No two Italian cities did anything the same way. Telephones. Train accommodations. Signage. All different.

Restrooms were marked “signore” and “signori,” but some forms of signore apparently could mean either “ladies” or “sirs.” And there were no little pictures on the signs. Traffic patterns best could be described as chaotic. “Anarchy,” an Italian explained to me with delight.

The American players certainly were naïve travelers, out of their depth off the field as much as on. With an average age of 23, they were the youngest—and least worldly—team in the tournament. Just settling into their training base on the coastal town of Tirrenia, on a U.S. military site known as Camp Darby, the Yanks complained of skimpy breakfasts consisting of toast and jelly. They wanted eggs and pancakes and so on, the luxury of air conditioning and a refrigerator in each room. The Italian daily La Republica slyly described them as “ben nutriti”—well fed.

Florence on Sunday, Genoa on Monday, Tirrenia on Tuesday, Naples on Wednesday, Rome on Thursday…

Patriotic fans from across Europe constantly were in evidence. Scots arriving at games in team shirts and kilts. Austrians touring the Vatican with their red-and-white national flag draped over shoulders. Italians flying their green-white-and-red colors next to the laundry from apartment balconies, from car windows, from the passenger seats of motorbikes.

On game days in venue cities, wine and beer were banned in restaurants, a decidedly un-Italian circumstance. But more than a few establishments navigated that problem by serving wine in green mineral-water bottles, leading to the observation that they were “turning wine into water.”

A couple of soccer clichés were at work during the tournament: 1) The widespread lack of scoring. (Jim Murray, the snarky Los Angeles Times columnist, once wrote of the sport that had too many 0-0 ties for his taste, “I’d tell you the final score but there wasn’t any.”) And 2) hooliganism.

At the time, England’s club teams had just had lifted a five-year ban on playing in continental Europe because of thuggish English fan behavior. For the ’90 Cup, England’s national team, for its three first-round matches, was sentenced to Sardinia—reachable only via plane or boat—to better screen potentially troublesome followers. There were a handful of scuffles with police, though no problems at the stadiums.

Florence on Friday, Cagliari on Saturday and Sunday, Tirrenia on Monday, back to Florence on Tuesday…Turin by the weekend, then Rome, then Bologna and back to Florence…

Oh, yes. The soccer. Cameroon was a revelation, knocking off reigning champion Argentina in the Cup opener, giving the otherwise defensive-oriented tournament jolts of rare creativity and style and advancing to the quarterfinals. Cameroon’s star was 38-year-old Roger Milla and its coach a Siberian who spoke Russian and used Cameroon’s Soviet Embassy chauffeur to translate instructions to his players.

Italy’s Salvatore (Toto) Schillaci, a 25-year-old journeyman from Sicily who started the tournament on the bench, became an overnight sensation with six goals in six games—five of them game-winners. Argentina’s Diego Maradona was a shadow of his heroic 1986 World Cup self, except for one exquisite assist that saved his mates from a mid-tourney elimination against Brazil.

The Americans lost all three of their first-round games and were sent home, no surprise, though their 1-0 loss to host Italy established their worthiness as a Cup participant. West Germany—the official reunification of East and West still was three months away—won the dull championship final against Argentina on an anticlimactic penalty kick.

There you have it: Another proxy for a real-time 2020 sports story.

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….

Sports? Now?

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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.

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.

Can nobody be like Mike?

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A primary manifestation of the “The Last Dance” documentary—but hardly news—was the glorification of Michael Jordan’s ferocious competitiveness. All the subplots aside—Jordan’s soaring dominance, the Chicago Bulls team dynamics, the spoils of victory—front and center was Jordan’s embodiment of the historical romanticizing of every sport’s success obsession: The zero-sum I-gain-by-your-loss addiction.

Over and over, we saw Jordan as the “hypercompetitive weirdo,” as labeled in a New York Magazine review; as what The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner found to be “borderline pathological” in contests of any nature. Slate’s Joel Anderson reasonably judged that Jordan was “portrayed as a distant, win-at-all-costs guy, abusive to teammates.”

Chicago reporter Sam Smith had established as much with his 1992 book, “The Jordan Rules.”  So, no surprise there. It in fact is a cliché in all sports: Doing anything—anything—to win is admirable. And, by contrast, losers lose because they don’t care enough; don’t give their all; are not “competitors.” As if sheer ability wasn’t the essential ingredient. As if the runner-up hadn’t lent just as much commitment to the struggle.

“When people see this,” Jordan says during “The Last Dance,” “they’re going to say, ‘Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant.’ But that’s you. Because you’ve never won anything.”

That Jordan was a basketball wizard, plenty worthy of spectator awe, is immune to overstatement. His hoops contemporary Larry Bird once called him “God disguised as Michael Jordan.” Jerry West, among the previous generation’s stars, said Jordan was “the modern-day Babe Ruth.”

There were revelatory NBA performers before Jordan—Elgin Baylor and Julius Erving, just to cite two with similar styles of suspended-animation flights and fluid creativity; singular talents such as Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar—but Jordan’s mesmerizing skill unquestionably ascended to another level.

And he certainly filled record books: Six league championships. Ten times the NBA’s leading scorer. Five times regular-season MVP. Records for the highest career scoring averages in the regular season (30.12 points per game) and playoffs (33.45). And on and on.

Yet “The Last Dance,” beyond providing some timely nostalgia for a golden NBA era while the current world plague holds live sports in abeyance, felt a lot like Jordan’s need to insist that he could—and would—get the better of any man. Any time. And that such athletic superiority is supremely important to him.

Several commentators have raised an eyebrow over the appearance of “The Last Dance” just when barstool arguments have been put forward for LeBron James’ candidacy as history’s best player. Before the coronavirus pandemic brought this season to a screeching halt, James appeared on his way to the NBA finals for a 10th time. Four more than Jordan had.

Such comparisons dealing with different eras are a fool’s errand. Still, “The Last Dance” deification of Jordan came across as his reminder that he is the sport’s rightful king. NBA fans in an ESPN poll at the documentary’s conclusion agreed—73 percent picked him over James.

That kind of public regard is how Jordan long ago made Nike a global superpower and supplied, along with Bird and Magic Johnson, the glitz that moved Olympic officials to finally welcome NBA pros. It caused Harvard historian and intellectual Henry Louis Gates to proclaim Jordan “the greatest corporate pitchman of all time.”

“The Last Dance,” two decades since Jordan’s retirement as a player, demonstrated that Jordan not only retains the marketing Midas touch, but that the thing he markets best is himself. The competition goes on.

Zooming in place

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Zoomology might be defined as the study of suggested human performance in such matters as education and business. It’s not real. Its specific activity, Zooming, doesn’t manage to accomplish much beyond freeing its users, exiled from classroom or office, from the guilt that they aren’t getting stuff done.

This is not to say that the 2013 debut of Zoom, a video conferencing service founded by California techie Eric Yuan, wasn’t a bright idea. Nor that the sudden, massive nationwide adoption of Zoom in March wasn’t a timely response to shelter-in-place orders necessitated by the modern plague. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

There are reports that Zoom parties and Zoom visits with socially distanced family and friends provide a decided comfort while we all are on Coronavirus Standard Time. But arguments exist that telephone calls are more personal. And, according to technology mavens, Zoom has privacy and security issues which should concern us.

Generally speaking, a two-month immersion in Zoomology reveals that, mostly, Zoom’s without-a-body experience can’t possibly substitute in-person discussion and brainstorming.

For one thing, the format is visually disconcerting, those rows of faces-in-boxes that recall, to us folks of a certain age and questionable television habits, the long-ago Brady Bunch intro or Hollywood Squares game show. As a Wall Street Journal headline noted in describing the potential exhaustion of meeting via Zoom, “Being gazed at by giant heads can take a mental toll.”

In place of back-and-forth communication involving physical presence, the remoteness of Zoom produces distractions in the form of participants’ absent-minded Z-gr-ooming—checking their hair in their Zoom cameras. Or, in contrast to that, those college students—technically present for online instruction—whose involvement can be better described as Zzzzzzzooming, their eyelids drooping while they lie in bed.

That is, if they haven’t opted for the no-camera look in which they are represented by a blank, black square.

Then you have the instances of Zoom-looming—children, cats or dogs wandering in and out of the process. Or some folks’ attention-deficit inclination to nose around a co-worker’s living quarters, possibly making judgments about the wallpaper, kitchen fixtures or garage-like environment. The New York Times recently zoomed in (lower-case ‘z’) on the bookshelves of celebrities during quarantine interviews—including Prince Charles, Stacey Abrams and Cate Blanchett—to wonder what certain tomes, spied in the background, might reveal about them.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld, in a Times interview, dismissed the inclination toward that sort of snooping, insisting, “I don’t want to see how you really live. We’re all just sick of people’s houses.”

More likely, we’re just sick of the circumstances that require another Zoomsday. In an essay for the online platform Medium, Kelli Maria Korducki pointed out that “we’ve reached the irritation phase of this pandemic.”

My own experience, since being thrown the Zoom lifeline to continue conducting a college sportswriting class, is that online sessions feel increasingly detached from sports, writing and anything resembling a class. After seven weeks of this, a Zoom fatigue—Zoom-and-gloom—clearly has set in.

And it’s doubtful that one alternative to real-time video contact, the so-called “asynchronous” Zoom meeting, isn’t worse, because that consists of recording all the previously mentioned shortcomings for later viewing. Which guarantees even less human interaction. It sounds like, and is akin to, remaining asymptomatic while carrying a Zoom virus.

So here we are: The breakneck increase of Zoom’s daily use—up from roughly 10 million people in December to around 300 million now—is replicating the galloping Covid-19 spread. Maybe we couldn’t get along without it, given the social distancing trap visited upon us all.

That doesn’t make the desire for a Zoom vaccine any less urgent.

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.