We love sports for myriad reasons. High among them is the ephemeral fun and relief they provide. We can park our problems outside our front door, watch gifted players turn into athletic artists and then pick up our problems once we leave our homes.
Now some sports have intersected with the realities we've tried so hard to keep apart.
As concern over the coronavirus sweeps across the nation, basketball has been forced into an eerie twilight. The NBA has been shuttered. The Big East and other college basketball tournaments have banned fans from their arenas.
Even March Madness is teetering before the pandemic's fast-moving eraser. For now, the billion-dollar tournament and national feast is alive. The NCAA has already announced that the games will not be played before the armies of fans that have given the tournament its cultural edge. All of which means we're faced with watching ghostly games wrapped in ghastly reality.
Keeping March Madness alive serves a few purposes. It keeps the TV money rolling in. It provides our ever-shrinking world with entertainment. And it may fuel a voyeuristic side of us, curious to see hollow arenas and hear their haunting acoustics around the dribble of a basketball. The NFL once toyed with the idea of broadcasting games with no announcers. But the notion of no fans at the biggest basketball tournament in the world has an apocalyptic feel.
Fans will fairly ask why NBA players get to go home while college basketball players — who don't dip their beaks in the billions that March Madness generates — are bullied into playing games, even as schools around America slam their doors shut for the foreseeable future. To many, it speaks to the eternal duplicity of the NCAA and how it treats its star players and moneymakers.
Selfishly, it would be great for us who are not athletes and aren't risking a thing by punching our remotes and tuning into March Madness. But as countless doctors have schooled us on the growing shadow of coronavirus, it seems that March Madness should be shelved for the greater good. The NBA shut down after a single player, Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert, tested positive. (Before news of Gobert fanned across the NBA, there was one team that wanted to keep playing games with no restrictions — the Knicks, of course.)
So if millionaire athletes, who live in opulent nooks far removed from the rest of us, fly in private planes and travel with medical staffs can be pierced by coronavirus, then you have to wonder how many college kids, who swarm in close quarters and ancient dorms, already have it.
Soon we'll have to wonder if the pandemic will clamp down on our pastime. MLB clubs are already tweaking schedules and issuing edicts. If March Madness is a refreshing end to winter, then opening day is our portal into spring. It's impossible to picture the first crack of the bat without swaths of fans around the ballpark, for a home run to drop into empty seats, with no rabid joust for the ball.
All of this runs counter to our impulse as humans — to congregate and socialize, to share and cheer, to high-five and chest-bump our troubles away. Even if we're not at the events, we live vicariously through the devoted masses who jump up and down like piano keys in domes and at courts around the country. To continue with March Madness sans the fans is more about feeding The Man than feeling for the people.
Mark Emmert and the NCAA need to cancel the tournament, or March may suffer a different form of madness.
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel.
