![]() It’s also true at the grassroots, where little leagues, swim teams, gymnastics camps and running clubs all went dark, leaving the very existence of their businesses, to say nothing of the sports they fortify from the ground all the way to the elite and Olympic levels, up in the air.Īnd at the outdoor playgrounds and courts and courses, which were shuttered, roped off and padlocked for weeks, sometimes months, before slowly gaining cachet as a new, somewhat safer haven for millions of restless citizens shut in by government mandate, or fear, or concern, or some combination of the three. The goal of it all is a return to something resembling “normal,” to get back to providing the masses with the programming they sorely missed while still accounting for the high risk the players take for the sake of our round-the-clock entertainment (and, yes, their millions in salaries and profit). Once jam-packed, stadiums are now being used as mass vaccination venues or, in cases where they’ve reopened their gates to significant numbers of fans, scapegoated as potential superspreader sites. It’s true in the pros and colleges, where leagues and conferences found themselves scrambling to figure out how to resume in bubbles, pods and cohorts. For the first time in anyone’s memory, sports were as much at the mercy of an uncontrolled, unpredictable and ever-changing health crisis as any other segment of life.Ī year after the worldwide coronavirus pandemic stopped all the games in their tracks, the aftershocks are still being felt across every sector. ![]() It was a sign that the steadily streaming loop of games we play, and watch – games that have been played amid crisis, in the aftermath of catastrophe and that even resumed less than a week after the 9/11 terrorist attacks - could no longer be taken for granted. ![]() Quite another for all those updates to find their way onto ESPN. Anthony Fauci to overtake CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. It was one thing for the still-nascent collection of COVID-19 numbers, the interviews with lawmakers and the warnings from Dr. So, when two NBA basketball teams were hastily sent back to their locker rooms, not to return, after pregame introductions on March 11, 2020, and, then, a day later, when two college basketball teams walked off the floor at halftime and also didn’t come back - “Game Ppd, pandemic” - it was a shock to the system. Not so much the results of the games themselves as the steady cadence of the seasons - the cutting down of nets and hoisting of trophies, the pregame hype and postgame deconstructions, the trade talk and injury crises that envelop each passing year with the regularity of an atomic clock.
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