March Sadness teaches us important lesson — some things are bigger than sports
Selection Sunday is now Silent Sunday.
Kentucky’s basketball season was over just like that. No SEC Tournament. (Friend’s headline suggestion: Kentucky wins SEC title without ever showing up!) No NCAA Tournament. No March Madness. No final determination on just how far this collection of Wildcats could have advanced in the Big Dance. John Calipari said this team could have won the national championship. True. And there were about 50 other coaches who could have made the same pronouncement about their team. We’ll never know.
It’s not just the NCAA, of course. No NBA. No NFL. No golf. No tennis. What are we going to do with ourselves, you ask? Read a book. Talk to people, but at a distance of 6 feet, of course. My wife says we’re going to clean the basement. If you saw our basement, you’d surmise that might require more hand-washing than COVID-19.
These days, social isolation means sports isolation. Especially in our polarized society, few things bring us together like sports. And few events have us all watching the same thing at the same time as the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. You don’t have to be a die-hard fan of college basketball. You don’t have to be a casual viewer of the sport. You might not have watched a single game all season. As soon as the 68-team field is announced on Sunday night, we all sit down and fill out a bracket or two or three, be it at work, or with the family, or with our friends. Then over the next three weeks, we watch to see what happens. And, those who haven’t watched a game all season are usually the ones who win the pool.
Did the NCAA do the right thing in canceling March Madness? Of course it did. Some things are more important than sports. Those who think the whole coronavirus thing is overblown or some kind of media hoax aren’t paying attention to what went on in China, or what is going in on in Italy or our own state of Washington. It’s not that we’re all going to get sick and die from COVID-19, it’s just that we can’t all get sick at the same time, thus pushing our health care system beyond the breaking point.
The only way to avoid that is to stop the spread. And the only way to stop the spread is to keep people away from each other as much as possible, especially those that are together in large crowds. And the NCAA Tournament has been known to draw a large crowd or two. There’s a reason they put the Final Four in football-sized stadiums.
At one point, the thought was the NCAA and its conferences could protect the players (and the fans) by keeping the spectators away. Rudy Gobert changed all that. As soon as the center for the Utah Jazz tested positive for the coronavirus, and the NBA immediately announced a suspension of its season, all bets were off. The tide had turned. The writing was on the wall, hopefully one that had been sprayed by antiseptic.
Do I feel sorry for the players? Of course, especially the seniors who missed out on their last shot at March Madness. And not just basketball, but those who play college baseball, softball, swimming and diving, track and field — all the spring sports that will not stage championships this year. The same goes for Kentucky’s high school basketball players who worked so hard to make it to the Sweet 16 only to find out there is no Sweet 16. Not this year. Their year.
Do I feel sorry for the fans? Of course. No March Madness means no fun. But we’ll survive somehow. We’ve survived Major League Baseball strikes, NFL work stoppages, NCAA probations, that silent period after 9/11, rainouts, weather delays, shot clock malfunctions, endless officials’ trips to the monitor, lightning delays, black-outs, brown-outs, you name it. We’ll survive COVID-19.
Sports aren’t gone forever, you know.
We’ll still be here when they come back.
