WHEN?

There isn’t much sports news these days and what there is isn’t good, mostly cancellations and postponements. Wimbledon, the British Open and the Olympics are gone—kaput—until next year. The Kentucky Derby has been put off until September, the Masters Golf Tournament until November.

I put a big “maybe” after those last two things, as well as other tries to get sports-as-we-know-them back on some sort of track while the calendar still reads 2020. It’s nice to be optimistic during these dour times, but it’s hard to find reasons to support that stance.

It’s been about a month since the current stay-home dictates have been in place in most places, and they have yielded results. New York, the hardest-hit state, shows signs of flattening its curve of hospital case increases, the stated purpose of the national effort, but that goal remains aspirational in other states and some areas of the U.S. are only beginning to feel the force of the plague. We should keep in mind that that is a very limited goal and has succeeded only because most of us have been following isolation and social-distance recommendations. The virus isn’t going away and if we get antsy and start breaking out prematurely, the “second wave” we’ve been hearing about will kick in and we’ll be back to where we are now. Indeed, it will be worse because we’ll be angrier and more frustrated.

Some ideas for resuming or beginning the seasons of our four major spectator sports are making the rounds. None of them envisions people returning to the stadiums in numbers; few of us will be willing to rub shoulders with our fellow citizens before a vaccine kills the bug, something that’s deemed unlikely in much under a year. And even the plans that have the games proceeding in front of empty seats have more holes than a screen door.

The NBA, which played its last game and sent home its players on March 11, seems to have given up on its regular season about 20% short of completion, but is said to be thinking about assembling its top 16 clubs in a single city—Las Vegas probably-- for some sort of playoffs, sans spectators. That would retain some TV revenue.  One problem is that this couldn’t be done without some sort of training period, probably beginning no sooner than a month from now. Another is that the players, et al, would have to get to LV somehow, and nobody wants to fly these days.

 A bigger drawback is that the whole circus would have to be sequestered in a hotel or hotels and tested maybe daily for the virulent virus, and one positive test would wreck the whole scheme. Further, the kind of quick-response testing regime required doesn’t exist currently, and when it does others more worthy will get first crack at it, one hopes. The NHL is supposed to be thinking along similar lines, but it has another problem—the lack of suitable ice. Any big city has dozens of proper basketball venues but far fewer ones for hockey.

Major League Baseball is reported to be taking the sequestration idea a big step farther, bundling all 30 teams off to Arizona beginning in May or June for some sort of training, a regular season (fewer than 162 games, of course) and playoffs. It’d use the Diamondbacks’ Chase Field and the 10 spring-training ballparks in the Phoenix area.  Most of the above-mentioned difficulties would apply to that, plus several more. One-hundred-degree-plus temperatures persisting well past sundown are daily summer fare around Phoenix, and among the stadiums there only Chase Field is air-conditioned. Arizona is on West Coast time in the summer, which would knock television times out of whack for most of the country.

  And under the plan the baseball players, coaches, trainers, equipment people, umpires, grounds crews, etc., would be locked away without friends or families for four or five months. That long without, uh, female companionship would weigh heavily on the lusty young men who play the game, among others.

    Football pro and college, our most self-important sporting entities, have been mostly mute about alternate plans, figuring, I guess, that the pandemic will abate in time to accommodate them, but that seems unlikely. Physical contact is the essence of both the sport and the contagion it’s hard to imagine how the teams could safely assemble in mid-July (the NFL) or early August (the collegians) to begin their training camps. Then and later, football’s battalion-like squad sizes would multiply whatever contagion problems face the other sports.

The economics of the plague also will work against sports, both in the short and long terms. Sports are supported by discretionary income and that will be in short supply for the millions of people who are suddenly unemployed or find their incomes shrunk because of stay-home edicts. The stock-market decline is bound to affect the luxury-suite crowd, either directly or by making the rich feel less rich than they were just a few weeks ago.

One of the few sport-page smiles of recent weeks was supplied in the unlikely place of Brest, Belarus, a land in which the president Alexander Lukashenko has decreed that professional soccer can continue, the virus be damned. The FC Dynamo club there hasn’t been able to lure a “live” crowd so it collected portrait photos of some of its fans and pasted them over the faces of mannequins, which it placed around the stands.  I fear that’s the best it’s going to get for many months anywhere.