TAKE ME OUT WITH THE CROWD?

 

               The reality of the Covid 19 pandemic came home to me a year ago yesterday when I showed up at the Turf Paradise horse track in Phoenix, Arizona, to occupy my usual Saturday carrel in the place’s Players Club, and found it closed. Sure, I’d heard about the disease, but cases in the area in which I live numbered only in the dozens, and had caused little stir. Within a few days baseball would cancel its spring training and the NBA and NHL would suspend their seasons. The spring and summer to come would be a virtual winter in the world of sports.

               Now the physical world has come a full 360 degrees and the Texas Rangers just announced they would open their 2021 home season to full attendance of 40,000-plus on April 5, thus marking the symbolic if not the real end to this unique chapter in American sports history. Whether 40,000 brave (or foolhardy) souls can be mustered to complete that particular circle remains to be seen, but it’s Texas so the answer probably is yes.  Good luck to them and to the rest of us.

               Fact is, to go or not to go to any sort of gathering has been pretty much up to us from the outset of the pandemic, and will remain so until the danger passes. A national vaccination process is in full swing while thousands of people die daily from the affliction. The ideological tug of war over mask wearing continues to muddle rather than clarify our decisions. The fear of dying on the last day of a war is stronger in some than in others.

               Thanks to our elderliness, wife Susie and I have been vaccinated, altering our risk assessments considerably, but the no-no go decision remains. I voted for “go” last Thursday when my also-vaxed friend Harvey Volin came up with tickets to a Chicago Cubs-Colorado Rockies spring training game at Salt River Field in Scottsdale, about 15 minutes from my home. The place seats about 12,000 people but this spring that figure has been reduced by about 80% for covid reasons.

               Aside from an inflated price tag of $57 per, the experience was both enjoyable and edifying. Parking was easy and seating for the 2,200 folks in attendance was comfortable, the ambience being close to that of the annual Fall League games at the park.  People sat in scattered groups of two, three or four, with the other seats made unsittable by plastic ziplocks.

Masks were supposed to be required and just about everyone wore one, no small matter in this famously maverick state. Outside the stands social distancing was suggested by the “stand here” ground stickers at the gates and concession stands, but those were mostly ignored. More effective was the closing of every other urinal in the men’s rest rooms.

Concessions were cashless, peanuts and sunflower seeds verboten. Hots dogs came in plastic containers, drinks in bottles. All very spic and span. Look for the same arrangements for at least a month after most regular-season games commence in the double-and-triple decked stadia of the Bigs. Even vaccinated I wouldn’t feel right sitting shoulder to shoulder with my fellow citizens while the virus still rages and some 90% of the population hasn’t had their shots, but those precautions make sense.

I wasn’t surprised that corporate baseball was up for staging post-quarantine games because they’ve done well generally since resuming play last July. So, too, have our other major professional team leagues. If you follow this space you know that I wasn’t optimistic that our Big Four (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) could handle their returns. That’s partly because protecting their casts under dire circumstances would be a major undertaking, far outside the usual for their narrowly focused enterprises. I further doubted that the rich and entitled men who make up the teams would sit still for the discipline that would be required.

It’s helped that the virus has been relatively kind to the young and healthy; only a handful of the notable jocks who’ve been infected have suffered more than mild symptoms (Freddie Freeman, Jayson Tatum and Von Miller were among the exceptions). It’s also helped that the leagues have the kind of money and clout that allowed them to elbow to the front of lines to obtain the virus-testing and contact-tracking capabilities others could only envy.  

Their response wasn’t perfect, of course. Games were canceled or postponed, schedules were knocked out of whack, teams played shorthanded. Empty stands became the new normal, weird even with the crowd noises the teams skillfully conjured up for the benefit of the television audiences.  

In total, though, the leagues performed admirably, and the entertainment they produced provided a welcome respite from virus-enforced monotony. We waited out the virus without sports from mid-March through June, and with them from then on. With was better.

During World War II President Roosevelt was asked to halt Major League Baseball for the duration, on grounds that the games consumed scarce resources and their crowds presented tempting targets for saboteurs. He refused, citing baseball’s contribution to civilian morale. Much the same thing can be said for our pro leagues today.    

              

JOSE CAN YOU SEE?

 

               Back when I was employed as a columnist people sometimes would ask me how I kept coming up with ideas for pieces.  “No problem,” I’d answer, “God provides.”

               That was a wisecrack, of course, but the universe regularly churns out plenty of grist for a writer’s mill, and if a week’s supply is short there always are a few “evergreen” subjects to which one can turn.

               One such is how our national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, is used or abused in the world of sports.  It’s as predictable as sunrise that, every so often, somebody, somewhere will take offense at how the song is treated, and start a row. Then the research done for previous pieces can be trotted out for reuse, good as new.

               The latest anthem contretemps involves Mark Cuban, the ubiquitous billionaire who owns the National Basketball Association’s Dallas Mavericks, among other things. On his instruction, with a nod to recent protests over racial inequities in American society, the team didn’t play the anthem at the start of its first 13 home games this season. The lack went unremarked until a reporter for the website The Athletic noticed and wrote about it. Then the bricks started flying.

               Last summer, while the protests boiled, the NBA told its teams they could do what they wished with the anthem. Not so this season, commissioner Adam Silver decreed-- league policy is to play it. Cuban relented and Mav fans now are oh-saying along with the others.  Thus, it turns out that not playing the song could be as offensive as kneeling, sitting or making other gestures while it’s played.

               I qualify as an expert on the anthem, if only by virtue of having heard it played a couple thousand times in a long life of games-going. More than once it’s occurred to me to ask why it has become more connected with sports than with other public gatherings. One could spend decades at movies, plays, concerts and such without being asked to stand for it.

               As Tevye the dairyman said in another context, the answer is TRADITION, but one not old as most people think. The words to the song were written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key, a lawyer who witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore by the British in the War of 1812, and set to an existing English song. It was no instant hit, though, taking 117 years before Congress in 1931 dubbed it the anthem, the nation having gone without one before that. It didn’t become a sports fixture until Major League Baseball teams began playing it before games during World War II.

               There were dissenting opinions about the song’s worth when it gained official status, and they continue. Its meter is lumpy, its 12-tone range makes it hard to sing properly and its words are hard to get the tongue around, which is why it’s often prerecorded and lipsynched for major public performances. When polled some Americans say they’d pick “America” (my country tis of thee), “America the Beautiful” or “God Bless America” to represent this land. “God Bless the USA,” aka the red-neck anthem, also gets some votes. Before one event I attended, a U.S. Olympics Trial, the Lee Greenwood ditty was played, and everyone took off their hats and stood.

 “God Bless America,” which Irving Berlin wrote in 1918 for a Broadway musical but decided it didn’t fit, gained co-anthem status after 9/11 when MLB began playing it during the seventh inning stretch at games. That’s still done in places. Again, people are asked to stand for it, anthem or not. 

               With all its repetition one would think Americans have anthem protocol down pat, but they don’t. Men pretty much remember to stand and remove their hats when it’s played, but the rules for women are fuzzier; baseball-type caps are supposed to be doffed but women’s “style” hats can remain planted. And while it’s clear what to do when you’re in your seat when the song begins (unless you’ve got a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other), what about when you’re in a stadium concourse, a concessions-stand line or a restroom? I’ve seen some amusing confusion in those places.

               The worst things I’ve seen done to the anthem came from people who performed it, not from disrespectful players or fans. A proper anthem can be sung in about 75 seconds but many singers prolong their spotlight time by stretching it well beyond that. Paul Zimmerman of Sports Illustrated used to put a stopwatch to the song in football press boxes and announce the result. I recall him once getting a reading of two minutes 15 seconds.

               Relatedly, the vocal gymnastics some singers employ can render the song all but unrecognizable. Opera singers and members of the military can be counted on to deliver it straight, but others not so much. The worst anthem I’ve heard “live” came at a Chicago Bulls’ game when the country singer Ferlin Husky sang offkey and then had to quit because he forgot the words. The worst end-to-end rendition, which I heard on video, was by the Olympic sprinter Carl Lewis, before a Houston Rockets’ game. It killed his singing career.

               Some years ago the actress Roseanne Barr capped a screechy rendition of the anthem before a San Diego Padres’ game by clutching her crotch and spitting—in homage to baseball, she said. Botching the anthem—or sitting, kneeling or first-raising during it--isn’t against the law, so nothing happened to her afterward except some boos, but she got some laughs, too. If you’re having a bad day check out her performance online. It’s a classic.