BACK TO EARTH

               On November 24, 1963, with the nation stunned and grieving over the Kennedy assassination of just two days before, the National Football League decided to go ahead with its full, seven-game Sunday schedule. The games were played even though many of the players later said their hearts and minds weren’t in them.

               The argument was made that football was a welcome counterforce to the national pall, but it was widely rejected, even (although much later) by NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, the man who made the go-ahead decision. It was, rather, the league’s assertion of self-importance and the notion that the world of fun and games stood outside and above the “real” world of mundane concerns.

               That idea, which persists in some circles, took a huge hit this week in a quite-different context-- the scary spread of the corona virus. This time just about every active sporting enterprise has been forced,  however reluctantly, to do the right thing. After first responding to the situation with such goofy half-measures as banning news media reps from locker rooms, games of the National Basketball Association, National Hockey League, Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball’s spring training were curtailed for the duration of the emergency.

               The NCAA cancelled its national-championship tournament, but only after 13 of its conferences had cancelled their own season-ending go-arounds. The group’s initial stance would have held the competition in gyms without fans. That wouldn’t have done much to protect players, who would have had a better likelihood of catching the illness from one another in their locker rooms or on the sweaty courts than from any paying customers. Baseball conducts its business out of doors, where contagion is less likely than in enclosed arenas. MLB just said it will delay the March 26 start of its regular season, but its hand was forced by state and local actions such as the California ban on gatherings of 250 or more people.

               The cessations may go beyond the formal games; NBA people have talked about keeping teams together for practice until the disease runs its course, but the fact that its two players who have tested positive for the virus play for the same team (the Utah Jazz) should scotch that. 

               No games mean no live sports on television, a prospect that many in the population will find painful. The TV networks no doubt will rebroadcast past contests, but they can’t get far with that. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers in movie theaters is another unattractive prospect. Netflix and Amazon Prime will do good business, and the electronic-game and, maybe, the board-game makers will see an upturn. I hope the libraries will, too, but that’s probably too much to expect. Meantime, putting sports in their proper (secondary) place even temporarily can only have a salutary effect.