What Will We Do When They Die?
If someone doesn’t stop professional sports from returning as scheduled, there will be victims. So why are we letting it happen?
It could be your favorite player on your favorite team. It could be an assistant coach. It could be the grandfather of a hotel employee. Someone will be the first to die.
This is the reality of professional sports in the United States amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
If indeed the NBA, WNBA, NASCAR, MLB, PGA, MLS, NFL, NHL, NCAA[1] follow their current schedules, the consequences will be catastrophic. Perhaps not absolutely, surely some teams, maybe even entire leagues, will combine rabid precaution with necessary luck to evade the virus. However, the scope of the crisis in the United States makes the odds of all leagues being so fortunate concerningly low.
It’s easy to understand why they are trying anyway. When the pandemic hit its peak in Italy and the first remnants of outbreaks were striking the United States, institutions around the country reacted swiftly. Pro sports leagues paused their seasons where they were and some, like National Pro Fastpich, canceled their season altogether. Many state governments instituted quarantines and stay-at-home orders.
Suspended seasons, postponed vacations, and extended quarantines were an investment in the country’s governmental infrastructure. Like any investment though, just because you want a strong return does not mean it’ll happen. A proper review yields a simple conclusion, virtually no government has failed to stymie COVID-19 as poorly as the entities in the United States.
The current executive branch prefers gaslighting hundreds of thousands of deaths out of existence to taking responsible steps to mitigate damage their missteps have already caused. The legislative branch failed to deliver more than a minuscule stimulus that lacked the broad and extended creativity required in such a particular crisis. The judicial branch has undercut state attempts to breach the gap federal officials have chosen to leave open.
Yes, some global sports leagues are restarting, but in countries with situations far less dire than where the United States currently sits. Even then, the results have been mixed. At the same time, the US is probably in a worse crisis than it was when leagues shutdown in the first place.
On March 12th, the day the NBA suspended their season following Rudy Gobert’s positive COVID-19 test, the US reported 329 new cases. Yesterday, the country reported 61,848, setting a record high for the third time in the past week. When the NBA suspended its season, the nation as a whole had only suffered 41 total reported COVID-19 deaths. 890 people died in the US yesterday. The national death toll is now 134,867.[2]
We can try and talk ourselves into this all we want. Nothing will change the disease’s prevalence in the US.
Leagues are instituting protocols and, in some instances, trying to create bubbles for their operations. While these measures will help to varying degrees, running these operations against a legitimate outbreak is like trying to carry a computer threw a windy rainstorm with just an umbrella in the other hand.
When you start, you’ll probably be able to line the umbrella up with the wind, keeping the computer dry. A change in the gust will undermine the entire process and flood your computer while you adjust. If you’re especially unlucky, the gust will catch the umbrella flipping it inside out or worse, pull it from your grip altogether. In the end, will the umbrella help the computer get less water on it? Yes. Will it prevent the computer from being irreparably damaged? Probably not.
People are quick to point to data that shows comparative risks for most professional players are much lower than the average citizen. If only it were that simple. Games will still be reliant on people like coaches, facility staff, and travel employees, which come from a far riskier demographic than players. Furthermore, all situations aren’t created equal. Some players are themselves or close to friends and families in particularly dangerous circumstances.
That’s before we get into the costs of COVID-19 that aren’t necessarily death. Thousands of patients have survived and still suffered irreparable damage. For a professional athlete that could end their career.
Of course, players want to play. No one becomes a professional athlete without a certain level of drive and passion to play the sport they’ve chosen. They dreamed of playing professionally for years and losing any of that time is a hard pill to swallow. Even then, it doesn’t mean leagues and owners should let them.
In a nonpandemic year, players are constantly withheld from play against their wishes. Insert an athlete, their representation, medical expert, and team official. The player has suffered an injury and wants to play threw the discomfort to help their team. The people around them may not follow their wishes. Teams have injured lists, inactive rosters, and minutes restrictions all designed to hedge risk. Usually, those things are done with the player’s input, but not always. Sometimes experts can understand the risks in ways most of us cannot.
Players, especially professional athletes, have thrived where others have faltered. Success in professional sports is a byproduct of crossing a minimal threshold of athletic capabilities with an astronomical commitment to repetition. Becoming a professional athlete requires a fanatical belief in your invincibility.
You cannot outwork a pandemic. You cannot outthink a virus. You can take as much precaution as possible and still end up its victim.
There are massive financial consequences as well. Most professional athletes rely almost entirely on their annual salaries to pay their bills. If no games are played, team owners will not be sending out those checks.
Owners have held team employees’ hostage to the season as well. While one could argue players making six to seven-figure annual salaries should have saved enough to manage, team employees and staff, who routinely make salaries south of $50,000 a year have been threatened with furloughs or layoffs without a season. If ownership groups follow through on their threats, these employees need a season to make ends meet.
Most of us have taken this for granted. Players and employees will only be paid if there is a season. It didn’t have to be that way. Investors must accept losses as readily as they’ll welcome profits. If a player signs a long-term contract, but immediately suffers an injury and misses the season, they still receive their salary. If, for some reason, fans chose to stop attending games that wouldn’t allow an owner to stop paying employees.
In the major sports leagues, each franchise is worth well over a billion dollars with ownership groups flush with wealth. Their employees should be paid the entire year without a season. Not just because they can, but because that’s what they signed up for.
When you purchase a team, you buy the losses and profits equally. For the major sports leagues, ownership groups have reaped reward after reward. If they failed to create a rainy-day fund to handle a moment like this, I can assure you plenty of groups would emerge ecstatic to buy a team and ensure all employees remained on the payroll.
We have already seen outbreaks among college football teams as they have returned to campus. Florida, the location where many leagues are planning to operate, is amidst an uncontrolled spike in cases with state leadership that has insisted it will not institute any new restrictions to prevent spread.
All of this for sports. For games.
Just games.
They are replaceable in a way that lives are not. They are unnecessary to such a degree that the mere notion of sacrificing a life for sports is unimaginably cruel. Yet here we are, willing to put thousands at risk.
Athletes will continue to test positive and it’s only a matter of time before the results are catastrophic. So, who will it be? Will it be a player, a coach, a team employee, a family member, a friend, or a fan? Will it be only one? Or dozens more?
We’ve seen tragedy play out in sports before. We know how the story goes. Their picture will be displayed on the scoreboard while the national anthem plays. The ESPYs will hold a moment of silence. Uniforms will have a patch with their initials. We will act as if they chose to sacrifice themselves for the sport instead of reckoning with power players that leveraged their livelihood against them.
They will be gone because leaders in sports are unwilling to acknowledge reality. Our government has failed to protect us. We cannot do this safely until our country gets it right. And we have not gotten it right.
[1] The NCAA while branding itself as amateur, is professional in every sense of the expectations upon their coaches and athletes.
[2] All numbers courtesy of WorldOMeters. Specifically: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
