Sports in 2020

2019-20 in Sport will be remembered as the Covid-19 year. Yeah, and 2020-21 will be, too. Hopefully, 2021-22 will not be but we'll see....

I took 2019-20 off from Sport. Oh, I still watched a ton of all kinda of Sport but giving it my deeper attention just didn't happen this year. It wouldn't be fair to completely blame Covid-19, I was already a little less into Sport than previous years. For example, in my to-do box from March are a post-Oscar wrap up I just never wrote, some Champions League takes that were already boring to me and some end of season NBA stuff that was less productive than usual. I don't expect my interest to remain steady. It will wax and wain and 2020 was already shaping up to be a less than stellar year. I can't help thinking a deep dive on stats and rosters at the moment just seems like wasted motion--or perhaps I'm missing the greatest statistical year of my life! I feel like until everything gets back to "normal" then nothing that happens is meaningful going forward. And the carry-over into 2021 is already giving me the blues.

But that's not true. 

That paragraph was unnecessarily dire. I'm still watching a ton of sport (NBA, Bundesliga, NFL, watched a lot more NCAA football than I expected to, tennis when I can find it, NHL every once in a while, been watching Caribbean baseball this week, looking forward to Champions League and still hoping we get some kind of NCAA tourney) and loving it, admiring it, being as fascinated by it as ever. I've lost my taste for the business side of it, but I'm confident it'll pass when the Covid stops hanging over everything. The games themselves are as good as ever. I'm impressed and I'm glad. 

Covid-19 stopped everything cold back in March when we learned the NBA was shutting the season down. And the shit really hit home when we got no March Madness. Then sports disappeared completely for three months or so and we obsessed over how it would return. It did return. The players played and the corporate suits did their best to get those games to the fans and it was pretty cool to see everyone doing what needed to be done to get back to normal. It wasn't "normal" though, so even though I appreciated its presence, what I watched wasn't normal. It was weird, it was a simulacrum of Sport. 

When the Covid first became a thing back in March, I figured it would take 18 months to get back to "normal". September 2021 felt like the time when things would settle in. Since I am a sports nerd that no longer goes to school, my sense of the calendar naturally revolves around sports. Fall means football and that seems like just the thing to settle the citizenry.

I was surprised by the return of the other sports in 2020 because in March I didn't think any of the sports except the NFL would get back on track. I didn't think MLB would be feasible without fans (they need the gate, man, they need to sell ten thousand Cokes every night to make that shit work), NBA and NHL bubbles seemed fanciful at best, and I wasn't sure we'd have college of any kind in the fall of 2020, much less college sports. 

I figured the NFL would be back because 1) those games make so damn much money, they pretty much have to be played; 2) when have we ever cared about the health of football players?; 3) because football is as popular (re: culturally necessary) as pretty much anything in American culture. People dropped everything to fight the virus, but football is on the short list of things we'll make happen no matter what crisis is taking place. 

I figured, too, some European soccer, like NFL, would be valuable enough to necessitate gameplay regardless of the state of society. The first sport to return was German soccer (actually Korean baseball never went away and for a hot minute was strangely popular among gaming starved degenerates). As I am an avid watcher of the Bundesliga, I was happy to partake of sports as soon as possible. A random observation: playing in cavernous empty stadia with no background noise of any kind was actually unnerving to hear. It was loud and weird and yet you still couldn't make out what they were saying so it wasn't helpful or enlightening. It was just weird. Playing music or piping in crowd noise actually makes a lot of sense for the TV viewing, which is something that never would have occurred to me before. 

The first American sports to return was the MLS in the form of a bubble tournament that showed the way for the NBA and NHL. And it was surprisingly fun (*), but the constant advertisement for the Disney campus, a vacation spot in a time when no one is allowed to leave their homes, seemed like bizarre filler from another time, annoying at first and then just laughable after a while.  

The NBA bubble was a bizarre experiment but at the time we needed it. Americans needed to see how life was supposed to be re-learned. The players had their ups and downs, for example the Suns looked better than ever, but some players (*ahem* Paul George) clearly did not look at ease or anything like normal. But the level of play was really good (hmmm, I like not having fans on the floor) and the commitment to getting it done was heartening. And though it still made for weird play, it was good and I'm glad it happened. 

I don't mean to suggest that the Lakers didn't earn their victory over the Heat--they absolutely did and I think the Lakers are the deserving champs. But its hard not to notice how untimely injuries decimated the Heat. In there of the games (1,2,6) the Heat had no chance but in the other three games (3,4,5) they went 2-1 and probably should've gone 3-0 (indeed, it was rare late game heroics from Lebron that pulled it out for the Lakers in Game Four). So while the Lakers were clearly the better team, it wasn't the blowout that it might look like, that series could've and should've been a lot closer.

I was glad to see baseball back--and I gotta say I love baseball as much as ever. Again, the weird conditions made for a weird year but you gotta go with what you got and the Dodgers-Rays Series was a good one. The Dodgers overwhelmed the Rays in a way that I think the Yankees might've been able to withstand. The Dodgers were on base all the time, it was just too much for the Rays to keep up with (and taking out your ace in Game Six of the World Series because the bean counters decreed it is...uh...just fucking daffy). Wouldn't be surprised to see a Dodgers-Yankees Series in 2021, might be just what the doctor ordered come autumn. (And I got a feeling it might be Yankees-Dodgers for, like, the next ten years)

As for NFL, I've been fine without the fans but it is different. For example, in Week One the Packers played the Vikings in an empty stadium. Packers built a comfortable lead but in the 2nd half the Vikings offense started putting points on the board and I couldn't help wondering if a cheering audience could've worked some magic for the Vikings. What is the effect of the fans on an NFL game? I dunno but this has taught me: when a football falls in a forest, everybody hears about it. 

I feel bad for the college kids whose seasons were screwy. They don't get a lot of chances to do their thing and this year will be a stunted (at best) experience for most of them. College football is strangely exposing how much the big boys need the little fish to make them look bigger by comparison. Yes, we know the titans dominate every year but the sheer amount of teams and games keep everyone involved even when we know they're far from the center of power. Without the wide variety of schools, the BCS feels like the football equivalent of the Grammys: a miniscule portion pretending to be the whole shmeer. 

How does 2021 look now? Well....NBA is good but the Covid lay-offs are gonna make for another weird post-season. We'll see if the Champions League is any different. NHL is fine but just got started. MLB is already having labor strife (kinda surprised last summer's strife wasn't worse) and I'm not yet convinced we'll even have a season this year. Aussie Open seems on the verge of collapse and I don't really see how tennis gets going. March Madness is gonna be weird no matter what happens (**). 

The Masters should still be good, though. So there's that and the other stuff will still be worth watching even if its weird. 

And by September I fully expect the NFL to keep rolling no matter what's going on in the world. I've been on the 18 month timeline since March, with the vaccine on its way, herd immunity steadily becoming a reality and everyone getting increasingly comfortable with the social distancing combined with the timeless dependability of football, I think that time horizon still holds. 

2020 required me to reevaluate my daydreams. I spent intellectual capital on things other than sports and while you probably think that's a good thing, I think I've learned once and for all that it is not a good thing. Science is vastly overrated, Politics is for charlatans and fools, the Markets are just like sports but less fun, video games have never grabbed me and Cinema has become more useful to me as as a look to the past rather than an eye on contemporary culture. 

Sports has outcomes, sports encourages statistical evaluation and problem solving, sports is gripping drama and ongoing soap opera. Sport is enlightening and enjoyable, it is the ideal meld of competition and cooperation. I'm ready to admit it: Sports are just better than everything else. And I'm ready to get my life back. 

(*) Gotta be honest I remember the semifinal better than the Championship. Nani had two killer goals in the semifinal that were just nasty. Just one heads-up vet making the game his own in a way that we just hadn't seen in months. A thing of beauty. But then Orlando lost in the Final. Oh well, great semifinal at any rate. 

(**) Put your money on Gonzaga.