Every day there is civil war, raging in our hearts, seething in our souls, fulminating our conscience. We know what we are supposed to do, and mostly we have done that. We have stayed home. We have masked up, and gloved up, whenever we venture to grocery stores. We have kept our social distance.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t miss things: happy hours, Little League games, proms, graduations — and wakes, and funerals, and graveside farewells, and hospital-room goodbyes.
And so arrives the daily skirmish between what we want and what we do, what we miss and how we cope. Sports fans feel that as much as anyone. And each day, it seems, we are teased. Baseball talks about building its own virus exile in Arizona. Basketball is giving us a H-O-R-S-E tournament this weekend. Football is proceeding with the draft. The NHL talks about a “unique” playoff format.
Folks guess: June? July? December? 2021?
The Sharkey Institute within Seton Hall’s Stillman School of Business released results of a sobering — if not terribly surprising — poll Thursday. The biggest takeaway from the 762 respondents polled April 6-8 (evenly divided between cell phones and landlines) was this:
Folks aren’t ready to embrace the old normal yet. And maybe ever.
Canvassing the whole country, 72 percent said they wouldn’t return to attending games until a vaccine that successfully combats the coronavirus is proven effective. Among those who identify as sports fans, the number is still a sizeable 61 percent. And since most experts don’t believe such a vaccine can be reasonably expected until 2021 …
Well, that certainly paints a solemn picture of what sports is up against.
We can glance around the world and see examples of what sports’ first steps back are going to look like. In Germany, plans are well under way to resume the Bundesliga, which isn’t just the top league in a soccer-mad nation, it is also the football league that draws the highest attendance figures year after year worldwide.
Practice began this week. All 36 stadiums are set to host games starting in May that will require an average of around 240 players, coaches, trainers and support staff. The empty stadiums will cost club owners millions of euros — and while they will bring a measure of comfort to TV viewers, these “ghost games” will also be jarring to watch, chanting crowds replaced by a vast array of empty seats.
And what about when fans are actually allowed back in? In Belarus, soccer and hockey leagues have continued without interruption because of a low virus curve, and the Premier League there has averaged around 1,200 fans who are given antiseptic hand gel when they enter the gates and then have their temperatures taken by medics.
In a European landscape just as starved for sports as its American cousins, these have become wildly popular matches, many fans in England adopting teams and getting their fixes at gambling parlors wagering on these games (along with other offerings like Russian table tennis and British darts).
Perhaps such measures are an inevitable eventual condition of future sports gatherings, although teams will face auxiliary nightmares in such a setup. What happens if you pay top dollar for a playoff game … and at the entrance gate your temperature registers at 100.3? These are things that weren’t problems before; they will be enormous issues going forward.
In the Seton Hall poll, 70 percent believe the NFL — which is trying everything in its power to project a sense of relative normalcy — should not start up on time. Twenty percent are in favor of the league starting — but in allowing players to decide for themselves whether they wish to put themselves at risk. Only 6 percent say the league should start as planned.
You can dispute the figures if you like — the poll has a margin for error of +/- 3.5 percent. But it surely represents a significant truth: we may yearn for sports to return in a vacuum. But when you begin to apply certain realities to this daily fight against COVID-19, that complicates things. No matter how badly we may rage against our boredom.
In the end, what is right generally wins out over what we want. If nothing else, this poll reaffirms that much.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t miss things: happy hours, Little League games, proms, graduations — and wakes, and funerals, and graveside farewells, and hospital-room goodbyes.
And so arrives the daily skirmish between what we want and what we do, what we miss and how we cope. Sports fans feel that as much as anyone. And each day, it seems, we are teased. Baseball talks about building its own virus exile in Arizona. Basketball is giving us a H-O-R-S-E tournament this weekend. Football is proceeding with the draft. The NHL talks about a “unique” playoff format.
Folks guess: June? July? December? 2021?
The Sharkey Institute within Seton Hall’s Stillman School of Business released results of a sobering — if not terribly surprising — poll Thursday. The biggest takeaway from the 762 respondents polled April 6-8 (evenly divided between cell phones and landlines) was this:
Folks aren’t ready to embrace the old normal yet. And maybe ever.
Canvassing the whole country, 72 percent said they wouldn’t return to attending games until a vaccine that successfully combats the coronavirus is proven effective. Among those who identify as sports fans, the number is still a sizeable 61 percent. And since most experts don’t believe such a vaccine can be reasonably expected until 2021 …
Well, that certainly paints a solemn picture of what sports is up against.
We can glance around the world and see examples of what sports’ first steps back are going to look like. In Germany, plans are well under way to resume the Bundesliga, which isn’t just the top league in a soccer-mad nation, it is also the football league that draws the highest attendance figures year after year worldwide.
Practice began this week. All 36 stadiums are set to host games starting in May that will require an average of around 240 players, coaches, trainers and support staff. The empty stadiums will cost club owners millions of euros — and while they will bring a measure of comfort to TV viewers, these “ghost games” will also be jarring to watch, chanting crowds replaced by a vast array of empty seats.
And what about when fans are actually allowed back in? In Belarus, soccer and hockey leagues have continued without interruption because of a low virus curve, and the Premier League there has averaged around 1,200 fans who are given antiseptic hand gel when they enter the gates and then have their temperatures taken by medics.
In a European landscape just as starved for sports as its American cousins, these have become wildly popular matches, many fans in England adopting teams and getting their fixes at gambling parlors wagering on these games (along with other offerings like Russian table tennis and British darts).
Perhaps such measures are an inevitable eventual condition of future sports gatherings, although teams will face auxiliary nightmares in such a setup. What happens if you pay top dollar for a playoff game … and at the entrance gate your temperature registers at 100.3? These are things that weren’t problems before; they will be enormous issues going forward.
In the Seton Hall poll, 70 percent believe the NFL — which is trying everything in its power to project a sense of relative normalcy — should not start up on time. Twenty percent are in favor of the league starting — but in allowing players to decide for themselves whether they wish to put themselves at risk. Only 6 percent say the league should start as planned.
You can dispute the figures if you like — the poll has a margin for error of +/- 3.5 percent. But it surely represents a significant truth: we may yearn for sports to return in a vacuum. But when you begin to apply certain realities to this daily fight against COVID-19, that complicates things. No matter how badly we may rage against our boredom.
In the end, what is right generally wins out over what we want. If nothing else, this poll reaffirms that much.
