Maybe I should have seen it coming at some point if I were fortunate to live a long enough life.

I’m 32, and I’ve already had my “where were you when JFK was shot?” moment as a freshman in high school. If you’re a Baby Boomer, then Sept. 11, 2001, was the second such moment for many of you after the actual assassination of President Kennedy. I pray I never get a second “where were you on 9/11?” moment, just as I’m currently praying I never see anything like the COVID-19 pandemic again.

The 1918 influenza pandemic is estimated to have infected 500 million people worldwide between that year and 1920. We don’t know the actual death toll of what is commonly referred to as the Spanish flu, but it’s believed to have been between 40-50 million. I hate drawing a comparison between Spanish flu and COVID-19, as we simply don’t have enough data to not only give a definitive mortality rate on the novel coronavirus but to also determine its potential long-term effects on humans’ respiratory systems.

What is clear, though, is just how much COVID-19 is and will continue providing disruption to our daily lives in the short-term, just like the influenza epidemic did to people living in the early 20th century. If the school closures and insistence from our public health officials to limit peer-to-peer contact as much as possible aren’t good enough examples of that, then the domino effect we saw last week as both college and professional sports nationwide were put on hold is a great example of that. We’re a country that loves sports, and now we’re going to be without sports for at least a little while.

While I can’t remember the exact order these things happened,  it does feel like a domino effect. The various conference tournaments in men’s NCAA basketball were expected to bar fans from entering. Then the Utah Jazz’s Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19. Then the NBA halted its season. Then the conference tournaments got canceled, then the rest of the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball seasons were canceled — and all of its spring sports were canceled as well. Locally, the junior colleges were the first to begin extending their spring break a week and then announcing the conclusion of winter sports. By the time I got around to putting the sports section Sunday’s edition of The Star, the only thing in the TV listings was “PBR: Unleash The Beast: Gwinnett Invitational.” (Apparently, it was cancelled.)

I asked Enterprise tennis coach Justin Sollie to describe the surreal feeling of last week as both college and professional sports one-by-one began stopping. “That’s a great word for it,” Sollie said. “Surreal” might be underselling it. Pandemics happen every so often in human history, and like I said before, if I lived long enough I was bound to see one become serious enough to lead to a significant interruption in my day-to-day life.

We often turn to sports as an escape, but now we can’t do that. Try sending a message to the you from two weeks ago that this was going to happen, and past you is going to think future you is crazy. There was no 1904 World Series due to a dispute between the National and American Leagues, and there was no World Series in 1994 because of a strike. Hopefully, COVID-19 will be contained by the time we get to summer, but even then the best-case scenario is likely an abbreviated season in Major League Baseball. For the first time since its creation in 1939, there will be no NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. If you look on the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Tournament’s Wikipedia page, the 2020 winner listing says the following: “Not held because of the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

That’s just seven words, but it’s a gut-punching sentence. The NCAA has announced its intention to allow spring sports athletes an extra year of eligibility, but as of now there is no plan to extend that to winter sports athletes. For seniors on the NCAA’s various men’s and women’s basketball teams, as well as juniors planning to declare for the NBA, the season came to an abrupt end. Any hopes of making a run in the postseason tournaments, dashed.

I realize it’s “just sports” we’re talking about, but for these athletes, that’s a gross oversimplification. It’s a lifestyle, one to which they dedicate themselves year-round. For many of us, it’s not only a constant, but a source of tranquility amidst life’s stresses. Yes, I know we all jokingly wonder sometimes why we continue to be fans of teams that break our hearts year after year, but do any of us really want this taken away even with those love-hate relationships? 

This stinks. It stinks that COVID-19 is potent enough to take away sports and school and force us to socially isolate ourselves as much as possible while hoping and praying the damage is minimal. These are necessary precautions being taken by our country, but it still stinks.

I especially feel for high school seniors, not only locally, but abroad. Right now, the senior seasons of their spring sports are in jeopardy. I can’t even imagine what that must be like, waking up every day wondering if you just played your last baseball or softball game, just competed in your last tennis match and track and field event or just sank the last putt you’ll ever sink as a high school golfer. As East Central Community College baseball coach Neal Holliman told me Monday, it isn’t something that can be helped, but that doesn’t make it any less easier.

 

Drew Kerekes is the sports editor at The Meridian Star. He can be reached at dkerekes@themeridianstar.com.