Life without sports

March has come and gone. Typically it is one of the few months on the calendar that I care much about because it is “March Madness” month, and I always enjoy listening to radio broadcasts of the NCAA tournament. This year, No.2 ranked and in-state Gonzaga was again looking like it was heading to the Final Four, and Wisconsin managed to finish as the second-seed entering the Big Ten tournament and possibly make a run into the Sweet Sixteen. But along came the virus, and after mulling over the tournament being played in empty arenas, the NCAA called the whole thing off under pressure. Although Kansas was No.1 in the final poll, it is probably jumping the gun to assume that it is the “national champion,” especially when past history reminds us that unbeaten (and supposedly unbeatable) Kentucky was stopped by Wisconsin in the Final Four a few years ago.

Meanwhile, the NBA is still mulling over continuing the season, which would have been of interest to me had Milwaukee not started losing games and threw away their chance to join the 70-win club. Last year the Bucks won 10 of their first 11 playoff games before getting blown away by eventual champion Toronto, and I’m thinking that this season they just had a run of good luck that just ran out. I’m not much of an NBA fan anymore; the problem is that the NBA just got too “big,” with too little real talent to go around. I remember a time when every team had at least one superstar player; today, the best players all “buddy” together to play for a handful of teams. 

The Major League Baseball season is also on hold, although I’ve read that the highest paid players are still receiving about $4,800 every day for not playing. As a kid I was fascinated by baseball statistics, but you grow up eventually and leave childish things aside. Baseball hasn’t really interested me for a while; I think it has something to do with having grown up in Wisconsin and being a Brewer fan, the world of free agency—where the best players no longer hang around the same team to be the “face” of the franchise that you root for year-in and year-out—controls the play-worthiness of the team, and you kind of lose faith, especially if you root for a “hometown” team which hasn’t been to the playoffs since 2001 (that is, if you are a Seattle Mariners fan). Ever since Robin Yount retired I just don’t really care that much about the Brewers, or any MLB team; Ryan Braun would have unretired my fandom, but he hasn’t been the same player since that PED thing. 

The fact of the matter is that other than the NCAA tournament, I don’t really feel that I missed much. Yeah, it would have been interesting to see if Tiger Woods could repeat as Masters champion, but now in April after a month of no sports, I wonder how many people (outside the media and game announcers) actually feel that they’ve lost something “important,” that they can’t do without. What if this virus lockdown continues for a year? Is it possible that even diehard fans would just shrug their shoulders and go about their workaday business without giving it much thought? It is “possible,” isn’t it? I mean, movie theaters have been closed for a while, and there is always television to fill that void.

Well, maybe to a point, because television can’t fill the void of my favorite “season”: the NFL football season, where there is certainly at least one intriguing story line—Tom Brady playing for a new team, Tampa Bay. Of course as a Packer fan I am curious to see if last season’s 13-3 run to the NFC Championship Game was a fluke, or if the Aaron Rodgers/Matt LaFleur tag-team can actually “jell” enough to improve on that record. But the Brady story line—and how the Patriots move on without him—certainly is fascinating for even the casual fan who wants to see how the divorce between Brady and the Patriots works out for both parties. 

So that is where it stands with me. The absence of the NCAA tournament and NFL football would leave a void because of story lines left unanswered and because there are teams and players I just care about more. But is it possible that even that could fade into irrelevance if given time? That’s something else sports fanatics can blame Trump for because of his botching of the virus situation. We are told that even if the coronavirus fades this summer, it will likely make a resurgence in the fall, and with that the possibility of cancelling the NFL season. Just maybe people will care enough about their football to “punt” Trump this November.