Sports world had the answers, right and wrong, in 2020
It was the night of March 11, 2020, a day that may without end stay in the annals of American cultural historical past. As the coronavirus pandemic washed upon our shores, a skeptical nation, together with our president, was paralyzed by indecision and uncertainty.
But one thing occurred that evening that snapped the nation to consideration. It got here as a lightning bolt, lighting up our telephones and tv screens:
The NBA was suspending its season.
Who doesn’t keep in mind the place they had been at the second the alert got here, asserting that one participant’s constructive COVID-19 check was shutting down the total season, instantly?
A sports activities league was doing what President Donald Trump and 535 members of Congress couldn’t do. It was awakening a nation to the overwhelming magnitude of a disaster that was going to form each second of our lives for the remainder of the yr.
“We were bumbling along as a country until the NBA did that,” mentioned Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, “and then suddenly everybody took notice of how many lives would have been saved had we shut down a month earlier.”
If the NBA, one among the world’s hottest and profitable sports activities enterprises, might shut down in the blink of a watch, simply how severe was this? We quickly discovered. Over the subsequent few days, as faculty and skilled video games disappeared earlier than our eyes, sports activities stopped being an escape from actuality and as an alternative turned a sobering mirror of our society.
As sports activities went, so went the nation. When the nation wanted steering and one thing to lean on, the sports activities world turned our North Star. How attention-grabbing, and becoming, that the yr that sports activities turned extra essential than ever was the sports activities yr with the most interruptions. At a time of nice uncertainty, the sports activities world had all the solutions – most of them right, a number of of them fallacious.
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The bubbles that protected NBA and WNBA gamers had been majestic successes, feats of non-public accountability and skilled management. But simply as some members of the American public grew antsy, or barely cared about well being tips and the security of these round them, so too at instances did sports activities, faculty sports activities in explicit.
When one faculty convention after one other determined to play soccer, driving the backs of 18-to-22-year-olds in the midst of a lot medical uncertainty to make thousands and thousands in TV cash, sports activities performed a management position in all the fallacious methods throughout the worst days of the pandemic in November and December. In faculty cities throughout America, many college students weren’t allowed on campuses, however soccer gamers had been. The powers that be determined in their very own self-centered means that we wanted younger, unpaid males to entertain us by taking part in soccer throughout a pandemic, it doesn’t matter what. It stays to be seen how historical past will choose that call.
But there was a lot extra to 2020. Barely two months after the unique March shutdowns, a wave of athlete activism the likes of which we had by no means seen was triggered by the deaths of unarmed Black males and ladies at the palms of police, originating with the killing of George Floyd on Memorial Day.
Unprecedented social consciousness adopted, led by the NBA and WNBA, in addition to others similar to tennis star Naomi Osaka, whose masks at the U.S. Open bore the names of Black victims of racial injustice and police brutality. “Black Lives Matter” turned a rallying cry for a brand new era of athletes, a whole lot of them. Often their sponsors adopted right alongside. This wave of activism and protest culminated in the Milwaukee Bucks’ determination to boycott a playoff sport on August 26, resulting in a shutdown not solely of the NBA playoffs but in addition video games in the WNBA, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer.
“When the Bucks didn’t come out that day during the playoffs,” Lapchick mentioned, “there hadn’t been a day as important for athlete activism since the protest of John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics. What was important was that this time, they were not alone, everybody was joining them. It wasn’t a single voice, it was a unified voice.”
Tennis legend and ladies’s rights advocate Billie Jean King has been a number one voice for social change by sports activities for greater than 50 years.
“Many of today’s professional athletes found their voices in 2020,” she mentioned. “The pandemic brought us more time to reflect and more time to look closely at something bigger than themselves. And we took action. We saw that with the NBA, the WNBA and others taking a lead on equality issues. Individual athletes like Naomi Osaka made us see important situations in a new light.
“For my generation, standing up and speaking out was often frowned upon and discouraged and many of us saw it as the price we had to pay for positive change. Professional athletes have an amazing platform for change and it is gratifying to see so many of them – and the leagues they compete in – step up for something bigger than sports.”
Such an apt description of 2020, a sports activities yr that was about a lot greater than sports activities.
