Day 139…
I can’t say that know much of anything about sports, but the issues arising as the NFL, the NBA and MLB try and get up and running seem similar to the same ones that we in the entertainment industry are all likely to face when we try to get up and running ourselves.
The NFL has cancelled all preseason games. At the moment, the season is set to begin in September. The draft happened virtually. They are planning on implementing a rigorous testing schedule on the athletes and support staff. Whether or not fans will be able to attend in person and in what form will be determined by where the game is being played.
The NBA has attempted to create an isolation bubble around their teams at the ESPN Wide World of Sports in Orlando. Twenty-two teams will play the season in three arenas at the resort. Practice courts are being constructed within ballrooms. In an effort to acknowledge the Black Lives Movement, players will be allowed to wear what they like in terms of slogans and symbols on their team uniforms and the words Black Lives Matter have been painted on the courts. Initially about 30 players in the bubble - under 10% - tested positive for the virus. As of a week ago, there were no new cases reported. So far so good.
In professional baseball seventeen players and coaches from the Miami Marlins team have tested positive for the virus which caused three games to get postponed this week. The rest of the team is now in lockdown in Philadelphia. The manager of the Washington Nationals, Dave Martinez said yesterday in response, "I'm going to be honest with you: I'm scared, my level of concern went from about an eight to a 12. I mean this thing really hits home now. ... I got guys in our clubhouse that are really concerned, as well." The League is trying to figure out how to proceed.
In one of the more surreal events that has happened in the last four months of mind-blowingly surreal moments, the President announced that he had been invited by the New York Yankees to throw out the first pitch on August 15 at Yankee Stadium.
He hadn’t been invited. It was a lie.
This past Thursday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, threw out the first pitch of the 2020 Baseball season for the Washington Nationals at National Stadium in Washington D.C.
Apparently, the President was so bent out of shape that Dr. Fauci was getting so much attention, that just before it happened the President felt obliged to tell everyone that he was doing the same thing.
While the President apparently had a standing invitation from the Yankees to throw out a pitch, nothing had ever been discussed about him doing it on August 15. That the President was going to throw out the pitch startled everyone from his own aides with him in the briefing room to the Yankees, themselves.
This past weekend, the President tweeted that he wasn’t going to be able to do it after all because he was so busy with the “China virus”.
The tension between the President and Dr. Fauci has escalated in recent days. It’s been there from the beginning of the pandemic. We’ve all watched Dr. Fauci dance around the President’s nonsense the White House has put forth. I have always assumed that he felt being politic at least allowed him to get SOME of his message out.
Two weeks ago, the President visited Walter Reed Hospital and, for the first time, publicly wore a face mask.
Back in April when the CDC first began recommending that we should all be wearing them, the President said "I don't think I'm going to be doing it. Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens - I just don't see it."
Under intense pressure to do something, anything at all, to appear to be taking action against the spread of the virus, he put one on. “I’m all for masks,” he said. He said he kind of liked how he looked in one. He said it made him feel like the Lone Ranger.
It seemed like the President was finally conceding to the science. Then came last night’s tweets.
The President retweeted several things that promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine as an effective treatment for the complications that arise from COVID-19. While it initially seemed that the drug might be effective, it has long since been discounted by a consensus of healthcare professionals, globally.
He retweeted something paraphrased from a critic of Dr. Fauci named Dr. Lee Vliet claiming that Dr. Fauci misled the public by dismissing hydroxychloroquine.
He also retweeted something else from an account that uses the hashtag “faucithefraud”.
Finally, he retweeted clips of a video where some doctors make a number of claims about the virus including their belief that hydroxychloroquine is effective. That video has been removed by Facebook, Youtube and Twitter for containing false and misleading information.
In response to the President’s assertion that he has been misleading the American public, Fauci said, “I have not been misleading the American public under any circumstances”.
When asked if he felt he could continue to do his job with the President questioning his credibility this way, he said “I don’t know how to address that. I just am certainly going to continue doing my job. I don’t tweet. I don’t even read them, so I don’t really want to go there. I just continue to do my job no matter what comes out, because I think it is very important in the middle of a crisis in regard to an epidemic, a pandemic. This is what I do, this is what I have been trained for my entire professional life, and I will continue to do it.”
I truly believe that last night’s tweets from the President were in direct response to the attention Fauci got from throwing out that ball.
While it is definitely true that I don’t follow sports in any meaningful way, I do understand their importance. The sports industry employs nearly a half a million people. It’s responsible for direct earnings of over $14 billion a year. It is next to impossible to calculate the peripheral business generated by the nation’s sports teams - transportation, lodging, dining, merchandise, advertising, legal services - the list goes on and on.
Like the entertainment industry, the sports industry is the fulcrum of a vast, interconnected web of business. For everything else to work around it, it needs to work first.
An enormous amount of care and money is going into figuring out how to keep the players, the support teams and the spectators safe. Different methods are being used and attempts are being made, but it is unclear which ones will be the most effective.
When asked in a Good Morning America interview if the fact that the Miami Marlins had to postpone their games meant that baseball should shut down again, Dr Fauci replied, “I don’t believe they need to stop, but we just need to follow this and see what happens with other teams on a day-by-day basis.”
You can bet that’s what everybody will be doing. The care and attention being given to this is vitally important to making this work.
NONE of that care and attention is being spent on reopening our nation’s schools.
Individual schools are doing their best, but few of them have anywhere near the resources that a Major League sports team has. Schools don’t create nearly the same immediate economic ripples that arenas and theatres do.
It’s been that way throughout time. The Colosseum in Rome. Ball courts throughout Mayan and Aztec Mexico. Tlatchtli courts in Peru. I can think of a lot of famous ruins of sports buildings. Outside of religious institutions, though, I can think of very few famous ruins of schools.
The American Federation of Teachers announced this morning that it would support its 1.7 million members going on strike to fight inadequate health and safety measures connected with school re-openings if necessary.
The average salary of an NFL player last year was $3.2 million.
The average salary of an NBA player last year was $8.3 million.
The average salary of an MLB player last year was $4.03 million.
I do not begrudge any of those players the money they are making. Their teams are making a fortune off of their backs. It makes complete sense that the owners and promoters would do everything in their power to protect their teams. There is a huge financial investment at stake there in each individual player.
The average salary of a teacher in the US in 2018 was just over $60,000.
That the teachers’ union would need to announce that it might come to a strike if basic health and safety measures aren’t in place to protect them and the kids in the coming weeks and months is inconceivable.
The White House is DEMANDING that schools reopen. They are doing nothing whatsoever to help this happen safely and, in fact, they are threatening to withhold funding from schools who won’t.
This is going to sound hyperbolic, but what is at stake here is our future.
Kids need to get back to school as much if not more than teams need to get back to playing. Keeping them home truly isn’t good for anybody. It can even be dangerous.
To do that, each single individual kid needs to be protected in exactly the same way a highly paid professional athlete is. We cannot afford to lose ONE of them.
Nobody sane ever went into teaching to get rich, but nobody sane ever went into it expecting to die either.
In the midst of everything else that is going on, this is something else that we all need to attend to. Put it on the immediate “to do” list.
I hope it gets cooler outside, soon, because we’ve all got a serious amount of marching ahead of us.
Get your masks ready.
Mask Up and ready
Children are our future
beacon of truth awe and wonder
the stars of our universe
Such a great post! 👏💕