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Why Would Anyone Call Sports a Return to Normal Life?

The strangest thing was that none of it was very strange at all. The return of live professional sports on US soil yesterday was for television viewers two events that were eerily familiar. The lack of on-site spectators for either one didn't change the home experience a bit.

The afternoon started with a skins game golf match between the teams of Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson vs. Rickie Fowler and Matthew Woolf. It was sponsored by equipment firm TaylorMade, so if you're wondering what the relatively obscure Woolf was doing with three stars, he, like them, is a pro in TaylorMade's stable. For golf fans, and nobody else watches golf, the real attraction was the course on which the match was played, Seminole in South Florida, a famous track belonging to a famously exclusive and reclusive private club. Thomas Pynchon would fit right in as a member.

There were no spectators, of course. There weren't even caddies, leading to the refreshing site of top pros actually carrying their own shit around for 18 holes. They didn't seem to mind. There was only the TV production crew and one lone official in a tie whose job was to pull the flagstick to minimize the danger of coronavirus infection. Maybe he's a doctor in non-golf life.

Except for those trifling details, it was all very normal. The event bore no resemblance to an actual PGA Tour tournament, but it was a dead ringer for the fake tournaments and events that are played in the Thanksgiving to Christmas period known as the silly season. Those feature only star players. Those are always played in some venue known for its proximity to sand and surf. Most of all, those events have very few spectators, precisely because they're played at resort locations which are supposed to be exclusive and therefore have relatively few people at them. Gated communities in the Bahamas or Orange County, or a course in Bermuda, that kind of joint.

So for golf fans, the match was a comfortable familiarity, albeit one out of season. For non-golf fans, it was easy to ignore. If a non-fan was driven to it by desire to see ANY kind of sports, it became comforting background noise. Golf's not as good as baseball for stimulating Sunday naps, but it's close.

It was hard to nap during the second sports to grace my set yesterday -- a NASCAR Cup race from the Darlington track in South Carolina. That's what made the lack of spectators even less noteworthy. Who hears crowd noise when the broadcast features hours of 40 800 horsepower racing engines going full throttle? Aside from the gate receipts, which I'm sure NASCAR missed, the fans in the stands are a disposable part of a stock car race offering little to its entertainment value. To an auto racing broadcast, they are completely irrelevant and always have been.

Even minus fans in the seats, a NASCAR event features hundreds of men in the garages and pits working in close quarters. This is doubtless why the Fox announcers went to endless pains to emphasize all the "social distancing" that was going on. It was, too, but a casual viewer could be forgiven for not noticing. After all, everyone on a NASCAR team from the driver on down to the guy ripping off the layers of windshield protector has ALWAYS worn plenty of personal protective equipment long before Covid-19 came along. They've had to because their sport is freakin' dangerous.

For this television viewer, the Darlington 400 was the same show as any pre-lockdown NASCAR race. That's stock car racing big problem in 2020, not the virus. For whatever reasons, what gripped audiences at the turn of this century is losing them today. I'm nowhere near as interested as I once was, and I couldn't possibly tell you why. I just am.

There are a great many talented people in sports television and those working on the two events I watched yesterday used all their considerable technical skills and imagination to make each broadcast seem as "normal," that is, as pre-virus, as possible. That they succeeded to a significant extent is an accomplishment, but it might be a double-edged one.

This viewer ended his day of American sports television thinking "that wasn't so bad." But his second thought was "I'd only do this again if it was raining out."

posted by Michael Gee @ 9:05 AM