You don't know what you have until it's gone: Life with sports during the Coronavirus Pandemic

When I wrote about Kobe Bryant's death in January, I wondered aloud why even though his impact on me personally wasn't great, the emptiness I felt that day was nothing like I've experienced before. I concluded that it was because he was an ever present constant beyond basketball; his presence was taken for granted. His story was the prime example of "you don't know what you have until it's gone".

In the last week, the sports world across the globe went from looking nervously at the coronavirus pandemic to being almost entirely shut down with a Thanos snap. There may be a few stragglers, but on the whole, professional and amateur sports are shut down as the world tries to fight back against this pandemic. Even at the lightest time in the sports calendar, there is more than enough going on to keep your attention. "You don't know what you have until it's gone" couldn't be a more perfect phrase to describe what sports means to us as a society; never thinking that they could ever go away like this, perhaps for months. We didn't know what we had with sports until they were gone. But without them, not have we gained a better appreciation for what they mean to us, but what they've done to get us through these difficult times.

Sports are a cultural meeting ground, an exchange of ideas, beliefs and experiences where disparate people come together to laugh, cry and scream. What happens when that meeting ground is closed? Do those people get to come together anymore? Can they come together in another way? Do these people have another outlet with their time now that their primary love has vanished? What about those people whose lives depend on sports indirectly, like those arena and stadium workers who aren't going to get their paychecks, or the bar owner down by the stadium who overnight has no business? Perhaps until now, no one ever fully grasped how wide the sports net is cast not just in this country but across the globe and how many peoples lives depend on the machine continuing to hum.

But morbidly, sports meant so little so recently. As the pandemic began to spread rapidly across North America and Europe, watching sports felt so empty. Sean Farnham of ESPN said this during halftime of a ACC tournament game after the news broke that Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19: "does any of this really matter?". In one fell swoop, sports went from considering playing in empty arenas to almost entirely going silent in a matter of hours. As much as us the collective misses sports, having them go on right now would be entirely pointless. Out collective energies need to be spent fighting this pandemic, not yelling at a referee for a bad call.

A week without games of any kind should have felt emptier, lonelier and worse than it actually has. Perhaps that's the gravity of the global situation hitting home after too long of not taking it seriously. Perhaps that's the realization that sports of any kind like we took for granted for so long might not return until Memorial Day, perhaps even later, and that this week is the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps its knowing that the tangled web of those affected by this virus, from Gobert to Kevin Durant to a CAA Tournament referee would eventually affect almost everyone sooner rather than later, playing in empty stadiums or not. Could we as sports fans and human beings collectively hold that guilt that we endangered people because of our own blind devotion to "normal"?

But without sports, who knows if the world, particularly the United States, takes this as seriously as they needed to. Without Rudy Gobert testing positive, the dominoes that knocked all sports out might not have reached the corridors of power, which forced them to activate every tool in their arsenal to deal with a public health crisis like none of us have ever seen. When the history of this pandemic is written, sports will play an incalculable roll in that history. Without Rudy Gobert, sports might still be playing in full arenas and stadiums, and how many people would have been infected, hospitalized and killed because of that?

Our nation's first PSA about safe practice during the pandemic even came from a football coach:

When Coach O speaks, we all listen.

For more information on how to prevent the spread of COVID-19, visit: https://t.co/89sZCjY9n3@Coach_EdOrgeron @LADeptHealth #lagov #lalege #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/OxJ5u2xBmo

— John Bel Edwards (@LouisianaGov) March 14, 2020

When this pandemic is finally under control, sports will play an outsized role in bringing society back to normal. Coming together is something that puts so many people in danger during the pandemic, but when it's safe to put 19,000 people in an arena and 70,000 in a stadium, it will be a celebration of not just sports, but what life was like before social distancing and flattening the curve. That first sporting event in a full stadium will be a cathartic release for everyone, like when the Mets and Braves played at Shea Stadium right after 9/11. It will be a sign that the normal we took for granted is coming back, and that we can come together again. Our partisan allegiances will be put aside because even through the worst most bitter rivalries in sports, we're all there because we love these games, and what these games mean to us.

For most of us, sports were an ever present constant in our lives that we are all desperately yearning for in these trying times. As much as we miss them, think of this even through the horrible news of the pandemic: they might be the reason we beat it in the first place, they will be one of the first places where society can let out a collective sigh of relief when we do beat it, and our love of them will grow exponentially when they come back because we now know what life is like without them. The small collective sacrifice we made when it was needed the most will save lives, and will help us get back to the normal we all crave.

Even in their shocking absence, sports have taught us so much about the world that we didn't know or appreciate before. That might help us save lives during the pandemic, and be even better fans and people when it's done. We didn't know what we had with sports until they were gone, but even through the dark times without them, I can't wait to see what life is like with them again.