A friend called me yesterday morning and wondered, “What are you going to write about now that there are no sports?”
It was an excellent question, and one with no easy answer.
The effect COVID-19 — aka the novel coronavirus — has had on athletic competition, be it pro, collegiate or scholastic has been virtually all-encompassing.
But the shutdown of sports activity in this country was an absolute necessity … except to those myopic super fans whose teams were having a great season and can’t see past their pom-poms far enough to realize this is a crisis of epic proportion.
When experts predict that up to 60 percent of America’s population could eventually test positive for the disease, no further explanation is necessary.
All pro sports are either on indefinite hold or the rest of their seasons have already been canceled.
High school athletics will likely not finish their winter championships and there’s a very real question about the fate of scholastic spring sports.
Then, there’s the colleges.
St. Bonaventure Athletic Director Tim Kenney is likely getting the same question as every other AD on the high school or collegiate level: “What are you going to do now that there are no sports to manage for the indefinite future?”
For Kenney, his 10 winter/spring programs are losing 146 games or matches.
The major victim is women’s softball which has had 57 games wiped out, 24 of them via doubleheaders. Baseball is next with 37 canceled contests. Women’s lacrosse lost 11 games and their male counterparts eight. The men’s and women’s tennis and track teams, respectively, lost eight and four matches each.
Men’s golf had three tournaments canceled.
The NCAA, which often gets it wrong, was absolutely right this time. Canceling March Madness for men’s and women’s basketball quickly led to the termination of this year’s other championships in both winter and spring sports, including the high-profile baseball and softball World Series. That decision effectively ended collegiate spring competition by taking it out of the hands of the individual conferences.
Clearly, losing college, and most likely scholastic sports, for the spring season while punitive is also a wise precaution.
Pro baseball will return eventually as will the PGA and LPGA while NASCAR and IndyCar will resume with fans in the stands. But the future, this season, for the NBA and NHL remains iffy at best.
And the temporary absence of all sports is a reminder of how much we rely on them as a diversion either in person or via broadcast, even in this time of a life-altering health concern.
THAT BRINGS me to the Dayton men’s basketball team.
Of all the winter sports seasons that were shut down, none bothers me more than that of the ill-fated Flyers.
Maybe it’s because they remind me of the 1969-70 Bonnies.
Dayton, 29-2, 18-0 in the Atlantic 10 and ranked No. 3 in the country, seemed destined to roar through the conference tourney and claim a No. 1 regional seed in the NCAA Tournament. Their showcase player, ‘Obi’ Toppin, a 6-foot-9, redshirt sophomore forward, is projected to be a lottery pick in the first round of the NBA Draft.
Fifty years ago, the Bonnies were 25-1 and also ranked No. 3 in the country behind 6-11 senior center Bob Lanier. But in the East Regional final that sent St. Bonaventure to the NCAA Final Four, a freak collision with Villanova’s Chris Ford produced the knee injury that ended Lanier’s season.
Without the soon-to-be No. 1 overall NBA draft pick, Bona lost the national semifinal to Jacksonville and was deprived of a shot at a vulnerable UCLA team, the eventual champ, which had no big man who was a match for Lanier.
St. Bonaventure’s only chance to win an NCAA title was gone forever.
Now comes Dayton.
An excellent team with a generational player having a shot at becoming the rare mid-major program to win a national championship was undone by a country-wide pandemic that prematurely ended its remarkable season.
Another such chance won’t soon come again, if ever.
Dayton instead is left with the same knawing “what if” that has dogged St. Bonaventure nation for a half century.
And long-time Bonnie fans genuinely feel the anguish of the Flyers and their faithful.
(Chuck Pollock, a Bradford Publishing senior sports columnist, can be reached at cpollock@oleantimesherald.com)
