The professional basketball and hockey seasons evaporated in early March. The N.C.A.A. spring tournaments were canceled. Major League Baseball’s Opening Day was postponed. The 2020 Masters — the first major golf tournament of the year, usually held in April — has been moved to November, when the sun will dip below the chilly fairways of Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia around 5 p.m. All of these nullifications have destroyed the sports broadcast calendar. The only newsmaking events on the horizon are those that can be orchestrated digitally — drafts, scouting reports, free agency — the paperwork we turn into a circus when nothing else is grabbing our attention.
I have used sports to cope with every traumatic period in my life, so it feels especially cruel that at this time, a roiling stretch of anxiety with no contextual antecedent in living memory, that the pandemic has taken sports away from us. Daniel L. Wann, a psychology professor at Murray State University in Kentucky, claims in his research that rooting for a local team is good for your mental health. I can attest to his findings. I spent an entire summer in college worrying that I might have cancer after a series of inconclusive ultrasounds. The only palliative relief I could find was in the euphoric monotony of the daily San Diego Padres telecast. My present was suddenly fragile, but baseball is durable and resistant to change. It granted me faith that I would be, too.
We don’t have that luxury now, but we can remember a time when we did. ESPN, Fox, NBC and others are digging out old games from their vaults, as a way both to fill the huge gaps in the 24/7 television schedule and to invent a stopgap sports culture. These old games have a wonderfully disorienting effect on the brain. On April 2, ESPN aired the 2006 Rose Bowl, between the University of Texas and the University of Southern California, which remains the most beloved national title game in college football history. Enough people watched the rebroadcast for it to trend on Twitter, perhaps because when the game happened the first time, Twitter did not yet exist. We had sports again for a few hours.
I have been sucked back into so many of these old games during my weeks of self-isolation. I watched Michael Jordan rip the heart out of the Indiana Pacers during the 1998 playoffs on NBA TV. I watched Daniel Bryan defeat the dastardly trio of Randy Orton, Batista and Triple H to win the 2014 WWE heavyweight title on ESPN. This past Sunday, on what should have been the first weekend of the NBA playoffs, the sports-viewing public came together to treat a Michael Jordan documentary as the next-best thing.
I tuned into a random Saints-Packers game from 2011 on NBC Sports, which sparked the glint of a memory from when I watched the game the first time, on a brisk patio bar in Austin, Texas, as the sticky summer air slowly ceded into autumn. I was about to start my second year in college, and more important, I was finally assured that I wasn’t sick. The giddy sweetness of the flashback poured over me. After another day of the unique blend of chaos and boredom, nothing felt better than sinking back into a predetermined timeline: a game where the outcome isn’t in question, while everything else is up in the air.
You can enjoy sports media’s quarantine-length history lesson academically. It was nice to remember how good Vince Young was in college and how quickly the Tennessee Titans muddled his talent during his professional career. ESPN has resuscitated games from deep in the archive, like Game One of the 1988 World Series, between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Oakland Athletics, that serve as an essential addition to any younger sports fan’s palate of stats, references and last names. Kirk Gibson, who hit the famous walk-off home run to spur the Dodgers toward their most recent championship, was interviewed on ESPN’s SportsCenter after the game. The legends live on, as the world remains on pause.
Personally, though, I’ve been drawn to the aesthetics of it all. It has been little more than a month since the N.B.A. suspended the remainder of its season, and America’s tide of stay-at-home orders only swelled in late March. But already, it’s become disconcerting to witness 20,000 people in the same arena. There they are, shoulder to shoulder, on a mountain of bleachers that pile to skyscraper heights, completely immune to the fears that have petrified our economy and frozen our social interaction. There is no starker representation of the way we used to live than these sports rebroadcasts. Even the games from recent history, like ESPN’s April 1 showing of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ immortal performance in the 2016 N.B.A. finals, appear as a relic of a fundamentally different civilization. Look at that crowd; envy their buoyancy, and regret their naïveté. How wonderful it was to be unburdened by the unthinkable.
Dr. Anthony Fauci recently told The Wall Street Journal that he expects the handshake to die with the pandemic. Slowly but surely, he contended, Americans will interrogate their social habits through the lens of a pandemic and create a new normal. It makes me consider what the fate will be for live sports. The N.B.A. has floated Labor Day as a cutoff point for the 2020 season. If players do go back to work, they will most likely be playing in practice facilities that are closed to the public. The quintessential fan experience will be altered throughout the rest of the year, at least. Beyond that, it’s a mystery. When will you and I feel comfortable entering a crowded stadium? How much longer will we fear the strangers sitting next to us? Can the airy euphoria of mass gatherings thrive after we’ve all been made brutally aware of how fragile our defenses are against a virulent infectious disease?
I watch those old broadcasts to witness people who don’t yet need to wrestle with those questions, living proof that we once never feared breathing one another’s air. Nobody knows what will guide us back to normalcy, but the 2006 Rose Bowl is a good start.
Luke Winkie is a writer from San Diego. He has contributed to Vox, The Washington Post and The Atlantic.
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