About a month ago, on March 11, Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert, in the midst of his first all-star season, tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Afterward, the NBA suspended this season “until further notice.”
The day after that, Gobert’s teammate, Donovan Mitchell, who is also an all-star, tested positive. Around the same time, the virus’s impact was felt in college sports, as the NCAA canceled the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.
Major League Soccer and the NHL suspended their seasons. Major League Baseball canceled spring training and delayed Opening Day. The dominoes of American sports kept falling.
And who were the canaries in the mine of the novel coronavirus’ metastasizing in sports? Black athletes. Gobert, Mitchell and, afterward, the handful of other NBA players who tested positive for the virus. Some went unidentified. So it can’t be said all were black. But three-quarters of the league’s talent is black. You do the extrapolation.
Similarly, upward of 70% of the NFL’s athletic labor is black. Yet, President Trump, who upon coming into office consistently expressed disdain for black NFL players who protested on the field against unchecked police lethality against men like them, reportedly said in a recent conference call with league commissioners that the NFL should open as scheduled in September.
Major college football is upward of 60% black. Yet, Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy and Clemson coach Dabo Swinney argued in recent days that their games should proceed as usual because the college athletic industrial complex needs it and, Gundy added, the athletes are supermen who can withstand the infection.
The first utterance underscored the human girders that college football players, particularly its dominant black stars, are to the multibillion dollar sport for which they are inequitably remunerated and vastly exploited. The latter belief stood to exacerbate a myth birthed in black communities that we are somehow immune to catching this illness, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Data mined recently showed black people in particular, and people of color in general, got struck by coronavirus at rates disproportionately higher than everyone else. It is amazing that some in the black community forgot that bromide, “When white folks catch a cold, black people get pneumonia.”
Simply put, black athletes don’t deserve to be subjected to some sort of 21st century Tuskegee experiment to restart our games before epidemiologists and virologists — not the president, league commissioners or owners — deem it absolutely safe to do so. As World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently affirmed, after a couple of French doctors suggested testing a vaccine on Africans, we are not the world’s guinea pigs. And that goes for sports leagues, too.
“If ever NCAA sports is going to treat players like people rather than property,” Ramogi Huma, head of the organization representing college athletes’ limited rights, stated the other day about college sports’ intentions to resume, “it should absolutely be during this crisis.”
Huma was calling on college athletics’ governors to relax their reins on athletes from working, and immediately earning income from their likeness, given that many of them are facing the same hardships as other college students but aren’t eligible for the same relief, like unemployment. They also could lose health care if they are at an institution so hard hit by the pandemic’s fallout that their scholarships are reduced or eliminated. And Huma’s call also could be made of any rush to kick off college football, which is fueled by reported average earnings of $1.5 billion in profit on total annual revenue of $2.7 billion for the game’s 25 most valuable teams, before the players’ health is absolutely secure.
It is unclear whether sports fans will even want to fill stadiums and arenas for games until a vaccine is available. Are the concerns of athletes, who fans would turn out to watch, not to be considered? Is this ancient Rome and our places of play the primal Colosseum?
“I’ve personally been thinking about, when they try to bring us back, I won’t be around until I know all the proper precautions are taken,” Houston Texans wide receiver Kenny Stills told me via text message Friday. “Everyone we come across needs to be tested. Until then, I don’t see how they can have us working.”
Stills’s resistance undoubtedly is the kind all leagues would face en masse from the players unions.
Baseball — where players of color now make up more than a third of rosters, and have for some time — floated the trial balloon the other day of playing games at spring training facilities in Arizona, sans fans. Serie A soccer tried that in Italy in early March. It lasted until players scattered throughout the league, including on superstar Cristiano Ronaldo’s Juventus team, tested positive. The league shut down.
Eireann Dolan, the wife of Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle, wondered on Twitter about the morality of the scheme baseball was considering, given reporting that players, coaches and staff would be sequestered to adhere to social distancing guidelines.
“Y’all asking them to stay at their current salaries but also stay locked inside Baseball Biodome for an indefinite amount of time away from their families during a GD pandemic?” Dolan tweeted. “This is a reckless and irresponsible kernel of an idea. Shut it down.”
And that was before Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo revealed Friday that a team employee tested positive for coronavirus. If there is one thing we’ve learned in recent weeks about this infection, all it takes is one. And the one, though Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) was slow to learn, doesn’t even have to exhibit symptoms.
Who among us doesn’t want to get back to a pre-COVID life as quickly as possible? What, other than a pharmaceutical prophylactic to this virus, would be more soothing right now to the national psyche than the ability to linger at an event that forever brought us together in times of strife, like our old national pastime of baseball, or the national religion of football?
But no one is worth sacrificing for our return to some normalcy.
Kevin Blackistone is an ESPN panelist and visiting professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
Copy the Story LinkSend questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.