The end of March and early April is typically a busy time for veteran Vancouver sports journalists like Scott Rintoul, and it’s usually a prelude to a full summer of new champions, storylines and controversies to discuss.
But 2020 is not a typical year.
“It’s a blank canvas,” Rintoul said with a chuckle on the challenge in the age of COVID-19 to find discussion topics for the Scott Rintoul Show, which airs daily on Sportsnet 650 in Vancouver and Sportsnet 960 in Calgary. “Typically, now is a particularly busy time. You are busy with baseball. The NFL draft is coming. The CFL draft is coming. You have hockey and basketball playoffs.”
It has been roughly a month since the National Basketball Association became the first major professional sports league in North America to suspend its season due to the emerging COVID-19 outbreak. The move was quickly followed with similar suspensions by the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball (MLB), Major League Soccer (MLS) and the Canadian Football League (CFL). Events like March Madness or upstart leagues like the Xtreme Football League have pulled the plug on their operations for this year – if not permanently.
What’s especially jarring for fans, Rintoul said, is that sports is often the chief outlet for people who want an escape from stress. And in this case, COVID-19 has invaded a safe haven of sorts, and the psychological damage may be just as palpable as the economic pain for sports fans.
Added to the loss of spectator sports from people’s daily landscapes is the uncertainty. Thomas Drance, senior writer for the Athletic who covers the Vancouver Canucks, said the sports world for NHL fans is stuck in a type of limbo, where the season isn’t being played, but it also isn’t officially over.
“It’s a very odd time for sports. In a season, you are used to certain rhythms.… Your life is fixed for seven to eight months every season. To have it abruptly end, you are suddenly untethered from predictability. But the season’s not officially over.”
For leagues with Vancouver franchises (NHL’s Canucks, CFL’s BC Lions and MLS’s Whitecaps FC), there have been no announcements or hints for when play could resume. Most leagues are abiding by social-distancing rules, which means that the date to relaunch the season – if it’s possible – isn’t up to the league offices to decide.
Globally, only one professional sports league – the Taiwan-based Chinese Professional Baseball League – has resumed regular season play. It is playing without fans in the stadiums, with mannequins and robot drummers littering the stands for a semblance of live sports atmosphere. Meanwhile, the Korean Baseball Organization has begun intra-squad games while eyeing an official season return in May. One of the most high-profile planned returns, that of the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) at the origin point of COVID-19, was originally scheduled for April 1 before authorities shut it down. A second restart date, April 15, has also been pushed to at least May – a disheartening development for league officials in North America who were waiting to see how the CBA resumption would work before committing to their own restart.
On April 15, U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci outlined a rough set of conditions that would set up a return of sports by summer: regular weekly testing for COVID-19, no fans at the stadiums, all players and support staff isolated at hotels for the season and permitted to travel only to and from game venues.
“There’s so much that is going to occur in the event that an [NHL] season can conclude that’s going to have to be done in partnership between the NHL and the NHLPA [players’ union],” Drance said.
“Whatever this looks like, it’s going to have to be done with a level of co-operation, creativity and flexibility on both sides – almost unlike anything we’ve seen before.”
For the closest thing to competitive sports events being held in North America in the last month, there has only been one example: professional wrestling. World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) aired its annual WrestleMania event April 4-5 after taping performances on March 25 and 26.
With Florida declaring pro sports an essential service, the WWE has said it will tape live shows weekly in empty arenas.
Jason Agnew, host and executive producer of Sunday Night’s Main Event on TSN 1150 in Hamilton, Ontario, said there has been chatter that the Florida ruling may entice some organizations like the Ultimate Fighting Championship to hold events there after being spurned by California’s state government.
But Agnew added that any sports league that decides to hold events under the current COVID-19 environment against leading health advice would provoke the wrath of critics the same way the WWE has for continuing to hold live shows. Agnew noted the case of star wrestler Joe Anoa’i (ring name Roman Reigns), who walked away from taping WrestleMania because he recently survived a bout with leukemia and might have a compromised immune system, as an example of pro athletes who may balk at the idea of returning to play during the outbreak.
“To me, as somebody who works in media and has been following COVID-19 so closely, it seems to be a horrible idea for talents to fly in and out, having to go through airports and quarantine themselves from their families. Look at someone like Daniel Bryan whose wife is pregnant, and he can’t go see her because there’s a risk that he could infect his wife.”
Agnew added that the WWE event suffered significantly from having no live crowd, although he conceded that professional sports, with real competition as opposed to scripted theatrics, would probably fare better because fans are so starved for content.
NHL officials are reportedly considering holding all games at a neutral site such as Saskatoon or North Dakota. The NBA had explored playing games in Las Vegas, while the MLB has kicked around the idea of concentrating teams in Arizona and Florida to start the season. But Drance cautioned that the situation is delicate, even if leagues are looking to recoup some of the massive financial losses they’ve incurred so far for suspending their seasons.
“You can take all the relevant precautions and test rigorously,” he said. “You can quarantine teams for a couple of weeks and give them ramp-up time to do a made-for-TV event. You can keep players in big hotels away from their friends and family. But it still takes just one positive test to essentially cause the whole thing to be abandoned.
“Without being a medical expert, honestly, I think it will be pretty tricky to restart. And not only am I skeptical that they can conclude the 2019-20 season, I’m more hopeful that the next season can start during this calendar year. To me, that’s a more realistic timeline.”
But Rintoul is more optimistic.
“Sports, for fans, generally relies on hope. Just like fans in Vancouver hope the Canucks will be in the playoffs and go on a run, people are still maintaining that hope. Maybe they are like me and could think realistically this may be a lost summer … but there’s that hope about them that says, ‘What if it’s not?’
“People in unprecedented times find unprecedented solutions in their respective businesses. The same way that two to three months ago we’d predict we’d be here, I just don’t know what lies ahead three months from now.”
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