Buzz. Killed.

In my personal sports fan bubble, this past weekend was hard to top.

Starting Friday night and through Sunday, nothing went wrong:

• The Chicago Cubs swept the Pittsburgh Pirates, taking firm hold of first place in the NL Central.
• The Chicago White Sox swept the Kansas City Royals, bouncing back from a shaky start to the season and showing much-anticipated signs of promise.
• The Chicago Blackhawks returned to the ice and took a 1-0 lead in their series against the Edmonton Oilers, riding Actual Youth and the Fountain of  Youth to a surprisingly impressive 6-4 win.
• Finally, two Illinois basketball players who were flirting with the NBA – guard Ayo Dosunmo (the Illini’s best player) and center Kofi Cockburn (the reigning Big Ten Freshman of the Year) – announced they were returning for their junior and sophomore seasons, respectively. Instantly, Illinois was a preseason Top 10 team nationally, and Illini fans were given reason to dream big again.

The Buzz

Finally – for the first time in months – I paid rapt attention to sports. I wore out my remote control flipping among the Cubs, Sox, and Blackhawks on Saturday afternoon. I shared excited one-word texts with Illini fans: “Ayo!” “Kofi!” I watched post-game highlight shows to see replays of the six Hawk goals that I’d seen live. And then watched each goal again on my smartphone. I studied box scores – particularly those chronicling White Sox games. If you are not yet on that bandwagon, join. That lineup is must-watch TV, and Sox rookie centerfielder Luis Robert looks like the product of a science project to create a baseball playing machine. Imagine – if you can relate – Anthony Michael Hall’s character and his buddy in Weird Science setting out to build the ultimate baseball player, and not Kelly LeBrock.

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It was all so … normal. Live sports. Lounging away a weekend afternoon. A little guilty that I wasn’t being productive, but not really. Optimism. Hope. I thought the kinds of thoughts I haven’t thought in months. Boy, David Ross seems to have these guys playing loose. How would you ever pitch around this Sox lineup? Is this the most talented Illinois hoops team since 2005? The deepest Illinois hoops team in my memory? Has Kirby Dach grown from boy to man in the last four months? Has Jonathan Toews turned back the clock? Is Dominik Kubalik the Next Big Thing? What got into Tyler Chatwood? Did Adam Engel really leave 10 men on base as a hitter in a nine-inning game? (He did.) Is that some sort of record? (Looks it up.) Nope. But close – former Cub Glenn Beckert once left 12 on base.

This. This is what I missed. Wallowing in thoughts about the games and the players and the records. Dreaming of what Luis Robert and Yoan Moncada and Eloy Jimenez could become. Thoroughly enjoyable. For me, thoroughly normal.

The Kill

But as it turned out, the sports pages offered no respite from the invisible, dark cloud that has been hovering for months – COVID-19.

Outside my little bubble, it turns out, the virus carries on, upsetting daily life in America:

• The Miami Marlins did not play baseball at all last weekend, and neither did the Washington Nationals or the St. Louis Cardinals or the Milwaukee Brewers or the Philadelphia Phillies or the Toronto Blue Jays. Positive tests. Lost games. COVID.
• The Rutgers football team suspended all team activities following a wave of positive tests traced to attendance at a party. College kids – left to their own good judgment – decided to cut loose and attend a party. Who could have predicted that? COVID.
• By my rough count, nearly 60 NFL players have opted out of playing the upcoming NFL season – including a key piece of the defense for the Beloved Bear, nose tackle Eddie Goldman. COVID.
• Rafael Nadal withdrew from the U.S. Open. COVID.

So as much buzz as the weekend could generate, COVID-19 killed it. Sure, Chicago’s MLB teams appear to be legitimate contenders. But is the sport going to make it to the finish line in 2020? Sure, Ayo and Kofi are back. But back for what? Are we going to even have a college basketball season when it’s not possible to confine college kids to a bubble and expect that there won’t be positive tests?

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I cannot help thinking it was all a tease. The optimism, the hope, the anticipation. But “it’s all going to go away,” right? Right? A Tweet from ProFootballTalk’s account, of all things, summed up the situation pretty well, I think:

More than 150,000 American are dead. There are people who take the situation seriously, people who have grown numb to it, and people who continue to twist and torture the facts and logic to continue to downplay it. How many more have to die before they’ll admit they were wrong.

@Pro football talk, twitter post, august 4, 2020, 10:38 pm

What I have learned during the pandemic, I think, is that Americans – collectively – are pretty selfish. And fiercely individual. And prone to read and believe and repeat what they want to read and believe, and deny facts that inconveniently decimate their view of the world.

The optimism and hope and excitement I felt this past weekend did not have to be fleeting. But – as a nation – it looks like we blew it. We took a halfhearted approach to locking down and dealing with COVID-19 this Spring, and as a result we sit here in August, not really sure we’ve made much progress in overcoming this pandemic. Yes, we have gotten better at treating the sick. Yes, the progress toward a vaccine is encouraging. Yes, we are doing more testing now than we were doing in March and April. All good things.

But my sports fan’s buzz was killed when my thoughts drifted back to the dark cloud that is COVID-19. My buzz was killed when I scrolled through my social media accounts and continued to see debates about mask-wearing and the wisdom of doing all that testing. The thing that makes me most unsettled about the future of this country, and the present, is that a substantial number of Americans gobble up misinformation like fried food at a state fair. The ease with which people can propagate bad, unchecked, agenda-driven information has created a toxic environment in this country.

On the COVID front, the United States is, I am told, the best at testing. And yet many have to wait in hours-long lines and then wait days for results. But screw testing, others say – more testing means more positive cases. And we don’t need those! This is nonsense, of course. (If you are at all taken by the argument that the nation would be better off if we did less testing, please reach out to me privately and I’ll try to explain why doing more testing and detecting as many cases as possible is a good thing, not a bad thing, if we want to put COVID-19 in the rear view mirror.)

Put simply, we Americans have done a miserable job, collectively, at dealing with COVID. And that’s on the politicians and their constituents. We are lousy consumers of information, because we are lazy consumers of information. Just because you agree with a person or a party’s position on immigration or welfare or the corporate income tax does not mean you should lap up what that person or party feeds you about matters of public health. The rejection by some of science and scientists who have spent entire careers preparing to guide a nation through a crisis like this blows my mind.

Hindsight is 20/20. I get that. But a bunch of countries suffered like the U.S. suffered earlier this year. And they asked their citizens to sacrifice more than the U.S. asked its citizens to sacrifice – again, collectively speaking. As a result, many nations we would consider our peers (you know, if we weren’t uniquely “great”) are preparing to send their kids back to school without the fear that grips parents and educators on this side of the pond.

Interestingly, the two professional sports leagues that seem to be getting back to play without reports of cancelled games or outbreaks are the NBA and NHL. What are they doing that baseball isn’t doing, and that football won’t be able to do? The short answer: bubbles. Players are being confined, and limited from contact with the outside world. They are engaged in a collective effort, pursuant to a plan designed by league officials who consulted medical and public health experts in putting it together. No exceptions. Everyone pulling on the same rope, in the same direction – trying to keep the games going. Imagine that.

Go ahead – send me all the articles you’d like to send me, all the statistics that say I’m being too hard on the good old USA. We’ve done a terrific job, right? It will all, magically, go away? It is what it is, right? Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but foresight counts too. And it appears that many, many nations had more than we did. And they did not let a pandemic become a political football.

Statistics can be fickle. They can be spun and massaged and cherry-picked to make about any point you want to make. So I’ll just mention a few here that cannot really be spun and massaged. They are cherry-picked, I suppose, but only because they are the ones that matter most to me. If you want to cherry-pick your own, go for it –  here’s my source. As of August 5, 2020:

• 161,601 Americans have died due to COVID-19
• as a percentage of total population, 91 of every 1,000,000 citizens in the world have died due to COVID-19
• as a percentage of its population, 488 of every 1,000,000 Americans have died due to COVID-19 – or more than 5x the world average
• of the 215 nations tracked, the United States ranks as the 11th worst in deaths as a percentage of population (to be clear, being 11th is bad, not good)
• stated another way, the United States has about 4% of the world’s population, and about 23% of the deaths due to COVID-19

For the richest, most technologically advanced nation on Earth, that’s not good. And it kills my buzz. And it does not kill my buzz any less because most of the dead were old. Or had diabetes. Or high blood pressure. They had months or years or even decades left. Many died early, and unnecessarily so.

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As I wrote this piece, I was flipping between the Cubs and Sox games, and then added the Blackhawks Game 3 vs. Edmonton to the mix. The Cubs win – again. The Hawks improbably score two late in the third to take a 2-1 lead in the series. I wander to bed after midnight – and the buzz is back. Maybe there’s hope. Maybe the Hawks hoist another Cup and the Cubs and Sox face off in the World Series? Maybe we are really headed back to normal.

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And then I woke up, walked the dog, and started reading. I ran across this headline and read the accompanying story: As problems mount, college football’s outlook appears grim: ‘You can feel the tidal wave coming.’

After months without sports, and tens of thousands of deaths, the tidal wave is coming? Then what just happened?

It’s time to go to work. Buzz killed.