Tom Finneran: When the Cheering Stopped

Friday, April 17, 2020

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Former Speaker of the House, Tom Finneran

Sure, I miss the games. But I miss my friends a lot more.

Yes, I wish the sports pages were filled with box scores and accounts of games played. But I wish even more strongly that the death notices were fewer and further between. Young and old, black and white, healthy and not so healthy, too many folks have been lost to a virus which I curse. And I save a particular venom for Communist China, its ugly criminal thugs, and its lackeys around the world, all complicit in global homicide.

Apropos of the games, I saw a Seton Hall University poll that must have put the fear of God into college athletic directors as well as sports franchise owners across the country. Not that billionaire franchise owners are at risk of having to patronize local food pantries for their next meal or anything. We need not cry for them.

According to the poll, 72 percent of Americans will not attend a sporting event until a coronavirus vaccine has been developed. Dr. Fauci and other experts constantly warn us that an effective vaccine is likely to take twelve to eighteen months to develop. That means a lot of empty stadia across the fruited plains of America for many months ahead.

Even more ominously for the franchises and leagues, the poll dug into the attitudes of acknowledged “sports nuts”, self-identified fanatics of any and all games. Even within this narrow group of zealots, sixty-one percent of respondents said that they would not attend such events until a vaccine had been developed.

That this virus has triggered such responses should not be surprising. We’re all self-quarantined, captive to 24/7 media reports, and aggressively chided if we venture out for a walk without benefit of a hazmat suit. So, under those daily circumstances, who is going to Fenway Park or the Garden to squeeze into small seats with less than a foot between your face and the face of a free-styling semi-inebriated fan? COVID-19 anyone?

Equally important and extremely worrisome to the leagues, is that the longer we’re away the more easily we will find enjoyable replacements for our money and our time. For many of us there is never any game as important as the game that our child or grandchild is currently playing! And for every potential fan, there is the gnawing realization that you’ve been being gouged at every turn by the leagues and the franchise owners. We’re gouged on ticket prices. We’re gouged on parking. We’re gouged on food and drink. We’re gouged on merchandise. For the leagues and the franchises, the main event is the gouging they can get away with. The game itself is a mere sideshow. Call it the World Series of gouging.

Finally, it’s a challenge to remain “loyal” when you realize that, in Dan Shaughnessy’s immortal phrase, you’ve been “rooting for the laundry”. Yes, the laundry still says “Red Sox” on the front, but Mookie Betts is on the West Coast now, not in Fenway’s famous right field. You might even remember that once upon a time Tom Brady was a Patriot, one of “us”. So much for “our” team when “our” players keep changing their addresses.

There is a striking irony at work here. Early in the NBA season, an NBA general manager tweeted his support for the people in Hong Kong in their resistance to Communist China’s thuggish regime. China went ballistic about “interference in domestic matters” and the NBA trembled on bended knee, anxious to the point of timidity of losing access to many many yen. The League’s greed and cowardice shone quite clearly for anyone with a functional brain and a code of moral decency. Now the League is on its knees again, brought to a screeching halt by the criminal negligence and indifference of the same brutal thugs, all directly responsible for the global spread of a virus which has emptied all the arenas in America.

NBA chickens have come home to roost.

And the cheering stopped.