Commentary: Covering a game doesn't feel the same
I covered a live sporting event for the first time in eight months and 18 days on Wednesday night.
I expect starting this column that way will elicit two reactions. Those with a media background will read it and say “What the hell have you been doing for the last three months?” Those without one will probably read it and say “Why do I care?”
The answers to both of those questions are kind of intertwined.
For 20 years, I’ve been taught that it’s important to be at the games if you’re going to say you cover the team and be taken seriously as something in the neighborhood of an expert. There was a time that was true, but it really isn’t anymore.
Nobody needs us to tell them what happened. If they care, they know. Every game is on TV (some are harder to find than others, but if you care, you manage). The Internet and social media provide a near real-time play by play of what unfolded. Before I can finish a paragraph about the game at the buzzer, you know the score and the basics of what happened. The days of the media being the way to inform fans of the result are long gone. You want to know what it means and why it happened.
The value in being at a game is in talking to people. Not really the interviews because those are sanitized and players are taught from the day they hit campus not to say anything that could be taken as controversial or pinned up on a bulletin board somewhere. I mean the casual conversations you have with a staff member or someone in the athletic department or a donor or someone in town covering the other team. We might not write about those conversations, but we use them to inform our point of view for what we do write. We still try to be the go-between from you to your favorite team. Just because something isn’t said into a tape recorder doesn’t mean you have to pretend it wasn’t said at all. You hang around enough places, you learn some things.
Obviously, none of that’s happening this year. So what’s the value of being at a game? To be honest, about ten minutes into the first half of Missouri’s 91-64 victory over Oral Roberts, I was asking the same thing.
Due to COVID protocols, reporters covering the game can’t be on the court level this year. We can’t talk to any of those people. Cuonzo Martin will never even know if I’m here, other than the fact that if I am I have to wear a mask for the post-game Zoom call. The athletic department staff can’t even walk up the stairs to hand us a box score because that would break the protective bubble that is supposed to separate the people on the court from the unwashed masses in the stands.
So from a professional standpoint, there’s really no advantage to being here. It’s no easier to do my job than it would be at my house. There’s not a lot more to be seen or learned from 120 feet away from the court than I would see or learn on TV.
But personally, it’s something else I missed about the first live sporting event I’ve covered since March 7th. I missed the atmosphere. It felt like I was watching a preseason scrimmage.
You can insert your jokes here about how the limited capacity didn’t really impact how many people were at the Mizzou game, but I’m actually being serious here. Not that a season opener against Oral Roberts would be electric most years, but the great thing about this job (other than the fact I’ve found a way to turn it into getting paid to eat barbecue and drink beer on the Internet this year) is that every time I go to a game, I have a chance to see something I’ve never seen before. At the root of it, that’s why we all fell in love with sports.
That’s still true. Anything could have happened on Wednesday night. But if nobody’s there to see it, does it mean as much?
The capacity at Mizzou Arena is capped at about 3,000 fans this year. I’d guess maybe half that were there on Wednesday. There are bands that read “seat closed” over 80% of the seats. Other than a few of the suites, the most people I saw sitting in a group was four. It wasn’t a crowd. It was a bunch of small groups of people.
Even the players can’t sit within six feet of each other. Instead of benches, there are 15 evenly spaced folding chairs on each side of half court. Martin spent most of the night holding his mask down around his throat so he could holler at his players about defense. Multiple players went to the scorer’s table wearing their masks before realizing they had to put them back in their chairs before coming into the game.
“I would say the crowd,” Jeremiah Tilmon said when asked what the biggest difference was. “It’s not as loud as we’re used to hearing when somebody hits a three constantly back to back like Mark (Smith) was and the flashy layups X (Pinson) was doing and people just dunking. You would expect the crowd to just go crazy off that but it was just a couple hand claps. So that wasn’t normal.”
Nothing was really normal.
I’ve been fortunate enough to be at a lot of games I’ll never forget. I was there for Nebraska in 2003 and Armageddon at Arrowhead and Oklahoma in 2010 and the 2013 SEC title game and the Moe Miracle and the two MU/KU games in 2012 and an overtime NCAA Tournament win over Marquette and the 2012 Big 12 Tournament and Norfolk State. As a fan, I was there for the 2014 AL Wild Card game and Chiefs/Broncos on Monday night and more.
Being there mattered. Not because I wrote something I couldn’t have written watching from home, even though I’d like to think I did. But because of the energy and the passion and the shared experience. Being there in a big moment is different. You might remember watching those games, but I remember being at those games. And that difference matters. Ask anyone you know who was at any of them.
That feeling isn’t going to be there this year. Like I said, it wouldn’t be there for Oral Roberts on a Wednesday night anyway. But Missouri opens SEC play with pre-season league favorite Tennessee. Kentucky comes here later in the year. This team has tournament hopes. Across the street, Missouri is getting some things done in Eli Drinkwitz’s first season and games against Arkansas and Georgia might offer a signature moment to the season. But none of those things are going to feel the same when you can’t turn and high five the stranger next to you, or wrap him in a big bear hug if something really amazing happens. It’s hard to make much noise when 4/5 of the arena is empty and everyone is sitting 15 feet apart from everyone who didn't come to the game in his car.
Eventually, we’re going to be able to do all those things again. I don’t know when, but we will. We need that. Sports brings us together. They give us a common goal with people we don’t know and with whom we may have nothing else in common. They distract us and give us incredible joy and equally incredible agony and experiences we remember forever.
Maybe this is all too downtrodden and I’m overthinking the meaning a blowout against a team that never looked to pose any sort of a challenge to Mizzou. But right now, it’s the only COVID-era sporting event I’ve got to go on. It wasn’t the same. I can’t wait until it is again.
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