The return of sports? Not so fast

By Art Spander

The Masters was supposed to begin Thursday. But you knew that. You also knew it has been shifted to a weekend in November, one of the few apparent certainties we’ve been offered in sport.

Otherwise, it’s a series of possibilities and wishes. And worries.

We keep hearing there will be improvement, the coronavirus will be limited if not controlled, and life and sport will return to normal — schedules full of games, stands full of fans.

People would be in church on Easter, we were promised. The country would be open. The only masks needed would be worn by catchers.

Then another medical person told us in so many words, “Not so fast, folks.” Never mind searching for a place in the bleachers or lower boxes while epidemiologists still are searching for a vaccine. And before you even think of selling tickets for an NFL game, you’d better sell the players on the idea there’s no danger coming together in a huddle or the locker room.

Only the other day, Dr. Jeffrey Smith, the Santa Clara County executive officer, said he didn’t expect sports until Thanksgiving. “And we’d be lucky to have them then,” he added.

Thanksgiving, when high school football usually concludes. When college football often plays its traditionals. When the NFL — and the 49ers are based in Santa Clara, of course — would be three-quarters of the way into the schedule.

Baseball? Basketball? They’ve almost reached a point of desperation. Or resignation.

By the time the NBA figures how and when to resume a season that never made it past the halfway mark, it will be time to start the next season. Major League Baseball have a bizarre scheme to play every game, all 30 teams, in Arizona, without fans. That doesn’t work.

It can be done. But it shouldn’t be done. Our sports are more than digital matchups among distant athletes. We need people in the seats, behind the ropes, as well as people inside the lines.

Sport is not silence. Sport is huge galleries lining the fairways at Augusta National. Sport is obsessed fans tailgating in the parking lots before Auburn-Alabama. Sport is parents and kids unloading at the 161st Street station in the Bronx to see the Yankees play the Red Sox.

Sport is jerseys and T-shirts, golf hats and baseball caps, anticipation and excitement.

But before any of that, we need a go-ahead from those best qualified to judge our health and safety. Not politicians or football coaches or businessmen who want the economy to rebound and our entertainment to return. But from medical professionals.

The numbers of those stricken by the virus, those who have died from the virus, ought to be warnings not to take chances, not to allow, say, a Warriors-Lakers game to take place until all doubts are eliminated. Sure, we want to see Steph or LeBron, but what we don’t need to see is one more victim.

Impatience? Indeed. Would you expect another response? The head football coach at Oklahoma State, Mike Gundy — remember how he challenged the media a few years back? — insisted his team is getting back to business on May 1. “We’ve got to get these guys back in here,” he said.

Back in where, the locker room? Or since they are student-athletes, the classroom? Most schools around the country have been shut down because of the contagion. And if Oklahoma State hasn’t, the guess is at least the schools of some opponents have.

“From what I read,” said Gundy on a teleconference, “the healthy people can fight this ... we all need to go back to work.”

Until, if we’re callous, careless, the healthy people become infected. As has been the case virtually everywhere.

The future is a question. If it is not safe enough to hold a 49ers game or a Cal or Stanford — or De La Salle — game in September, will it be safe enough to hold the PGA Championship in early August at San Francisco’s Harding Park?

With luck, and maybe a vaccine, the threat of the virus may be diminished to the point where a golf tournament or football game will return to being the attractions and joy that sports are meant to be.

We hardly can wait. But wait we must.