Bruce Pascoe: Covering Wildcats on the road during a pandemic was tough but "essential"

When I checked into a hotel on Dec. 18 for the first time in eight months, I wasn’t greeted by “How are you?,” “Good evening” or even “Welcome to the Fairfield Inn.”

It was “Hi. What is your essential business?”

I said I was a reporter covering a basketball game in Santa Cruz.

“OK!” the clerk said. “Welcome!”

That was easy, I guess. But was basketball essential? Certainly, basketball is not health care. It’s not trucking or farming or firefighting or any other number of jobs that simply must get done.

But college basketball was being played this season, so for us, it was essential to be there. We go everywhere the Wildcats go, all year round, even to summertime recruiting events, high school all-star games, the NBA draft (if appropriate) and the occasional NBA game involving former UA players. Our goal is to bring the Wildcats to life as more than just a television show, more than just a semi-garbled Zoom sound bite, describing the sights and sounds of being there, so that hopefully readers can feel they are, too.

Doing so in a pandemic that peaked early in the season and then started to slowly fade made it both challenging and illuminating. I saw firsthand how COVID-19 protocols, politics and cultural attitudes varied widely even within the Pac-12’s footprint. California was by far the strictest, Oregon and Washington were next, and Arizona might have been next after that. Colorado and Utah appeared to be pretty wide open, at least by the time the Wildcats visited in early February.

Heading to the Bay Area first was a startling dive into the deep end of COVID-19 restrictions. Upon learning of a new Santa Clara County health order while en route to early season “Maui” Invitational games in North Carolina, Stanford wasn’t allowed to return home to do laundry — much less host Arizona as scheduled on Dec. 19, unless it wanted to quarantine for two weeks.

So that game was moved to Santa Cruz, where the Cardinal began living at a place called the Hotel Paradox while hosting the Wildcats and four other teams at Kaiser Permanente Arena, a bland G League venue that could be easily mistaken for a warehouse by those heading to the famous Boardwalk a mile away.

Searching for dinner on the drive over from San Jose the night before the game, I passed blocks and blocks of eerily empty tents and shut-off heat lamps in downtown Los Gatos, where restaurants that had been suddenly forbidden to even offer outdoor dining.

Because of low ICU bed availability, Santa Cruz County adopted similar restrictions just before Arizona arrived, forcing the Boardwalk to fence off marquee areas and leaving the downtown core empty except for stacks of tables, chairs and decommissioned heat lamps.

Takeout wasn’t too popular.

“When you tell them they can’t eat outside, they just leave,” said Ariana Perez, an employee at Santa Cruz’s Sesame Korean Grill.

It became clear that traveling in the least impactful way was a moral imperative, while staying healthy also was required to do the job. Media weren’t tested for COVID-19 around the Pac-12, since we were seated at least 25 feet away from the floor, but temperature-taking guns and/or internet screenings constantly threatened to keep us outside the doors.

So I taped over the valves on my industrial-grade N95 masks. I ate solely in hotel rooms and in rental cars. I escaped the more crowded media sections at a few venues to sit in the stands. Before I booked a hotel, I’d call ahead to ask if the windows opened or if there was a balcony for fresh air.

Air travel was trickier. While airlines brag about filtration and cleanliness these days, they don’t mention how you get to the planes. A doctor friend in California who deals with COVID-related deaths every day warned me that being in airports was the highest risk of a trip. That’s why I steered clear of restaurants and crowds in the terminals and even wore goggles at times.

I tried to book lightly populated flights, checking seat maps with regularity, even flying from Seattle to Spokane late on New Year’s Eve after the Wildcats beat Washington. There were only nine of us on that 76-seat jet, which landed 10 minutes into 2021.

Sometimes, it wasn’t so easy to relax. There was the guy across my row chomping nuts, mask hanging loosely off his ear, even before one flight took off. And another whose constant mask-lowering allowed for muffle-free F-bombs.

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The worst experience came toward the end of a New Year’s weekend flight from Spokane to Phoenix. A shouting match broke out between two nurse practitioners and two others who spent the bulk of the flight drinking, eating, talking and laughing loudly while not masked. Flight attendants put out a warning over the loudspeaker but, as the yelling escalated upon landing and taxiing to the gate in Phoenix, they were tethered to jump seats and unable to intervene.

I texted that story to my doctor friend.

“Human nature causing more misery than the virus,” he said.

Attitudes varied upon landing, too, of course. In Portland, where several downtown building windows were boarded up after the protests of 2020, authorities were trying to shape them. The city had several massive black-on-yellow billboards imploring drivers to take COVID-19 seriously.

“Let’s Not Make This 2020, Part Two” said one, with another asking simply of masks, “Do you love your family enough to wear one?”

While Oregon and Washington restaurants were mostly restricted to takeout and outdoor dining, Pacific Northwest weather made that challenging. The ratio of heat lamps to patrons surpassed 1-1 on a sidewalk bar in snowy Spokane, while the Oregon Health Authority basically banned tents by requiring 75% of any dining area be open directly to outside air.

Considering the drizzly cold that permeates the Willamette Valley for much of the winter, that wasn’t exactly good for restaurants and bars.

“It killed them,” one Oregon reporter told me.

Having seen all of that by the midway point of the season, I expected the usual “stand here” and “takeout only” signs when I headed to a basement pizza joint just off Utah’s campus for a late-night slice after the Wildcats’ Feb. 4 game in Salt Lake City. Instead, the place was jammed with students laughing, eating and drinking — just like it was 2019 again.

In Colorado, things were also opening up. When the Wildcats visited Boulder on Feb. 6, the famous Pearl Street Mall mostly was limited to shivering outdoor diners, though indoor dining was allowed shortly afterward. Restaurants in other nearby cities were already allowed to operate fully if they wanted to.

In Boulder, the Wildcats played only their second game of the season before fans of any sort, since the UA prohibited player guests after the Wildcats’ Nov. 27 season opener. CU allowed player guests to sit in pods on one side of the arena, creating some noise in the Buffs’ 82-79 victory. Their athletic director pitched in by removing his mask to yell at the officials.

Things started feeling even more normal by the time I reached Los Angeles in mid-February for the Wildcats’ loss at UCLA and upset win at USC.

Restaurants were still takeout-only and laden with protocols (the server at a Hawaiian place even scolded me gently for grabbing a can of Pass-O-Guava out of the refrigerator before a gloved attendant could do so.) But out at Dockweiler State Beach, walkers and bicyclists zipped up and down while families sat atop dunes to watch the sunset, just like any other day. The hotel pool and hot tub were open fully while in other locations, they had been closed or available only by reservation that allowed staff to disinfect first.

By the time the Wildcats finished up their season at Oregon on March 1, Lane County had just begun allowing indoor dining, with some bars filling ironically just as the sudden spring-like weather invited everyone outdoors.

On the final trip home, I changed from one crowded flight to another in the San Francisco airport. The terminal had an almost pre-COVID buzz, with restaurants, moving walkways and many gate areas all challenging the notion of distance.

Maybe that was no surprise. By earlier this month, with vaccines and protocol fatigue both kicking in at a furious pace, life was returning to normal.

People were moving again, no matter how essential the purpose.