At sunrise Thursday, it began to sprinkle just enough to turn on the windshield wipers. Alone in my car, I muttered a bad word. No golf? Damn. How much worse could things get?
I worried about my son’s spring break trip to Hawaii. I tried to block out thoughts of the imploding stock market. Was it truly possible that I wouldn’t be able to watch Aari McDonald play basketball at McKale Center again?
And what about Selection Sunday, my favorite hour of sports television every year? How can you go through a year without the fine Madness?
And then it really started to rain.
We won’t be able to see if Arizona softball coach Mike Candrea can break a 13-year drought and win the Women’s College World Series, or if his incomparable shortstop, Jessie Harper, can break the NCAA’s all-time home run record.
There will be no opportunity for UA women’s golf coach Laura Ianello to win another NCAA championship, or to watch her prize freshman, Vivian Hou, the nation’s No. 1 ranked women’s college golfer.
Arizona’s return prominence in men’s college swimming, Augie Busch’s push for the top 10, will be delayed a year, and his stellar distance star, Brooks Fail, won’t be able to become an All-American or win a national championship.
And there won’t be any closure on the long-anticipated NCAA Tournament debut of Arizona freshmen Nico Mannion and Zeke Nnaji.
Is it over, just like that?
A few minutes after lunch, Arizona women’s basketball coach Adia Barnes tweeted a one-word description of the day’s events: “Devastating.” A tear dropped from the eye of the emoji that accompanied her message.
The Wildcats have waited 15 years to win a women’s NCAA Tournament game. They will wait another year, and so will the adoring legion of fans who have crowded into McKale Center the last four months.
It is no one’s fault. It’s life.
There has been no other week like this in the history of American sports. Not even close. But just as I was about to be engulfed by the crying emojis and the realization that I won’t be able to watch my alma mater Utah State, and its superstar shooting guard, Sam Merrill, play in the Big Dance, I found perspective where there had been none.
Arizona guard Nico Mannion played one season at the UA before declaring for the NBA Draft.
One of my golf partners, a finance analyst at Raytheon, had just returned from a business trip to Washington, D.C. Earlier this week, he rented a car in Baltimore and drove 100 miles to the Civil War battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
He stood on the hills, in silence, and tried to imagine what it was like in the summer of 1863, when thousands of Americans were killed in the bloodiest battle in our history. He went to the site where President Abraham Lincoln delivered The Gettysburg Address.
As he told me about the sobering day at Gettysburg, I realized that delaying Opening Day at Yankee Stadium is about as important as forgetting to mow the lawn.
My friend from Raytheon didn’t give any thought to the abrupt end to Dayton’s inspiring basketball season, or stop to think that Tucson’s Roman Bravo-Young, a sophomore wrestling All-American at Penn State, won’t get a chance to win an NCAA championship this month.
There is much more at stake than bracketology and LeBron James dunking over James Harden.
Ten days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Arizona decided to continue its basketball season, opening at Bear Down Gym against West Texas State. A headline in this newspaper said:
FDR ASKS 19-YEAR-OLD DRAFT
Rather than continue full-on college sports seasons, President Franklin Roosevelt outlined a plan in which 8,000,000 American men, aged 19-44, would face compulsory military service. One of those on the UA basketball roster that night was George Genung, a Tucson High School grad who would ultimately become one of FDR’s 8,000,000, leaving the UA basketball and baseball teams to be part of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army in Europe.
Scores of Genung’s friends were killed by Germans at the Battle of the Bulge, but Lieutenant Genung fought on, ultimately being among the first Americans to meet and celebrate with Russian forces at the Elbe River in August 1945.
That was Genung’s One Shining Moment.
A year later, Genung was back on the UA campus, a key part of an Arizona basketball team that went 21-3 and won the Border Conference championship.
There will be another time for us, too; another time for Aari McDonald and Nico Mannion and Augie Busch.
For the last few weeks, I have been reading insightful dispatches from my longtime friend John Henderson, a former Denver and Las Vegas sportswriter who moved to Italy a few years ago and writes travel stories at johnhendersontravel.com.
On Tuesday, he wrote: “I sense fear. I had to make the risky move of traveling across Rome to a clinic using public transportation. As Italy becomes the western world’s most paralyzed country courtesy of the coronavirus, I felt like the guy sneaking out of his shelter in a scene from ‘Night of the Living Dead.’
“For the first time, I saw raw evidence of how a country in total lockdown goes through life. I passed the supermarket and 14 people were in line, outside. A supermarket employee, in mask, stood with them, waving in one person at a time. That morning in the check-out aisle, I was scolded by a masked cashier to move 1 meter back. Rome is about sold out.”
At noon Thursday, Disneyland announced it will close on Saturday.
If the Happiest Place on Earth is shut down, we’ve got much greater things to worry about than some basketball games.
