We Play Because we Play.
Sometimes, we need a minute
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Genuinely, this is never an easy question to answer. Politics and jingoism aside, there is hardly ever anything cut and dried about whether a team, conference, league or sporting industry should push forth in a somber national moment.
Every one of us, if we’ve paid attention, has already observed such a situation. The NFL suspended its schedule for a week in the wake of 9/11 — and that is an extreme example, correct? That is way out there on the farthest edge of the periphery of this conversation, so far out that most of us would agree sports absolutely did not matter in the moment and needn’t have been part of anyone’s calculus in the days that followed.
And yet, according to the NFL’s commissioner at the time, it was not an automatic call, and getting agreement among the league’s owners — the players, too — took some time and a lot of conversation.
“I said, ‘We’re not playing. What we need to do now is get a consensus for why,’” Paul Tagliabue, the league’s commissioner in 2001, told USA Today a couple of years ago. “We don’t want to make it look like we’re divided, and we don’t want to make it look like we can be cowed by terrorists.”
Again — even after 9/11, the biggest sports league in America needed a minute to figure out what to do. The players union ultimately voted to shut down for a week, but the vote was just 17 to 11. The owners, meanwhile, were loudly divided, with some arguing that by suspending play, the league was giving terrorists what they wanted: the impression that they had created national panic.
I’m saying that while the decision to postpone the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans for one day this week was unequivocally the right one, it wasn’t necessarily easy. In this case, in fact, the Superdome’s close proximity to the site of the murders in the French Quarter may have been as persuasive a factor as any part of the equation.
There were security measures to be considered, for one thing — although in truth, any event as large as the Sugar Bowl is already subject to rigorous protection. The Superdome went into lockdown Wednesday for security sweeps, but the building had been swept for explosives several times prior to New Year’s Day, which is normal for an event of this size. That’s the world we’re in.
Still, it was in conjunction with police, local and state authorities that members of the Sugar Bowl committee decided to push back the game — Notre Dame vs. Georgia — from Wednesday to Thursday. That announcement came quickly, which is not to say it was simple to make.
There are some practical consequences of such a move. They certainly seem trivial now, but they’re still real. Among other things, thousands and thousands of out-of-town ticket-holders won’t be able to attend today’s game, as their flights back home couldn’t be moved or they simply had to leave.
One ticket-holder told the Associated Press that she and her fiance, a Notre Dame grad, couldn’t get new flights, so they had to head out. They didn’t even bother listing their Sugar Bowl tickets for resale — they paid $250 apiece — because online prices had plummeted to $25 as tickets flooded the market.
“Of course we’re disappointed to miss it and to lose so much money on it, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter,” the woman, Lisa Borrelli, said. “[Postponing was] absolutely the right call. We’re fortunate enough that we’ll be fine.”
After the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, the World Series between the Giants and the A’s — an actual Bay Area World Series — went on hold for 10 days before resuming at low enthusiasm. Baseball’s commissioner then, Fay Vincent, deserves credit for announcing that decision, but in reality there were logistical considerations that would’ve prevented a quick restart anyway. And in the end, Vincent was criticized by some very prominent public voices at that time for resuming the Series at all. It just isn’t easy.
After 9/11, Paul Tagliabue was mindful of the fact that his predecessor as NFL commissioner, Pete Rozelle, had said his greatest regret was deciding to play games on the weekend following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The decision painted the league in that moment of national mourning as woefully tone-deaf. Tagliabue wasn’t going to have that regret.
We do play on. We’ve always done so. It is well known that FDR urged Major League Baseball to continue in the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a fraught decision; the U.S. was fully engaged in World War II, and the league’s commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, wrote to Roosevelt asking him if baseball should shut down. But Roosevelt, in the famous “green light letter,” argued that it was to the good of the country that such a revered institution as baseball should carry on.
America stayed open for business, and we’ll go on doing that, staying open. It won’t be perfect, because this is tragedy, not drama. But we play on.
Thanks for giving us a view through your lens, Mark…very poignant perspective. Yes, we do play on…and, sometimes we need to “take a beat,” collect our selves, and in this case—re-focus our security efforts at the venue…much like Tagliabue…the NOPD, FBI, & NCAA don’t want to look back with regret.
I have to think the situation with Rozelle still plays into decision making today as it should. And, as we learned after 9/11, sports can help us heal and press on. Nice column Mark.