Corona Virus shutdown looks like an apocalypse

The NCAA has canceled March Madness? The NBA has canceled its season? The Atlantic Coast Conference has canceled its 66-year-old basketball tournament, along with tournaments and scheduled games in all other sports? Major League Baseball is delaying opening day? Colleges and universities are canceling in-person classes and replacing them with online classes? Broadway shows are being canceled? The Masters golf tournament has been postponed — The Masters!

If these aren't signs of the apocalypse, I don't know what is.

The NCAA basketball championship game was played nearly 40 years ago hours after a failed attempt to assassinate the president, who was still hospitalized and in serious danger at tip-off.

This Covid-19 virus must be truly virulent to disrupt American life so thoroughly. The World Health Organization has declared the outbreak of this new disease to be a pandemic — a disease that endangers the entire world.

Although some irresponsible individuals in and out of government have attempted to minimize the dangers and impact of the new corona virus, top scientists in U.S. health agencies have strongly urged action to avoid spread of the disease. Without such actions, the rate of infection could grow exponentially, ultimately overwhelming the health care system as hospitals run out of beds, equipment and medicines. Each infected person is likely to infect more than two people they encounter. It's not influenza, which has a much lower fatality rate.

Because of a slow initial response by officials, the United States still does not have adequate numbers of test kits for the virus, allowing the virus to continue its spread. Although "Quarantine" signs have not gone up on people's doors, as they did in earlier smallpox and polio epidemics, limiting contacts and practicing good hygiene are essential to preventing a far greater crisis.

Covid-19 is said to be especially hazardous for people 65 and older, especially those with heart or lung disease or a compromised immune system. As an older-than-65 man with a not-noticeable heart condition, I am paying close attention to this corona virus. I'm not panic-buying Clorox or toilet paper, but I am washing my hands more often and more carefully than in the past.

I am also hoping for government leaders to be more transparent, empathetic, honest, scientific, prepared and trustworthy in the future.
 

I'm afraid I have March Madness!

The post first appeared in the March 16 edition of the Wilson Times.

As I write this column, the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament is already under way. The oddity about this annual event is that I’m not paying any attention — yet.

Television networks are promising us “March Madness,” but all I’m feeling is a bit of anxiety. This is the second year that I have been retired with no office to go to, no demands on my afternoons, no commitments to be productive instead of mesmerized by fast-paced games in ever-larger arenas. I could be turned into a bug-eyed zombie by watching four tournament games in succession and being unable to remember, three hours later, who beat whom.

I’ve been a college basketball fan for more than 50 years. Let me correct that: I’ve been a fan of one particular college basketball team for 50-plus years. I watch games involving that team with a zeal and fixation that is mental, emotional and physical.

When my children were young, they learned to accept the fact that Dad would not be available during certain televised basketball games and that he would periodically shout (nothing profane, just “No-o-o!” or “Rebound!” or “How can you miss a free throw?”) and, when necessary, stomp the floor, sometimes with both feet at once. They survived the trauma and are now basketball fans.  

I’ve learned that such devotion can be hazardous to your health. When I was in college, I never missed my team’s home games. At one game, a particularly important late-season contest, I had tickets in the very top row of the university’s 10,000-seat arena (since downgraded and replaced by a bigger arena). I had a tendency, whenever things did not go the “right” way in the game, to jump from my seat, scream and shake my fists. My seat at this game presented a problem for me. When I stood at my seat, my head hit one of the monstrous steel beams holding up the roof. It took only one bad moment for me to realize the danger. Getting walloped by a ten-ton, foot-wide steel beam will get anyone’s attention, unless that someone is fixated on what is happening on a 94-foot basketball court 200 feet below someone. Throughout that game, which ended in a close loss for my team, I must have leaped from my seat two dozen times. To say I had a headache would be equal to saying Hamlet had a dysfunctional family.

After college, I continued my fanatical interest in my team, but I made it a point not to sit beneath any roof girders, wherever I was. I watched my basketball team on television and was grateful for the development of color television and for expanded programming that put more than one or two college games per week on broadcast networks.

Through the expansion of the ACC from eight colleges to 16, I’ve followed the tournaments. I would try to arrange my schedule so that I could see my team play in afternoon games, and I would be sure to finish dinner before the 7 p.m. game started. When I first became hypnotized by ACC basketball, only the tournament winner advanced to the NCAA tournament. Now, more than 60 teams get into the tournament bracket, and fans are treated to endless speculation and drivel about who’s the top seed and who’s “on the bubble” as CBS, which is paying top dollar to broadcast the NCAA tournament games, encourages an outbreak of “March Madness.”

It’s an amazing illness. “Madness” is dependent upon fans catching the fever, but fans are mistreated with seemingly constant promotions of the next game or tomorrow’s game or an NBA game later on the network and with announcers who rarely say who was charged when a foul is called and with camera shots that ignore the game and focus on someone on the bench or in the stands. Isn’t there a basketball game going on?

The fans at least get an adrenaline burst from the games. The colleges and coaches get paid mega-millions for participating. The players, forced to fit into the NCAA definition of “student athletes,” do the work but get little in return. Their athletic scholarships get them a college education, but they don’t get a share of the monetary bonanza colleges, coaches and networks share.

Not that I’m complaining. I’ll put up with all the inequality, unfairness and bad calls on block/charge incidents if I can just watch the games and see my team win. Assuming my team makes it to the tournament finals, I will be watching Saturday night and all through the weeks of the NCAA tournament. I just can’t stop myself; it’s a madness.

Hal Tarleton was a newspaper editor and writer for 33 years. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.

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Conference changes destroy rivalries

I've said many times that I'd prefer to see the Atlantic Coast Conference contract back to its pre-1971 size of eight geographically contiguous universities with intense and natural rivalries rather than morph into a 12- or 16-university conference that dismisses the rivalries and traditions that had made the conference great. But, lo, the almighty dollar is wielded by television networks, and the universities and their conference follow blindly the scent of money, even to the organization's demise.

The conference, led by my UNC classmate John Swofford, had attempted to inoculate itself against the hazards of being forgotten because of its small size and relative weakness in football by expanding and bringing in universities that had reputations as football powerhouses (or at least respectability). But with the departure this week of Maryland, the flaws of that strategy are revealed. In this new era of made-for-television spectacles, maybe rivalries and tradition don't matter any more.

As if intercollegiate athletics didn't have enough problems already, the expansion of conferences and the swapping of teams between conferences threaten the very foundation of college sports — the loyal fans and the natural rivalries that have developed over the past 100-plus years of college football and 100 years of college basketball. Will Maryland fans really care about a game against Wisconsin when they're denied their annual tiff with neighboring Virginia? Who, other than Alabama and Notre Dame fans, will travel 800 miles to see their favorite team play a conference foe? These expanded conferences are trying the patience and wearing down the loyalties of the fans who, despite the power of television, are necessary for college sports to survive.

Nate Silver, the guy who became a legend by crunching the poll numbers with uncanny accuracy earlier this month, has examined the numbers involved in Maryland's switch to the Big Ten, and it's not pretty. Even in an age of interstate highways and air travel, geography matters. The Big Ten has always been a Midwestern conference. The Atlantic Coast Conference has always been a, well, Atlantic Coast conference. But no more. Conference names have dissolved into meaninglessness. It no longer matters if the Big Ten has 16 teams or the Big Eight has 12 teams. Who can blame the fans for feeling confused and ignored?

Blame the universities for letting their athletic departments do whatever brings in the most money. If university presidents would just say no to the headlong rush to get another sports-related dollar, we could eliminate the Thursday night football games, the 9 p.m. local time weeknight basketball games, the shoe and clothing logos stamped on uniforms, and the rampant exploitation of athletes unprepared for and perhaps incapable of college-level academic work.

Maryland's move to the Big Ten won't solve Maryland's fiscal problems, and it won't appreciably help the Big Ten. The ACC's expansion from a compact, four-state alliance to a Caribbean-to-New England-to-Midwest gerrymander makes no sense. This was sensible: South Carolina, Clemson, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Duke, Wake Forest, Virginia and Maryland — natural rivalries, football parity, basketball excellence and academic standards.

ACC gets bigger, not better

Size matters. That's certainly true on the offensive line in football and in the three-second lane in basketball. It also applies to collegiate athletic conferences, at least as far as the league executives are concerned. For the fans, I'm not so sure.

The Atlantic Coast Conference has announced an expansion of the 58-year-old conference to 14 teams, adding Syracuse and Pittsburgh to the 12-team roster. Two factors are behind this move: (1) Major conferences are falling apart or expanding — the Big 10, Big 12, Pac 10 (I have trouble keeping up with the numbers) are adding or shedding teams and (2) enlarging the conference and adding major television markets increases the conference's revenue from TV contracts.

If you haven't noticed, television controls intercollegiate athletics. That's why you have Thursday night and Friday night football games. That's why you have 9 p.m. start times for basketball games. Everything is geared toward maximizing TV audiences, even if the schedule is bad for the fans and the student athletes.

I am reminded of televised boxing, which had its heyday around the time the Atlantic Coast Conference was formed. "Friday Night Fights" was a staple of televised sports in the 1950s when college basketball and football got relatively little attention. Boxing fell from favor and disappeared as a regularly scheduled broadcast within a few years. One of the explanations for boxing's fall was that television demanded matches that were not good for the boxers or for the sport. (The brutality of the sport and some in-ring tragedies also contributed to its demise.) Feeding television's insatiable demand was not good for boxing. Collegiate football and basketball have not reached that tipping point yet, but concerns over television's influence are rising.

I am one fan who would prefer the early days of the ACC, when eight teams competed within a relatively compact geographic area, and almost every game was a rivalry. Each team played every conference opponent in football each season, and in basketball, each team played twice, one game at home and one game away. This made for wonderfully heated rivalries and great excitement among fans and alumni. The conference comprised North Carolina, N.C. State, Duke, Wake Forest, Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina and Clemson. Stricter academic standards for athletes and other factors led South Carolina to (foolishly, it turned out) leave the conference in 1971. Georgia Tech was recruited to replace South Carolina, adding the Atlanta TV market. Since then, Florida State, Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College have enlisted, bringing their own TV markets and fan following. The home-and-away basketball games had to be dropped, and the football season was divided into two divisions. Rivalries waned.

The bottom line is nearly $2 billion worth of television contract. Forget about the fans; forget about the rivalries. Television rules.