Iâve done a lot of interviews over two decades of sports journalism – but one Iâll never forget was with Kevin Campbell, a veteran English Premier League soccer player I spoke to in my early days as a reporter. Seeking to gain some insight as to what Campbellâs thoughts were on retirement but struggling to find the appropriate words, I clumsily reminded him: âYouâre a year older than you were last year.â Campbell leaned back in his chair, shot me a quizzical look and then charitably decided to give an inexperienced newspaper scribe a free pass over what was a patently absurd statement. âArenât we all?â he smiled. And so here we are now at the close of a year beyond compare. Yes, all just a single year older than we were back when 2019 ticked over into 2020. But doesnât it feel like more? Â The ongoing pandemic has brought tragedies both individual and collective, ending life for so many and altering it for everyone. We no longer feel time in the same way and nowhere was that more obvious than in sports. The realities of COVID-19 brought our beloved games to a complete halt for a four-month span that seemed interminable. If you couldnât remember what day of the week it was, or even what month, you werenât alone. Like millions of others, you might have tuned in to marble racing, Taiwanese baseball or Russian table tennis. You almost certainly treated The Last Dance like an event in itself, not just a television show. Yet the return of the major leagues is now more than five months past, beyond the length of the shutdown, and it still somehow feels like sports has only just come back. Time has been ticking, but not with uniformity, at least not in our minds. Kobe Bryantâs awful passing in a January helicopter crash that claimed the lives of eight others, including his daughter Gianna, is so fresh we not only recall where we were but how we physically felt. However, when in future years we mark modern history as being pre- or post-COVID, it is already an event from an entirely different era. Â People donât journal much anymore (who has the time?) but sports writers have a little advantage in recalling prior thought by being able to dig into our archives. So it was that on Jan. 1, a manifestly more buoyant and optimistic version of myself wrote excitedly about all the sporting treats awaiting in 2020. I positively salivated over the upcoming Tokyo Olympics, how they would be held in front of packed stadiums in a country that adores the Games like no other. I couldnât wait for the unique European soccer championships, an event for the first time making use of swift travel options to simultaneously use 12 different host countries. Both occasions hope to take place in the summer of 2021, but at this point, even completing them without major incident would be a triumph. Reduced (or maybe even no) crowds for the Olympics and a cutback on the number of Euro venues would seem to be a given. The New Year 2020 column wondered if Tom Brady would still be a member of the New England Patriots (no), whether Clayton Kershaw and the Los Angeles Dodgers would finally break through (yes), and speculated that Lamar Jackson and the Baltimore Ravens might parlay their regular season excellence into a shot at the Super Bowl (also no). I proved stating the obvious didnât end all those years ago with Kevin Campbell, when I wrote that whoever won the NBA Finals would have seriously added to their legacy (duh), though as it transpired, that was a pointed understatement. By clinching the Los Angeles Lakersâ 17th title, LeBron James now feels hot on the heels of Michael Jordan in the GOAT sweepstakes, while Anthony Davis is already a Tinseltown legend. Â And then I wrote this, which I donât really know how to contextualize. âThere will be all kinds of unexpected occurrences served up, stories and tales and plots we couldnât even begin to imagine right now.â You think? As athletic heroes got used to doing their thing without spectators, it was a reminder of how we should celebrate those who do more vital work while neither expecting nor receiving applause. The frontline workers I know are too busy and too exhausted to reflect on what they represent in the big picture, so letâs try â briefly and simply – for them. They are the superstars of life, in every way. As social injustice became the most necessary of talking points and patience ran out with civil inequality, athletes united. To varying degrees, the leagues listened. Figures like James, Patrick Mahomes and Naomi Osaka showed it is possible to be a champion in sports and also champions of a cause. Â Weâve been talking about a return to normal for a long time now, long enough that it is hard to figure out what normal will really mean when it eventually comes. When you go so long without knowing what to expect, all you can do is hope. We are hoping for better and there is reason for that hope. Just as all of us have found ways to get by and adapted to new realities, so too have the sports we care about. Sports is less important than so many other things in life but sometimes it can be a worthy metaphor for elements of it. Being able to power on through difficulty is the most sportive of traits and America, with so many other countries, has had new resiliency forced upon it. Whatever this latest New Year brings, just like before the last year, we canât begin to predict what comes next. Except that 2021 already has one thing going for it. Itâs not 2020. Â Hereâs what others have said … Shannah McCarriston, CBS Sports:Â âThis sports year was unlike any other. It was defined by a stoppage of play and a lack of games, but we still had moments of triumph, saw trailblazing athletes, major comebacks and championships that will be remembered forever. Looking back, the year will be remembered for the unknowns, the uncertainties and the adjustments made, but in between it all there were exciting and incredible moments we won’t want to forget.â Hannah Keyser, Yahoo Sports:Â âIf you look closely, the story of baseball in 2020 â played in a world reshaped by COVID-19 â is fraught and nuanced with stakes that serve to highlight existing power structures all the more plainly and painfully. The minutia matters perhaps more than ever before. Rethinking the entire future of the game suddenly seems possible or even necessary. But the real story of baseball in 2020 is that a lot of people werenât looking that closely. There was a pandemic, after all. Would-be spectators were busy, or stressed, scared and sad, and the sport they care about most didnât offer an escape but rather a reminder of why they felt that way. Even as we became accustomed to seeing them, empty stadiums reigned as the emblematic image of this past season â nothing that happened on the field mattered nearly as much to understanding the spirit of the sport this year as the total absence of fans. A lack of fans defined baseball in 2020; a lack of baseball defined many fansâ experience this year, too.â Barney Ronay, The Guardian:Â âThe lamps went out across the sporting world in the second week of March. In the months since they have flickered back on, emergency generators fired up, an ersatz version of reality winched into place, with its tinny fanfare and digitized cheers. Beneath this dressing the year in sport has been much like the year everywhere else. One of the functions of sport is to hold a mirror up to the world. In that sense 2020 did deliver, dishing up a wretched narrative of micro-decay and macro-collapse, of rancour, fear and unceasing anxiety.â |
 âFailure makes me work even harder.â â Michael Jordan |
