Having lived in the United States for 20 years, I’m a huge fan of baseball, a pretty big fan of the NFL, and I watch the NHL when I get a chance.
But I also retain a love for both rugby codes, league and union, from my formative years, and over the past couple of months I’ve been watching quite a lot of the National Rugby League competition from Australia, which has recently entered its playoff period. Yesterday, I also watched one of the highlights of the trans-Tasman rugby union year, the first match of the Bledisloe Cup series between Australia and New Zealand.
The sports of rugby league and rugby union are quite different from baseball and American football and hockey, but what struck me the most watching them this week, while I’ve also been watching NFL games and the MLB playoffs, was not the games themselves.
Here are some screen grabs from the games I watched yesterday. The first couple are from the South Sydney - Parramatta game in the NRL, and the others are from the Bledisloe Cup game:
Yes, those are crowds. Without masks. At a sporting event.
I know that, in a deadly pandemic that has killed over 200,000 Americans it might be crass to boil it down to sports, but I’m not sure that there’s a more obvious and public and keenly-watched daily symbol of America’s failure on this front than its major sporting leagues. Vast, empty stadiums, filled with nothing but some cardboard cutouts and artificial noise, all necessitated by the fact that we just can’t fucking do this properly.
I know it’s somewhat easier for places like Australia and New Zealand. They’re islands, after all; easier to insulate from world affairs. But America’s pandemic problem has not been, at least after the initial infections, a problem of tourists and immigrants importing cases. Sydney is a city with a metro population of over 5 million people, and it has had to deal with COVID cases, but it’s managed to do it and prevent massive spreading. If Sydney can do it, Phoenix or Atlanta or Houston, all of which aren’t that different in their metro area sizes, should be able to do it too, to say nothing of smaller cities and towns.
For good or ill, sports are often used in America, as in other places, as a sort of symbol for society’s values or its priorities or its culture. I wonder if the Americans who have gathered in front of state houses with their guns and their flags, who refuse to wear masks, who refuse to avoid large gatherings, and who think that COVID is an overblown flu or a liberal hoax, are happy with these massive, empty sports stadiums as a symbol of American freedom?