With the arrival of June a bit of normalcy is returning to everyday life. Not totally, of course; that’s still a long way off. But while the pandemic hasn’t abated, sports is talking about getting back to work sooner than later, though to start it will be in arenas that are more like TV studios with no fans in the stands. At least until football season, which is messing with plans for having crowds of 25,000 or so socially-distanced fans on hand. We’ll leave that for a future discussion as plans become clearer in the next few weeks.
In the meantime, let’s take a look at some of the good, bad and ugly things that happened in and to sports while most of us had our heads down.
So what’d you do during the pandemic? For Bob Kraft it was raising $1 million to help folks affected adversely by the Covid-19 via auctioning off his Super Bowl ring from the Atlanta comeback, along with sending his plane to China to deliver medical supplies to NYC. For Tom Brady it was his TB-12 company capitalizing on it by pushing 30-day supplies of “immunity supplements” for $45.
Ex-Patriot Chad Johnson also dropped a $1,000 tip for a $37 tab at a Cooper City, Florida, restaurant with this note written on the receipt: “Sorry about the pandemic, hope this helps.”
Loved the great Red Auerbach line Dan Shaughnessy mentioned in his column on her Celtics connections upon the passing of sportscasting pioneer Phyllis George. She was married to one-time Celtics owner John Y. Brown, whom Red hated, and when John Y. was running for governor of Kentucky not too long after selling his interest in the C’s he advised bluegrass voters, “you better watch out because he’ll probably try and trade the Kentucky Derby for the Indianapolis 500.”
Also dying during the siege, though not all from the coronavirus, were:
Tom Dempsey – the New Orleans kicker whose miraculous record-setting 63-yard FG to beat Detroit as the gun sounded in 1970 happened despite a birth defect that cost him half his kicking foot.
Bobby Mitchell – the Hall of Famer RB/WR was the first African American to play for the Redskins when the NFL’s most southern city became its last team to integrate in 1962. He was traded there by Cleveland for reigning Heisman Trophy winner Ernie Davis to form a spectacular all-Syracuse backfield with Jimmy Brown. Sadly the doomed Davis died of leukemia before ever playing a down for Cleveland.
Bob Watson – A solid .295 lifetime hitter who hit .334 for the Sox in 1979, four years after scoring baseball’s millionth run. He later hired the then-maligned Joe Torre to manage the Yanks during a short stint as GM.
Best local back-in-the-day Twitter line goes to political gadfly Grant Bosse, who wrote after the Pats got ripped off in the Rob Gronkowski trade, “if we can only get a fourth for Gronk, what can we get for John Hannah?”
The best pandemic Twitter video was the “you get what you deserve for not social distancing” moment of a guy drilling his just-two-feet-behind-him nitwit friend in the head with his backswing while hitting off a batting tee.
On the bright side the likely cancellation of the rest of the regular NBA season probably gives us an extra year of LeBron James, which based on his 25.7 scoring average cost him 514 points.That leaves him exactly 4,300 (34,087) behind Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s all-time high 38,387 points. That means instead of being in range to pass Jabbar near the end of 2021-2022, it’s now more likely he’ll have to play in 2022-2023 for the record to fall.
The Patriots unveiled new uniforms. While I do really like the new/old home blue on blue uniforms they’ve worn on Sunday and Monday night games, my only reaction is, would the Yankees go away from the pinstripes for the sake of merchandising? Classic, iconic teams like the Pats have to stick with tradition; otherwise they’re just like everyone else. So boooooo!
I can’t wait for the games, any games, to start just so talk radio, the newspapers and pundits will stop blathering on about everything Tom Brady, and I mean everything — Belichick, golf, TB-12 and the 97 “real” reasons various experts are saying for why he left. Ditto for exhausting and redundantly vapid chatter on Jarrett Stidham. Get over it. Brady’s now one of them and Stidham’s the guy.
Finally, to those who think Coach B can’t win with a fourth-round choice as his QB: Forget the “Brady was taken 199th” argument. In 2008 he won 11 games with a guy taken 230th overall who hadn’t started or played meaningful time in any game since high school. By year’s end Matt Cassel had put four 40-plus-point games on the board, including 49 and 47 in Weeks 15 and 16. They did miss the playoffs, but after tying Miami for best record in the AFC, it was on, like the 58th tie breaker, which made them the only 11-win team this century to not make the playoffs.
So relax, people.