Sports Open Up

This is the week where many sports are opening up for the first time. Professional sports like baseball, basketball, hockey, and golf, already underway with success in dealing with the virus, will be joined by tennis and football, both college and pros, in an attempt to level the playing fields with not only each other, but the virus as well. 

College football will see action with three of the Power Five Conferences, SEC, ACC, and BIG 12 opening up, while the Big 10 and PAC 12 will not, having cancelled their entire seasons due to the virus. Two teams, Florida and Florida State are allowing between 20 to 25% of their stadium’s capacity to be used in a sign of the times.

The NFL will open tomorrow night with a game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Houston Texans. The first six to eight rows of seats will be empty to control the virus. 

Tennis at the US Open is in progress with no fans in attendance. The major news so far is the defaulting of Novak Djokovic for hitting a ball in anger, accidentally hitting a line judge in the throat. He was immediately removed from the tournament, forfeiting the $250,000 he had already won. Tennis is one sport that truly follows the rules of penalizing poor sportsmanship.

Baseball lost two great heroes this past week as Hall of Famers Lou Brock and Tom Seaver passed away. Brock, born into a family of sharecroppers in Arkansas, had a long career with the Cardinals and the Cubs, having 938 stolen bases and 900 RBI’s. When he got to first, it was pretty much a sure thing he’d get to second.

Tom Seaver, a pitcher for the Mets, compiled 311 wins in a twenty-year career, including a remarkable performance on July 9th, 1969, when he had a perfect game going against the Chicago Cubs, going into the ninth inning with no batter having gotten on base. A bunch of us had hired a bus to go into Shea Stadium and we were cheering wildly for Seaver, a great fan favorite, to pitch a perfect game, something only 23 others had done over 150 seasons and 218,400 games. He got the first batter in the ninth before Jimmy Qualls, a career .233 hitter, lined a single to left to ruin the perfect game. We were all devastated but the Mets got revenge, beating the Cubs for the NL pennant and winning the 1969 World Series

In the NHL, the Tampa Bay Lightning are up one game over the New York Islanders, having put on a clinic beating them, 8-2, in the opening game of the Eastern Conference semi-finals. Game two is tonight.

Nice to see sports arenas around the country are volunteering to allow their facilities to be used as election sites to make voting more accessible for the coming election. Both Raymond James Stadium and Amalie Arena in Tampa have joined the program. LeBron James and the NBA are also heavily involved in the effort. James telling The New York Times in June “This is the time for us to finally make a difference,…” aiming to protect African-Americans’ voting rights.