I was playing golf one day when it was cart path only, and from there I couldn’t see where my ball was. I shouted down to a fellow player who was walking up the fairway, asking him my distance to the green.
“Whatever you hit 150 yards,” he answered.
I replied, “That’s everything from a sand wedge to a driver. I just never know when.”
I’m not playing golf these days. I’m not doing a lot of things I normally would be doing. On Friday, March 13, I was waiting in my office to see if I would be going over to the first day of Alabama spring football practice. A lot of things, including the conclusion of the Southeastern Conference men’s basketball tournament, had been canceled, and though we didn’t know it at the time, everything was about to shut down.
An hour or two before that opening of spring practice was scheduled, word came down. Nick Saban had postponed spring football practice indefinitely and Crimson Tide players would join their University of Alabama classmates in heading off to spring break.
None of them could know that the break from Tuscaloosa would last the rest of the school year, though classes would eventually be resumed on-line. They couldn’t know that there would be no spring football practice and no summer workouts. It’s the same across the country.
Although I have a small home office, I also have an office in downtown Tuscaloosa, and ordinarily I would go there every day in which there were interviews or games to be covered. But since that unlucky Friday the 13th a month and a half ago I have been quarantined – okay, stay in place -- at our home on Yellow Creek in north Tuscaloosa County, about 40 minutes from the office.
It’s a nice place to be staying home, particularly if you like to boat, fish, take walks, and, certainly, avoid crowds. My wife, Lynne, and I make up half the year-round population of four, and until last year we were 100 percent. Most of the homes here are for summer, mostly weekends.
These days we can take the whole neighborhood on an evening pontoon boat cocktail cruise and maintain social distancing…and we do.
How isolated is it? I subscribe to the Tuscaloosa News, but I don’t ask them to bring it all the way to my house, more than 10 miles from the next nearest subscriber. Instead the News provides a mailbox for the delivery. I drive in those 10 miles, usually on the way to my office, or perhaps to go to Fields Store to get gas and catch up on the gossip from uptown Windham Springs.
I imagine my adjustment to this work schedule is unlike that of Alabama Coach Nick Saban. I suspect he is more like a caged tiger.
Like all of you, I wonder about when this horror is going to end. It is killing people and it has caused economic devastation. I understand those whose primary concern is the economy. Wasn’t it Calvin Coolidge in the Roaring 20s who said something like, “The business of America is business”? But America is also known for humanity, so this business of defeating a killer virus has to be top priority.
My business is college football, and like many reading this, I have the reasonable question, whether there will be college football in 2020. All sorts of questions surround that one. When will it start? When do teams have to have their players and coaches active in order for it to be feasible? Will the games be played in front of ten or so television cameras only or in stadiums of tens of thousands? Sub-question: Will fans shoehorn into Bryant-Denny Stadium with 100,000 or so others just because our political leadership has said “We’re open for business!”?
And speaking of business: Can college athletics and cities like Tuscaloosa afford the cost of missing a football season?
There is no shortage of interest. This year’s NFL draft of college football players, conducted in more than 100 different venues with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell in his home reading the names of those selected who were sequestered in various places and switches to cameras 4 and 5 of pro head coaches and general managers beaming at their selections, was must-see TV. We watched, because it was football.
I’ve zipped into downtown Tuscaloosa a couple of times in the last month and a half, needing to go to the Post Office or the bank, and took advantage of those trips to pop into my office thinking there is something there I need. But I don’t know what it is. I have dozens and dozens of reference books on Alabama football and basketball, floor to ceiling shelves of things like every copy of Crimson TIDE-Ings, the old newsletter service I bought from longtime Tuscaloosa News Sports Editor the late Charles Land, and over a quarter century of ’BAMA Magazine and the ’BAMA newsletter. There are also Alabama and SEC media guides and record books in football, basketball, baseball, etc. going back decades.
I know I’m going to need something from that stash.
I just never know when.
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