Now These Games Feel Like an Escape

What did you watch Wednesday night--CNN or ESPN?

What did you watch on TV--news from Baghdad or college basketball?

What did you want--reports from the front or relief from the grief?

We all have decisions to make.

Channels to change.

Views or news to choose.

Information we need to know. Information we don’t need to know.

It’s OK.

It’s OK to watch a basketball game being played while a war is being waged.

It’s OK to prefer a sports report to a casualty report.

It isn’t un-American.

It isn’t inappropriate or indurate or inhumane.

It is natural and understandable and, at times, even uncontrollable.

So, don’t apologize.

Don’t be sorry for going straight to the sports section so you can find out how your favorite teams made out last night.

Don’t feel guilty or ghoulish about saying or thinking that this Iraq thing might interfere with your weekend plans for watching football, or your party preparation for Super Bowl Sunday.

People need their sports.

I know that now.

When an earthquake struck San Francisco, taking lives, on the night a World Series baseball game was about to be played there, I made the mistake of suggesting that the world could do without a World Series for one year, out of sympathy for the situation, out of respect for the dead.

I was wrong.

That’s what people told me, in no uncertain terms.

I was informed that Americans need their toys and games, need them to relieve the anxiety and pain, need them to make the dark clouds go away, to bring the rest of the world to a stop so they could get off.

I listened.

I understood.

I capitulated.

The only thing I asked was that somebody please diagram for me the boundaries of suitable and unsuitable behavior. When was it necessary to postpone and when was it proper to proceed? How many lives had to be lost? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? Must they be American lives or could they be anybody’s lives? And who was qualified to decide?

Unanswerable, I was told.

Stop proselytizing, I was scolded.

It goes case by case, I was assured. No set rules. No contingency measures. No way to make such determinations in advance.

So, OK then.

Earthquakes, well, they were natural disasters, God’s will, unforeseeable and spontaneous. Tornadoes and tidal waves, too. You get up, you dig out, you go on.

Illnesses and deaths were unavoidable and unpredictable, part of the natural order of things, tragic but beyond human restraints. You suffer, you grieve, you go on.

But war?

War affects the whole world. War rages on foreign shores, far from our own front doors. War is something to be watched on television, to be read about in newspapers, to be informed about by telephone or, under tragic circumstances, by telegram. War never happens here. It happens somewhere else.

And when it does, we go about our business and we go about our pleasure.

We go to sporting events. We attend them, discuss them, read about them, write about them. We want them to happen. We need them to happen.

At least some of us do.

We cannot tell why college teams from Kansas and Miami play their particular game as scheduled while teams from North Carolina and North Carolina State call their game off.

But we understand.

We have no idea why NHL teams resume normal activity while NFL teams weigh the possibility of delaying events that are not to occur for days, or even weeks.

But we understand.

We do worry about appearances. We wouldn’t want anybody to wonder why the sports page of a newspaper had the insensitivity to print the results of a hockey game without any accompanying disclaimer that perhaps this game should never have been played.

We do not want anybody to brand us forever as a toy department, too silly to be taken seriously, too childish to comprehend the relative insignificance of everything we do or say. And yet, we want to be true to what we are and to what we do, to be good sports and not poor sports, to provide a service to those who can stomach no more truth from the “real” world, to offer a little pleasant diversity from athletic adversity, to be precisely what Justice Earl Warren depended upon us to be when he said that he headed straight for the sports page when he needed a respite from the horrors of Page One.

So, if they want to keep playing their little games, it’s OK by us.

Let the games continue.

The basketball games, the hockey games, the football games.

And feel free to watch them.

And if you don’t, don’t worry.

Because someone will always be there to let you know how they turned out.

Because that’s what some of us do.

SPORTS REACTION: C9