We cannot lie – this women’s basketball drought…this WNBA drought….this sports drought has been one of the saddest periods in our lives.
While attention has shifted to a much more pertinent cause – saving lives from the wrath of the coronavirus and ending this Covid-19 stuff once and for all, it has left a large sports-filled hole in all of our hearts.
And while we know all of these sports will eventually return in one way, shape or another, it would be remiss to think about what has already been lost now – and what will all eventually be lost by the time this pandemic has been contained.
Even this year. We were supposed to have been treated to an unforgettable NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament with marquee college programs such as Oregon, Baylor, South Carolina, Maryland, Louisville and others looking to be the last team standing at Smoothie King Center in New Orleans. The storyline of Sabrina Ionescu, Ruthy Hebard and Satou Sabally closing out their college careers with the Ducks or Dawn Staley winning another national championship as a coach before heading to Tokyo to guide Team USA to a seventh consecutive national championship.
Because of this virus, we were all robbed of that. The athletes and coaches that put so much into this season only to see it snatched away in the most cruel of ways. Their college careers – no, their basketball careers will always have a huge incomplete on them because of this outbreak of coronavirus.
Sports can be something we all take for granted because on a typical, day-to-day basis, we are surrounded by them every day. It does not even have to be an actual game going on. Look at our televisions – we want to make sure we have ESPN, NBA TV, CBS Sports Network, ABC, ESPN2, TSN, SportsNet and League Pass to ensure we never miss a game. We have the ESPN, WNBA and NBA apps on our phones as well.
There is another saying that is as old as time itself … Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder. This is true in life and now, more than ever, it is true for sports.
One crazy irony of this from a WNBA perspective – is that when the Covid-19 outbreak really began to hit the sports realm hard, another story began to gain a bit of steam. That story was the Penny Toler lawsuit she filed against the Los Angeles Sparks. In said suit, she alleged that she was pushed out of the organization for blowing the whistle on supposed illicit trysts going on in LA’s front office. The document mentioned Christine Simmons, Eric Holoman and Dallas Wings coach Brian Agler as signature names.
That suit might as well have been filed last year since we have become engulfed with news regarding the outbreak. Also, given how the outbreak’s impact on life as a whole has been pronounced, we wish were talking about the Toler lawsuit more instead of a life-threatening disease that has left the immediate future of sports – including the 2020 WNBA season – up in the air.
It would even be more cruel if the 2020 season were to be altered in any way, shape or form. With the Olympics also being postponed to 2021, it does give Cathy Engelbert a bit of wiggle room in case we start to see this outbreak taper off by early or mid-June. The way this virus is progressing and how it has already affected heavily populated areas the most – including New York, California and Washington state, even that appears to be on the most optimistic end of the spectrum.
Sports will return eventually … in all of its glory, but their return will not entirely be joyous as it will be bittersweet. Because even when they do return, they will have returned all too late as the damage from this virus has already been done.
Hopefully, though, this will be a lesson to all of us – as women’s basketball fans, as WNBA fans and as sports fans in general to never take sports for granted ever again. Because as enjoyable as sports are, it can be twice as painful when they are missing.
