The Summer Of Covid. What Will We Remember?

Summer has ended (somewhere, somewhen, Ned Stark just told someone that “Winter is Coming,”) and with it goes the strangest sports season of most people’s lifetimes. The sports landscape looks a little brighter than it did when spring ended, as none of the major team sports has shut down, the US Open tennis and gold championships were successfully staged, and the Red Sox finally won a game against the Yankees (after an absurd 12 straight defeats, which, if the Red Sox were relevant this season, may have caused my death…or the death of my sanity at the very least).

In case you have been spending all of your time obsessing over Trump vs. Biden or who would win Best Drama at the Emmys (Succession) or fretting over the potential demise of Tik Tok, here’s some of the highlights you missed during the Summer of Covid – Sports Edition.

Bryson DeChambeau is not your ordinary pro golfer.  Never has been.  He’s always been fascinated by the science of golf and even before the golf world knew who he was, he was determined to change the way golf is played. His irons are all the same size (usually longer irons like the 3-4-5 are actually longer clubs than higher irons and wedges), and he has now famously bulked up his body (please please please let us never find out he used steroids) so that he looks more like an NFL linebacker than a golfer. He hits the ball considerably further than anyone else in the world, and this week proved most of the golf world wrong by using his bomb-it-and-hope approach to win his first major championship.  And not any major, but the US Open at Winged Foot.

The US Open is by far the toughest test for golfers in terms of accuracy, and guys who hit the ball 350 yards but don’t know for sure where it’s going are NOT supposed to have success there.  And Winged Foot is maybe the hardest US Open course there is. So naturally Bryson just pummeled the course into submission, running away from the field and ending up as the only guy under par for the week. Imagine what he might do in November to wide-open Augusta National?  Expect to hear lots of cries for golf to adapt to the new Hercules. And panicky complaints that golf may not survive this new threat.  Spoiler alert – it will be just fine.

Men’s tennis has been utterly dominated for a LOOONNGGG time by the Tremendous Threesome of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.  So much so that before this year’s US Open, nobody currently in their 20’s could claim to be a grand slam tournament winner. As an aside, if you’re not a big tennis fan, allow me to mention that that statistic is utterly insane. Since 2006, only four men not named Federer, Nadal or Djokovic have won a Grand Slam tournament.  That’s 14 years, 4 tournaments a year.

So with Federer and Nadal not playing this year, there wasn’t ANYBODY predicting a champion other than Novak. His 4^th Open title was considered a fait accompli in tennis circles; that is, until the 4^th round when he decided to lose his mind for a minute.  After playing a few bad points and going down 6-5 in the first set to Pablo Carreno Busta (who you’ve never heard of), Djokovic took a ball out of his pocket and fired it absentmindedly behind him. The ball struck a lineswoman in the throat and that was the end of his tournament. If the ball had gone ANYWHERE else, he would have gotten off with a warning or a point penalty or something else non-fatal, but the rules are the rules and he was immediately defaulted.

You can question the rule (and I have) but at the end of the day it’s his responsibility to know better. The rest of the field didn’t complain of course, and Dominic Theim jumped at the rare opportunity to win his first major without navigating the Big 3, taking the title by outlasting Alexander Zverev in a 5-set classic.

The Yankees went into this strange season as the favorites in the American League, and with good reason.  They won over 100 games the last two seasons and seemingly got better this year, adding the best pitcher on the planet, Gerrit Cole (and taking him away from their biggest competition, the Houston Astros). Plus, last season they suffered a rash of injuries that would make the NFL proud, and that still didn’t stop them from running away with the AL East.

So when they started off on fire and ran out to a 16-6 record (a 118 win pace, which would be the best ever), nobody was surprised. Then injuries hit, and Gary Sanchez and Gleyber Torres didn’t hit, and they embarked on a shockingly inept  5-15 run that would, if it continued for an entire season, pretty much make them the equivalent of the 1962 Mets (quite possibly the worst team of the modern era).  Suddenly the playoffs were in doubt, Yankees fans I know seemed thoroughly uninterested in baseball in general, and a nightmarish season for Red Sox fans suddenly had at least SOMETHING to bring the occasional smile. So naturally the Bronx Bombers then ripped off 10 straight wins to lock up a playoff spot.

Now, a week from the postseason, a Yankees run to the World Series would surprise nobody.  Other than maybe my Dad, who has pulled off the seemingly impossible combination of being a life-long fan of the most successful franchise in pro sports AND being an eternal pessimist when it comes to said team winning. He’s also managed to be a fan of the NY Rangers AND  the NY Islanders, and that’s generally considered inconceivable, so let’s just say he likes to buck convention.

The NBA stopped operating on March 11, 2020, and games resumed on July 30, 2020.  The world of course changed quite a bit during that time, and so did the NBA, in some odd ways. First, the best teams in the league pre-COVID, the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers, came back and looked mostly lost, each stumbling to a mediocre at best 3-5 record to close the regular season.  The Bucks promptly lost to the Heat in a pretty big upset (without the uncertainty of this COVID-split season it would have been an all-time upset), but the Lakers have mostly righted the ship as they now are in the Western Conference Finals against the Denver Nuggets.

But what has been most memorable about the conclusion of the NBA season has been the emergence of Jimmy Butler and Anthony Davis as the best players in the Orlando bubble.  Now, its not like these guys weren’t already well known super-stars 6 months ago, and it’s not like LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo (yes, I clearly had to look up the spelling) and Kawhi Leonard aren’t going to be 3 of the best players in the NBA next year (if not the 3 BEST).  But Jimmy Butler has willed the Heat to greatness over the last few weeks, surprising the Bucks and looking like they may get past the Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals and who knows maybe with the whole thing, and Anthony Davis has been the MVP of the Lakers, doing EVERYTHING on both the offensive and defensive end of the floor. So far, they are definitely the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck of the Magic Kingdom.  

If you play fantasy football, you know how enormous an impact injuries can have on your team. Of course, you probably would also notice that if you just follow a REAL football team, but that’s beside the point. Week 1 featured a HUGE number of injuries, and some of it was likely attributable to the truncated training camps and no preseason games.  And then Week 2 was an unmitigated disaster, as a TON of big names were hurt, many lost for the season. You could make an excellent roster just from the Week 2 injury list, including 3 starting quarterbacks (Jimmy Garoppolo, Drew Lock and Tyrod Taylor), the top 2 picks in most fantasy drafts (Saquon Barkley and Christian McCaffrey), Week 1’s top wide receiver (Davante Adams) an offensive line that Jim Brown would be proud to run behind, and a pretty solid front 7.

The effect on my two fantasy football teams has been devastating, and frankly I’m disappointed with the overall lack of media coverage about this.  Must be that liberal bias I’m always hearing about. Anyway, let’s hope the rash of injuries slows down and only the usual insane number of serious injuries occur in this absurdly dangerous sport we all love.