This was, as some of you might remember, the week following September 11, 2001, and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania). Major League Baseball was most affected, with a week's worth of games having to be postponed and rescheduled, resulting in baseball's first World Series to stretch into November. College football and the NFL ended up missing a week of games themselves, but that only amounted to one game in those sports. This was of course necessitated by the grounding of air travel in the US; indeed many of those MLB teams had a challenge getting home from the road trips on which they were engaged at the time.
I have the distinct memory, by about Friday of that week, deeply regretting that there was no game to which to go. Mind you, I was living in Tallahassee at the time, and the closest team, the Tampa Bay (Devil, at the time) Rays, were more than five hours away (and they were closer than the Atlanta Braves; I had actually measured this in the only way that made sense to me, by going to games in both places and comparing the distances). Nonetheless, that Friday night, even as I knew it was a practical impossibility, I ached for it. I ached for it, even as I was somewhat ashamed for doing so.
There was, as best as I could comprehend it, a desperate need to be among other people in a way that had even the tiniest tinge of normal to it. The week of course was filled with many different types of gatherings at churches and city halls and capitals and courthouses and all manner of other public places. But the very point of such gatherings was their not-normal-ness. The very point was the abnormality and the mind-numbing and mind-blowing horror of what had happened.
Games did resume, eventually, and while there were memorials and ceremonies at the "first game back" at minimum (and particularly pronounced ones at the first games back for the New York teams, the Mets first and then the Yankees), there was still baseball. The rules of the game were still the same. The interruption of baseball ritual by the displacement of the seventh-inning stretch with "God Bless America" (a disruption that seems to be receding somewhat but has long overstayed its appropriateness) marred the longed-for normality of a ballgame, but it was still baseball, gosh darn it.
There aren't many kinds of disruptions that can get games called off. (Whether or not this is a good thing is a discussion that is needed at some point, but this isn't the night.) A riot in a city can get that city's teams to postpone or move games, and natural disasters can sometimes cause cancellations or relocations (the Florida teams can get put off by hurricanes, as can teams in Houston, and earthquakes have been known to cause cancellations and postponements in California).
Our current situation is one in which a crime or tragedy with nationwide repercussions has no effect on the scheduling of games, but has a major effect on how said event is carried out, locally for certain and nationally in some cases. The latest instance of this is the set of responses to the murders at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, an event with definite national repercussions and reverberations but one most intensely felt in central Florida.
Though I don't know for certain (I really cannot watch every game, after all), the standard response that I would guess happened pretty much everywhere was the traditional moment of silence. That could be done, and I'd guess was done at baseball games on that Sunday, probably at the next game of the NBA Finals (that I did not get to see), and probably at a number of minor-league baseball games as well. The Orlando Magic, the city's NBA franchise, was no longer playing; that left local commemorations to Orlando City SC, the city's MLS club; Orlando Pride, their new team in the Women's Professional Soccer League; and to a secondary degree the Tampa Bay Rays; obviously they're not in Orlando, but they are the closest MLB team and it's not a crazy drive. (The Pride were away last weekend; their next home game is Thursday night.)
The Rays, to a degree, had the first chance, and coincidentally Friday night's game had already been planned as a "Pride Night"; thus the team had a ready-made vehicle for recognizing and honoring the families of the victims, and stepped up their efforts pretty effectively, it would seem; Friday night's game was a sellout. Do not underestimate the significance of this; the Rays do not get sellouts, outside of Opening Day, and sometimes not even then. Orlando City followed the next night with their own effective commemorations (another thing that just doesn't happen: a game stoppage at the 49th minute as a moment of silence was observed). The city's franchises in the Arena Football League and the East Coast Hockey League also held commemorations at their immediate next games.
On the national level perhaps the most effective commemoration, subtle but unmistakable, occurred last Thursday night, during the US Men's national team's match against Ecuador; team captain Michael Bradley took the field with his more typical captain's armband replaced with a rainbow-colored armband with the logo #OneNation emblazoned on it. The USMNT and MLS (which had been on a break for the Copa America Centenario tournament in which the USMNT was playing) had hit the airwaves with video messages of support for Orlando and the victims' families (at least one prominently featuring among its voices Sporting Kansas City's and USMNT's Graham Zusi, an Orlando native).
These commemorations are, sadly, in line with a pattern that has had the tragic opportunity to become well-established.
I really don't make any claim that any of this is wrong in any way. Sadly, with such tragedies allowed to be routine, it's only going to become an even more well-established pattern. And particularly on the local level, I really don't think a team can do any less, nor should they do so.
There is one thing I still have to caution against, though. It is a caution similar to the one expressed here, against thinking that sports can fix us. Sports might be a tool to do so, but can't do the job.
As sports can't fix us, neither can sports heal us.
Earlier today Richard Lapchick contributed this column to ESPN.com. Lapchick is no ordinary ESPN foof; he has a rather formidable title and role as the chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program in the College of Business Administration at the University of Central Florida, and the director of UCF's Institute For Diversity and Ethics in Sport. (For the Florida geography-impaired, UCF is in Orlando.) You might have heard of that Institute for its reports on such things as graduation rates and Academic Progress Rates for teams in the NCAA basketball tournament, or its "report cards" on racial and gender hiring in Major League Baseball and other big-time sports programs. Being able to be critical of big-time sports and its ethical shortfalls is part of his job.
Side note: I can't think of many things that would entice me to leave my current vocation, but if a Christian-affiliated college, university, seminary, or divinity school were ever to create that kind of institute ... I'd at least have to think about it.
Being based in Orlando, Lapchick has had a front-row seat to the city's response to the Pulse attack and to the reactions of its sports franchises in particular (he acknowledges being at both the Rays game and the Orlando City match in the article, and even speaking to Orlando City's squad last Friday). Most of what Lapchick has to say in the article I have no problem with, but there is one sentence that just can't go unchallenged:
Sports can heal and unite and can change society forever.
Forever? Really?
If you followed that link earlier you know I already have a problem with the notion that Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier didn't heal anything. It changed the US forever, yes. It opened eyes, sure. It changed many Americans, no doubt. But let us be blunt: does the United States look like a healed country to you in terms of racial relations?
Similarly, while Billie Jean King made an undeniable difference for women in sports, it would be a major stretch to suggest that women in sports have anything like equality with their male counterparts (for one example, the US Women's National Team in soccer is now embroiled in multiple legal proceedings against the US Soccer Federation over unequal pay, even though the women are vastly more successful than their male counterparts). For that matter, the United States doesn't look all that much like a healed country in terms of gender relations either.
Sporting events can be moments of respite or relief, which can be a part of a healing process. You can't grieve 24/7, and if a communal experience of catharsis in a sporting event can provide that brief period of relief or respite, all to the good.
But healing, people of faith or no faith should know, doesn't happen like that. It doesn't happen instantaneously. It is a process that takes time, and deep engagement with the source of the grief. It isn't about "getting back to normal," because that "normal" is never coming back. Some new place becomes "normal," but it's a "normal" that will never forget the attack in this case.
The survivors of the Pulse attack, or the family members and loved ones of the victims, did not wake up "healed" on Sunday because the Rays and Orlando City played games on Friday and Saturday, and they were invited. They may have awakened to the realization that many more people cared for them and empathized with them and maybe even grieved for them, felt their pain or shared their sorrow to some small degree. They may have even been able to sleep for the first time in days, who knows? But the process of healing is still only just beginning for them. And if those games and the outpouring of care and affection they showed provided even just a little bit of that relief and respite, all to the good.
But let's not put the words "heal" and "forever" together here. There are just as many homophobic people around as there were before the Pulse murders. That particular hatred is not going to end because of a couple of sporting events, any more than racism was eradicated by sporting events in the wake of the Charleston church shooting last year, or by Jackie Robinson or Hank Aaron. Sport simply isn't that powerful.
What it can do is still pretty amazing in the face of such shock and grief. Sporting events are still places where people who wouldn't even give each other the time of day elsewhere are united in common purpose. That's almost church in some ways (or a more successful example of what church would hope to do, maybe?).
Christian faith acknowledges one healer, called a Gentle Healer by some, a Wounded Healer by others, both accurate enough. Again, though, I don't think that in this case any particular religious affiliation is required to get that healing is too deep and too long a process to be accomplished by any sport, or certainly by any one game. It can be a step or a part, but it can't do it on its own, and evidently not forever.
Note the armband.
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