Now exactly a month has elapsed since sports took the lead on reacting to and mitigating the coronavirus, so if you'd like, take a moment to reflect on one of the top contemporary examples of visionary leadership.
A startling announcement crackled through America's nervous system at 9:31 p.m. on March 11, minutes after the Utah Jazz and the host Oklahoma City Thunder inexplicably left the floor instead of tipping off inside Chesapeake Energy Arena: The NBA would suspend play indefinitely.
What? Indefinitely?
At noon the next day, I spoke with Penguins analyst Phil Bourque, who was in Columbus awaiting that night's game against the Blue Jackets. There are few more pleasing diversions in life than talking hockey with Phil Bourque, but when I reached him in his Ohio hotel room, neither of us knew how little there'd be to talk about from that point forward, or that the NHL season was about to shut down. "Paused," was the term the league selected. We're still on pause. Another delicious Penguins-Flyers melodrama might have started on Wednesday of this week. That same day, baseball's spring training ended abruptly.
On March 13, the Masters and the Boston Marathon were postponed, and the day after that, casinos started closing, March Madness disappeared before it could start, and, within a week, just about everything from the Kentucky Derby to the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee were shoved out of their traditional places on the calendar.
But first we need to return to Adam Silver, the guy you can only dream would handle the daily briefing of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Silver, for the last six years the commissioner of the NBA and its deputy commish the eight years before that, knew by early March what the top officials of the U.S. government did not effectively understand by early April. I'll note the churches aren't full this Easter Sunday, something the head cheerleader was screeching about as late as March 24.
Silver, a leader rather than a cheerleader, had spent decades building multi-dimensional relationships and synergies across a range of international business platforms. A graduate of Duke and the University of Chicago Law School, Silver's reputation as a voracious consumer of information and data might well have risen to its signature moment when he shut down an entire sport while governments at every level fiddled indecisively.
"His action was instrumental at getting the political will and the economic will across the country over the hump," infectious disease physician Rishi Desai said in an interview with USA Today, "to switch us from one mode or thinking to another and get us to realize this is no longer an inconvenience; it's a national emergency."
Three weeks later, with his health care workers about to be overwhelmed with new COVID-19 cases, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker stopped pleading with the feds and instead started pleading with somebody who gets something done _ the New England Patriots.
"He called and said, "I'm so (expletive) frustrated ... I have had a couple of big batches of PPE (personal protective devices) and at the end of the day they just haven't come through,'" Patriots president Jonathan Kraft told a Boston radio station. "And he said, 'We just, through a third party, secured well over 1 million masks, N95s, in China. But we have no way of getting them here. The supply chains are totally frozen. Do you think people who have airplanes would be willing to fly over?' "
Soon the Patriots' 767 was flying for China, where a frantic ground operation filled its cargo hold with 1.2 million masks in two hours, 57 minutes, three minutes less than the Chinese government would allow the plane to be on the ground.
This came less than two weeks after President Trump's gutless "We're not a shipping clerk," admonition to the nation's governors. Turned out the Patriots were so much more than a shipping clerk. They knew a thing or 10 about leadership, compassion, urgency, strategy, all the things that make sports great in spite of itself.
These kinds of inspired efforts both from the players and executives in every team in every sport put aspects of the federal government's response to the worst crisis of our lifetimes to shame.
This was the week when small business owners everywhere started to get a sense of abandonment. Businesses across Pennsylvania were complaining to the Small Business Administration about long holds on applications and confusing and contradictory information amid growing fear that the federal agency can even deliver what's been promised.
This was also the week when the Los Angeles Times reported the following:
"Although President Trump has directed states and hospitals to secure what supplies they can, the federal government is quietly seizing orders, leaving medical providers across the country in the dark about where the material is going and how they can get what they need to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.
"Hospital and clinic officials in seven states described the seizures in interviews over the past week. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is not publicly reporting the acquisitions, despite the outlay of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, nor has the administration detailed how it decides which supplies to seize and where to reroute them.
"Officials who've had materials seized also say they've received no guidance from the government about how or if they will get access to the supplies they ordered. That has stoked concerns about how public funds are being spent and whether the Trump administration is fairly distributing scarce medical supplies."
So those of us who like to keep sports in broad perspective, placed purposefully as a diversion rather than a passion, might now have to admit that maybe they are more important than we've realized. Sports entities, scientists, front line warriors and all who assist them will lead the way out of this mess. The federal bureaucracy in general and the administration in particular, were it even capable of embarrassment, might want to take some notes.
