A Year in Sports
BG: Allow Tristan and I to be the latest in an unending stream of Blog Guys writing about what it was like to watch sports this year. Since this is Forget the Protocol, prepare for some strange reflections and tennis.
Before we do, a preamble.
One of the most popular phrases in sportswriting this year was “sports are the reward of a functioning society.” I even used it in my Northwestern football preview.
I’ve come to think it is a really bad turn of phrase.
Sports are not an ethereal concept that develops under the right sociological conditions. Sports just are. There were soccer leagues in POW camps, high school football teams during segregation, and even slapstick comedy movies made about football played in prison. And don’t even get Tristan started on the Romans’ obsession with chariot racing as their empire fell apart. Sports continued to happen in 2020 because sports cannot be turned off.
At times it was shocking, but almost immediately it became extremely normal to watch football on a Sunday like you always did, just with a little less crowd noise and guys on the sidelines unsure of what masks are supposed to accomplish. When you crack the surface, the return of sports extended down to city soccer leagues and high school cross-country meets. You just can’t stop it.
I think there are ways to write engaging personal essays about how sportswatching in 2020 was weird. Where a great number of bloggers will try and fail in their 2020 recap is by trying to attach grander meaning about life or capitalism or human behavior to a banal subject.
Sports are background noise, they are the soundtrack to the sports fan’s life, mostly played softly below the action and occasionally crescendoing to a more prominent role. This year, sports were no more important than they were last year, no less important than they were the year before that. As they always have been, sports in 2020 were an empty vessel in which you could place your priors to create your narrative. A hedonistic ritual driven by the wanton desires of Television Executives. An important bonding ritual for a world driven apart by plague. An outlet for political expression and social change. A misallocation of resources during a crisis. Whatever you wanted to see, you could find in sports this year. You always can.
Here’s what we saw.
February 29: Northwestern Women’s Basketball Wins The Big Ten Championship
BG: The beforetimes seem so long ago.
2019-2020 was the greatest season in Northwestern basketball history. The women’s team stormed to win a Big Ten title in a way that was electrifying and exciting, and it felt like basketball culture at Northwestern had turned the corner.
The team was great. Abi Scheid was a flamethrower for a full season. Lindsay Pulliam’s mastery of the mid-range was unmatched. A litany of guards were pests on one end and attackers on the other. There was even good center play, a rarity in the Joe McKeown era of basketball.
Clinching the Big Ten title at home in front of an actual crowd (what a concept!) was an extraordinarily cool feeling.
TJ: This was probably the high point of my sports year. After a rather depressing phase in the program’s history, Northwestern winning the Big Ten in 2020 was both unexpected and sweet. This was the best basketball team Northwestern has ever assembled.
BG: I can’t help but wonder what Northwestern basketball looks like in a world where Covid didn’t happen. It felt like that Illinois game could have been the springboard for a real fan culture to develop around women’s basketball. All the pieces were there. The team was winning, the team was cool, and people had actually gone to see them. Now, the program will be back to square one in terms of community support.
I hope they can pick up where they left off. I’ll make more of an effort to support once it’s safe to do so. Will others? I’m not sure.
March 1: Washington Wizards 124, Golden State 110
BG: What was the last normal thing you did before lockdowns started? For me, there were two things I remember crisply and cleanly before bugging out of the city to be with my parents as lockdowns were imminent.
First was going to a solid B+ Italian restaurant with a friend and his girlfriend. I have since eaten outdoors at a restaurant twice, but have no plans to eat indoors again until Bill Gates personally plants a microchip into my arm with that sweet, sweet vaccine.
Second was the above horrible basketball game I was paid to attend.
In a life prior to this one, I was working in event marketing and was out in the Bay Area to personally attend a suite at the Warriors’ sparkly new stadium and play host for the dozen or so loyalty rewards program members who had bought the seats.
It was an awesome time. I met some cool people who were over the moon to be taking in the game from these extremely nice seats, I was eating catered food and even sneaking a beer as the event drew to a close, and was being paid real money to do so. I even got to jaunt down to Monterrey afterwards and play Pasatiempo with my dad.
Two weeks later, I was let go from that job. Event marketing for a travel industry client, it turns out, was not the most Covid-proof job.
I’ll remember a lot about that job, that event, and the five-month whirlwind between bouncing out of a job I had learned to hate and being let go from a job I learned to love. Having a panic attack at 5:30 AM outside of O’Hare airport because someone was threatening to walk off a job for an event that was to start in two days. Becoming familiar with Newark airport after my fifth time through it in two months. How the Warriors’ stadium felt like it had made all of the worst parts of Bay Area Tech Guys real, through its disinterested crowds, its overwrought mid-timeout entertainment, and its overall soullessness made even more heinous by the Oakland it left behind.
TJ: Fun fact: the last time I saw Beng in-person was for a pit stop at a ramen restaurant in Washington DC during December 2019 right after the aforementioned O’Hare panic attack. He was very stressed.
BG: That slice of life feels so foreign to me now. At least I got to see Bradley Beal drop 20 first quarter points on a G-League team masquerading as a defending Western Conference Champion.
March 11: NBA Season Suspended
BG: The NBA season coming to a screeching halt was for a great many the moment when the pandemic felt real. I am not going to write about that because it bores me.
I will instead write about Rudy Gobert.
Back when one player getting sick was enough to put the entire league on hold, Rudy Gobert spent the end of an interview feeling up microphones with his hands before taking a Covid test and discovering that he in fact had contracted the novel coronavirus.
That moment will be the enduring image of the pandemic in America for me, more so than masked people standing six feet apart or of overcrowded hospitals. Perhaps that is dumb. But between the arrogance shown that even in those early days was transparent and the litany of whitewashing profiles trying to paint his actions as anything other than mind numbingly and offensively stupid, Gobert owns a special place in the lexicon of 2020.
TJ: This was the day before my 23rd birthday. The next day, I walked into my office on 19th Street for the last time as an employee at that rather miserable company. Everyone celebrated, and my coworkers and I went out for drinks afterward. We expected to be back in the office in about six weeks.
In hindsight, was my bar trip as dangerous as Gobert’s mic fiasco? Potentially. That doesn’t change how callous and stupid Gobert’s mic touching show was.
March 28: KBO Opening Day
BG: It wasn’t that long ago that we were so desperate for live contests that the Korean Baseball Organization was the talk of the town.
I watched an ESPN stream of two teams (I forget which) playing a baseball game in an empty stadium. I knew none of the players but knew enough to know that I was watching no better than AAA ball.
It was awesome.
Empty arenas are underappreciated. The crack of the bat is one of the best sounds in sports. Sitting in a basement late at night after being fired and taking in some baseball was like a bowl of warm chicken soup.
TJ: Appreciation for the KBO is long overdue. Also, shoutout to the Mother Country for being a large democracy that successfully a shit about the pandemic.
April 19: The Last Dance Premieres
BG: The Last Dance filled a very large void in the early days of the pandemic. Other than the NFL Draft, a weirdly spectacle-ized event for “just reading off some names at a lectern,” The Last Dance was the first thing that felt like a communal experience after All This started.
The “documentary” was flawed. Fatally so. Too often, an expansive look at the most dominant athlete of his generation became more of an ad for Nike Products and Jordan’s Brand than anything close to an inquisitive and challenging look at a mythicized persona. I often think about what the Discourse around the documentary would have been if it came out in a regular year. As it was, it earns endless credit for just being something that I could do each Sunday and know that lots of other people were doing the same thing with me.
TJ: I did not finish The Last Dance.
June 21: Adria Tour Cancelled
BG: Welcome to Part One of Novak Djokovic Discourse. Novak’s No Good Very Bad Horrible Year began in earnest in June where he and several of his Tennis Guy Friends decided it was time to host a multi-city tennis tournament complete with fans. It lasted about a few days until a handful of players contracted Covid and the event was promptly and without fanfare canceled permanently.
Other than a very clearly not quite right Grigor Dimitrov laboring through a match at the Adria Tour whilst probably infected with COVID-19, the visual people will remember was a gaggle of tennis professionals, including Djokovic, Dimitrov and other stars Dominic Thiem and Noted Domestic Abuser Sascha Zverev partying indoors at a club. It was a helluva visual, especially considering Djokvic’s genuflections towards anti-vax and anti-science nonsense trash during lockdown.
This was a year full of people acting dangerously. Everyone’s bar is different than their neighbors. I went to see my parents for Thanksgiving. I self-isolated for a week, but does that really matter? I had a few drinks outside. You maybe went inside for a meal. I for one struggle to get upset at anyone for doing what the government tells them is safe, even if there are things that I think are pretty clearly unsafe (like eating indoors!).
TJ: I can assure you that I have done many, many unsafe and selfish things, but I also think I escaped heavy criticism since I went about it with the right attitude (e.g. not posting about it). It turns out that a great deal of Covid moral judgment involves simply having the right attitude and going through the motions, not the actions that you perform. The virus, being an act of nature, is so capricious that aside from being a hermit, you are at risk 100% of the time. Basically, if you don’t pretend everything is normal while doing normal things, you can kinda get a pass, which is definitely driving public health officials crazy.
BG: On the other hand, if you’re a public figure with millions, acting like everything is hunky-dory rightfully comes off as despicable. Novak Djokovic has a gazillion fans and even more dollars. He could stay inside his mansion for a year and have a grand ole time. That he instead chose to host a bacchanalian tour around Eastern Europe and start a minor international incident is a staggeringly Dumb Guy decision and the first step towards a PR horror show of a year that dropped him from “admirable athlete who is a bit of a freak and kinda weird” to “genuinely bad dude.”
August 9: Colin Morikawa Wins the PGA Championship
BG: The PGA Tour in 2020 was The Year Of Bryson Dechambeau, he of the insufferable pseudo-science, awful clothes and haircut, and evermore bloated physique.
It made Colin Morikawa’s breakthrough major win all the more satisfying.
Morikawa is a flusher. Already one of the best ball strikers on tour, there’s a pretty obvious future where he learns to putt even a little bit and becomes one of the best players on the planet week-in-week-out. Maybe it’s a niche opinion, but that kind of player, a maestro with his irons and perhaps a bit shaky elsewhere, is easily the most fun kind of golfer to watch, certainly far more fun than watching Dechambeau’s caveman driver-wedge routine.
Morikawa won the tournament by getting up-and-down from 293 yards on the par 4 16th.
Just an unfathomably good shot from a special talent.
August 26: Bucks Strike During Game 5
TJ: It goes without saying that sports were relegated to the background during the summer.
While the Milwaukee Bucks’ strike and the wave of wildcat strikes that followed throughout professional sports may have seemed spontaneous and directly connected to the shooting of Jacob Blake or the murder of George Floyd, it is, without question, a moment that stems from an interminable, indescribable morass of anguish. I worry that our memories of the event and of the entire summer will hinge on these flashpoints when, in the moment, all one could feel was rage, grief, and agony caused by a lifetime of injustices from police brutality and systemic racism.
Full disclosure: I spent a good chunk of the summer protesting around the streets of Washington DC. During the protests and while reading/seeing what occurred in this country, it was sobering to listen to the billions of traumas experienced by Black America filtering through the smoke, tear gas, and social media posts. Ordinary people, friends, coworkers, athletes, artists, writers all spoke and urged action. Yet I had to listen! It would’ve been inhuman to keep ignoring the atrocities of white supremacy, and it was inhuman that I had shamefully looked away in the past!
Of course, at some level, these actions were madness. Going out unarmed and getting surrounded in a crowd by a battalion of armed cops (and eventually soldiers) doesn’t make sense. Neither does boycotting a playoff game with one’s lifelong dreams and millions of dollars at stake. Yet it was truly, utterly, irrevocably unavoidable. It just...happened. I was reminded of a famous passage from James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son where he describes the aftermath of the 1943 Harlem riot that began when a white policeman shot Robert Bandy, a Black soldier.
“In order to really hate white people, one has to blot out so much out of the mind—and the heart—that this hatred becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily; the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one’s own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black. One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene...The idea of going through life as a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally unbearable is the risk of swelling up slowly, in agony, with poison. And the trouble, finally, is that the risks are real even if the choices do not exist.”
This summer was an expression of the individual agony of this American reality. It was the cry of millions faced with real risks and no choices, hounded into a corner with endless compromises, terror, and equivocations, only for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others to still be gone. Meanwhile, white supremacy was brazenly illustrated the night before the boycott when a white counter-protestor murdered two people and then ran past the police without even getting arrested. Frankly, it was impossible to keep on keeping on.
It is all too easy to remember these strikes as an isolated story. Since the dawn of recorded history, the powers that be ensure the release point often garners more attention than the long arc of suffering. It’s why Nat Turner is conflated with “treasonous uprising” while thousands of unnamed and unashamed slaveholders get to slip away into the perfidy of “the way things were done back then”.
Remember, the Bucks did not just boycott the game to prove a point or make a statement. Like the protestors on the streets, they did it to stand for justice, but they also did it because there was nothing else that could be felt or done.
“What we did was nothing to get notoriety for,” George Hill said in an interview. “It was nothing that we were doing for a publicity stunt...It's something that we did from our heart. We were tired of different things going on in this world. We wanted action; we wanted things to be held accountable. And we decided to do this as a team.”
The sports world stopped playing because there was nothing left they could do. To go on was more than anyone could be expected to bear. For me, that is the main story, not the boycott itself.
BG: The wildcat strike ahead of Game 5 is such a fascinating moment, largely because we know so little about what its legacy is going to be.
One of the players who helped broker an end to the strike, Lebron James, was the one who earned the plaudits as Sportsperson of the Year from every legacy media org. George Hill, the Bucks player who probably did the most to push for the strike, was traded in the offseason. The NBA returned. The NBA and its owners promised to Do More. The NBA is back again for its 2021 season, and other than the empty arenas and poor mask usage, it doesn’t look much different. The NBA arenas becoming polling places were a good step, but it’s a drop in the bucket.
It is easy to say that the strike was a flash in the pan, a short break from sports that was temporary. But it was an unprecedented movement that affected more than just basketball (baseball teams and even tennis went on sabbatical as well). Will we see more things like this? We will undoubtedly get more heinous acts of police violence in cities with professional sports teams. Moments like this summer will continue to present themselves.
The strike felt revolutionary. It was revolutionary. But whether or not a revolution comes in sports is an unresolved question.
September 6: The Italian Grand Prix
TJ: For years, the Formula 1 community got endless mileage around one stat: Kimi Raikkonen’s 2013 Australian Grand Prix victory for Lotus was the last time a team not named Mercedes, Red Bull, or Ferrari had won a race. In parallel to the shift toward total global oligarchy during the 2010s, Formula 1 has been completely dominated by Mercedes for six years. Red Bull, and Ferrari were the only possible challengers who could occasionally knock them off. Every other team might as well not even try to win.
Thankfully, Pierre Gasly and AlphaTauri put that stat to bed.
Even before the lockdown, 2020 was set to be even more of a cakewalk for Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton. Yet the F1 gods decided to have some fun this year by giving us some extremely strange results and tracks resurrected from the dustbin of history to make the season bearable. For FTP, the most important of these strange occurrences was Pierre Gasly’s win in Monza.
Gasly’s odds to win at Monza were something like +20000. He started 10th and had, on a good day, the fifth-best car on the grid. Yet in an utterly bizarre chain reaction of events that could only really happen in a Formula 1 race, Gasly emerged victorious.
Here’s a simple summary: Ooh, shitty car breaks down in front of the pit lane! Lewis Hamilton—big lead, but wait, rule infraction? Yes, big penalty. Gasly made a stop before, now he leads!
Yet even that penalty would’ve been survivable had Charles Leclerc not thrown his Ferrari into the barriers, which caused the race to be stopped. That bunched up the whole field and ultimately dropped Hamilton to last. In first sat Pierre Gasly, who successfully leapfrogged everyone else. With Valtteri Bottas once again driving like crap and Max Verstappen sidelined with mechanical failures, it was suddenly set up for Pierre Gasly and Carlos Sainz Jr. to battle for the win.
It was at this moment that I frantically texted Ben to wake up and see a unique Formula 1 spectacle: a stunning upset win.
BG: I did in fact nearly miss this entire race due to Being Sleepy.
F1 for me was a quarantine-fueled development. It was on, the Netflix show was dope, I was in. Gasly was a rootable character, a talented young driver thrust into a weird position at Red Bull and demoted at the first sign of distress. He has been my guy. Thankfully, he held off Carlos Sainz and improbably won the race, thus proving my faith was warranted.
That being said, trying to get other friends into F1 is an uphill battle. Yeah, there are like two interesting overtakes a season. No, no one other than Lewis Hamilton will win the championship. Yes, 15 cars are not competitive. Races like Monza are too few and far between, but the drama of cars going at 300 kph wheel-to-wheel is still hard to top. Free George Russell immediately.
September 6: Novak Djokovic Hits Ball At Line Judge’s Throat
BG: Holy shit, remember this? Remember when Novak Djokovic was going to win his fourth consecutive slam but then decided to hit a forehand straight into the trachea of a line judge?? REMEMBER WHEN THAT HAPPENED????
Part Two of Novak Djokovic’s Year From Hell was one of the most disorienting moments in sports. It was a baffling moment of complete brain dead-ness that is still so hard to parse.
Djokovic was on his way to yet another Most Impressive Stretches In Tennis History, even pushing through a pandemic-forced hiatus in the middle of his streak. Up until that fourth round matchup against Pablo Carreno Busta, Djokovic hadn’t lost a match in 2020. Then, after losing his serve, he, a grown man in full control of his faculties, whipped a forehand that drilled a line judge.
For Djokovic, it’s a moment that could very well do real damage to his legacy. He will easily pass Roger Federer’s career slam mark, but he still needs to catch Rafael Nadal, who is good for at least two more French Open wins, probably at least three, and maybe a hard court slam sprinkled in for good measure. Losing a gimme slam tally is bad news for someone with aspirations of being considered the greatest to ever hold a racket.
It’s also insanely funny. What the hell was that, bro!!!?
TJ: I think I’ve randomly thought of Novak hitting the line judge more than any other thing this year.
September 12: Naomi Osaka Wins The US Open Again
BG: Naomi Osaka was one of the biggest winners of 2020. Already one of the five best women’s tennis players on earth, she spent much of the summer speaking loudly, proudly, and eruditely on social justice before showing up in New York and kicking ass en route to another US Open title.
She weathered the best set of Misaki Doi’s career in the first round, a suddenly dominant Jennifer Brady in the semifinals, and a 6-1 first set drubbing at the hands of Vika Azarenka in the finals before putting her foot down and claiming her third slam.
We have spent many words on FTP saying that Osaka is the modern superstar. She’s open about her struggles, charismatic as all hell, insanely good at her sport, and interested in more than just what goes on between the lines. 2020 was another leap forward for her. She still needs to develop a changeup if she wants to maximize her “All Time Great” raw potential, but you would be dumb to bet against her. The WTA remains one of the deepest and most exciting professional sports leagues there is. Osaka is the cream of that crop.
September 18: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Passing
TJ: Putting this in here because it effectively took over The Discourse for a month. The Supreme Court is basically sports now, which sucks big time. Not much to say other than mad respect for her work in making the legal case against gender discrimination. That being said, I truly hate to be cynical here, but this was certainly one of the worst-timed illnesses in American history. As a historian, I know history runs straight through these types of things, but my goodness.
October 4: Aston Villa 7, Liverpool 2
TJ: I’m still in disbelief that this even happened at all.
October 25: Randy Arozarena’s Mad Dash
(Note: We know Randy is cancelled now.)
TJ: The abbreviated 2020 MLB season was poorly executed, poorly conceived, and probably not as much fun as it seemed at the time. We did get a manufactured MLB postseason out of it, which did help fill October with some tremendous #content. The Indians/Yankees epic and the Rays beating the Yankees in the next series was fun. The Padres were great to watch. Some cool shit happened. However, the best baseball moment of the whole season came in Game 4 of the World Series.
Funnily enough, Brett Phillips’ base hit was actually spoiled for me. While I thought the text message saying “WOW!” that came across my phone would ruin my viewing experience, what occurred at the end of Game 4 of the 2020 World Series was so ridiculous that my jaw still dropped for the rest of the night despite knowing that it was coming.
There’s not much to say about this play, especially since the Rays would go on to lose the World Series a few days later. Still, the feeling of complete Rajai Davis-esque astonishment when I saw what happened is one of those emotions that only occurs during postseason baseball, so I’m glad I got one of those in 2020.
November 3: The Presidential Election
TJ: This was, without question, the worst sporting event of the year.
Obligatory Indiana football mention
TJ: My followers have informed me that Indiana football won some games this year. Maybe we shouldn’t discuss that since they aren’t even playing in a good bowl game.
BG: That tracks.
TJ: Yep, alright, on we go.
December 14: That idiotic Ravens/Browns game
TJ: Alright, just kidding.
Indiana fans will remember this year for a long time, even if they tragically weren’t able to attend their cathartic wins over Penn State, Michigan, and Wisconsin in-person. The types of sickos who love Indiana football will doubtlessly remember Mike Penix Jr.’s stretch for a touchdown against Penn State as the defining moment of this run, but I will always fondly remember Indiana coming in as a touchdown underdog against Wisconsin after Penix went out for the season and just completely shutting the Badgers down.
BG: I wrote many a word about how deranged Covid College Football was. That it took an emergency Yalta Conference by the Big Ten’s Executives to cancel the upcoming Northwestern vs Indiana Big Ten Championship game is exhibit A. Only in the most upsetting of seasons could those two teams be so close to such an important game.
Both teams will win a combined three games next year.
TJ: Here’s a good take about the NFL.
December 19: The Big Ten Championship Game
TJ: It’s wild that we still don’t know who won the Big Ten Championship.
BG: It didn’t happen!
Looking Ahead
TJ: In 2021, I intend to create more blogs about the intersection of sports and pop culture.
BG: I’m going to invent a subscription service wherein people can provide email addresses and will in exchange receive written content delivered to them, perhaps weekly.
TJ: That sounds like a great idea! Anyway, goodbye 2020. You were not great.
