THE National Basketball Association (NBA) took the lead by suspending its regular-season games for at least a 30-day period starting March 12 (March 13, Manila time) amid the global coronavirus disease that has infected three players so far — initially Frenchman Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell of the Utah Jazz and then later Christian Wood of the Detroit Pistons last March 14 (and perhaps more in the days to come).
Note that for every other NBA player infection from hereon, another 14 days of inactivity (said to be the incubation period of the virus) are added to the original 30-day suspension of NBA regular games.
Only 259 games — or 21 percent of the 1,230-game schedule are left to play but they could cost the NBA anywhere from $275 million to $500 million if these games are not reset. A home game is estimated to cost an NBA team an estimated $1.9 million if not played.
Not long after the NBA suspension of its games, other local and international sporting events followed suit and suspended until further notice or outright canceled.
One cancellation was the prestigious 2020 U.S. NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament that was set to start Wednesday (Manila time) with a pair of First Four games in the 68-school competitions known as the March Madness and would have culminated with the championship game at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia on April 7 (MT) .
The cancellation will result in the loss of around $1 billion in revenues, including $800 million in TV money.
But how important are the multi-million dollars worth of revenues if the health of the athletes, the fans and team officials or personnel of a school or a professional club is put into jeopardy because of health woes like the COVID-19 pandemic that has broke out in at least 114 countries and killed thousands of people across the globe, starting with the city of Wuhan in the Hubei province of the People’s Republic of China then spreading rapidly to other Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and the Islamic Republic of Iran (which was hard hit by the virus), subsequently diverting to Europe, specifically Italy, which is currently in a national lockdown after nearly 20,000 people were infected and caused deaths in more than 2,000 of them so much so that the World Health Organization is now declaring Europe as the “epicenter” of the COVID-19 pandemic, then shifting in the direction of the United States before currently engulfing our beloved Philippines and spurred the national government to resort to a community quarantine for a month from March 15-April 14 to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
Sports, it’s said, imitates life. And many people take to attending sports events as an escape to their daily hardships in life. For in reality, it is also a form of entertainment, perhaps even more exciting than watching a Spiderman do some tumbling in a movie or Enrique romancing Liza in the big screen.
Yet when national health concerns are at stake, sports must take a backseat, if not become the least priority of most people.
In troubled times such as this moment, sports becomes irrelevant.
That’s because health and the safety of everybody is of utmost importance.
If healthy, one can look forward to more sporting events in the future. Unhealthy, he/she may not live long enough to even witness another sporting spectacle such as the Tokyo Olympics in July.
And if this contagion does not go away in a jiffy in the next several months, the Tokyo Olympics may not even be worth staging, no matter what with the millions of dollars already spent thus far.
Health, after all, is wealth. Unlike sports, it is priceless and invaluable.