The Big East tournament at Madison Square Garden, a full pandemic year later
By Charlotte Wilder
FOX Sports Columnist
NEW YORK — Georgetown’s Jamorko Pickett stood at the free-throw line in complete silence.
This is not hyperbole. There was none of the buzzing, electric quiet that normally accompanies foul shots in elimination games.
As the ball left his hand, there was only the sound of a few squeaks from sneakers.
When I closed my eyes, it was easy to believe I was at a high school basketball practice rather than Madison Square Garden.
Pickett made the free throw, his fourth out of four, with three minutes left in the first half.
Georgetown versus Marquette on Wednesday marked the first Big East tournament game since the quarterfinal between St. John’s and Creighton a year ago. The day before, the NBA had shut down after Utah’s Rudy Gobert joked about COVID-19 then contracted it. Conferences across the country had already canceled their remaining tournament matchups, and the coronavirus was spreading rapidly through New York City.
The Big East pulled the plug before the second half of St. John's-Creighton began. No one knew it then, but it would be the last sports game in America for more than three months.
Nick Bahe, along with veteran broadcaster Tim Brando, was calling the game for FS1 as the world shut down.
"There’s something about approaching the one-year anniversary that drums up all sorts of emotions," Bahe told me. "It’s sadness, frustration and also feeling like, look how far we’ve come. But we’re still in the midst of this thing. It’s wild. It’s wild to think wherever we were 365 days ago, we had no idea what was coming."
Pickett’s basket put the Hoyas up 26-14. The applause that followed sounded like the reaction to an unpopular measure presented at a PTA meeting.
MSG is letting in 850 family members and friends of players and coaches over the course of each day, spread out across the games. But at the first, I counted only 30.
I reflexively looked around to read the expressions of reporters next to me and make some dumb joke, as I, an obnoxious person to work near, am accustomed to doing in a press box. But there were none.
I was alone on the bridge at MSG, hundreds of feet above the nearest human, yet I could hear conversations taking place right next to the court. At one point, a guy in a suit said to one of the stats keepers, "That’s what they’ve got at Whole Foods, huh?"
All of this might sound obvious to you. Of course there were very few members of the media at MSG. Of course the arena was empty. Of course it was quiet.
But all of it was obvious to me, too. What I’m trying to convey is how, even when you know it will be, attending a fanless sports game during a pandemic is even more bizarre than you imagine. TV flattens the emptiness, fills the silence with pump-up music and makes a game without spectators feel almost normal.
Being there in 3-D did not feel normal.
Which is good. Keeping players and fans safe is worth exponentially more than having a packed house, and reopening has to be done carefully. But that doesn’t stop the empty expanse from feeling like a trophy case stripped of all its hardware.
TV reporters have been at games out of necessity, but for safety, most writers and those who don’t have to be on-site, well, haven’t been. The last time I covered a game in person was more than a year ago, which has made this a very strange time to be a sportswriter, especially because sports have proven to be largely inconsequential. We don’t need basketball the way we need healthcare workers. Life goes on in a year without March Madness, we learned.
But for the people whose livelihoods depend on them, sports are very consequential. I am very lucky to have a job in this industry, because the loss has been monumental. The New York Times reported that shutting down sports from mid-March to May meant that 1.3 million people lost their jobs and $12.3 billion in earnings were lost. By the end of November, that number was $28.6 billion.
For people whose jobs don’t depend on them, the empty arenas have represented a less dire but still real sense of pandemic loss, too. Intensity of feeling, a sense of community, moments of spontaneity — all of that was gone if you followed the CDC’s advice and tried not to spread COVID.
Sports can be vital the way going to bars can be vital, the way getting together with your family for the holidays can be vital, the way inviting friends over to watch a dumb Netflix show on your couch can be vital. It’s possible to live without all of it, but that life becomes dull.
It was clear Wednesday afternoon at MSG that we’re not out of the sensory deprivation tank yet.
"If the fans were back, and we were getting the full treatment, it would be epic," Brando told me before he arrived in New York to call the games. "It would be — we would be ecstatic. But because they’re not and the feel of the place is going to be exactly what we left on March 12 of 2020, it’ll be even more surreal, in my opinion. Because none of us, any of us leaving the Garden that day, felt like we’ll be back here next year, and it’ll be vacant again. The severity of the pandemic — we had not had time for that to blend into our heads."
We might still be in the tunnel, but at least we’re heading toward the light. Case numbers are going down, the weather is warming, the vaccine is going into arms. MSG required a rigorous testing process for anyone entering the building Wednesday, restricted everyone’s access and mandated a security check to go to the bathroom (though I might have been put under a more watchful eye, thanks to my tweets about the Knicks — it’s tough to say).
No teams had had to leave the tournament because of COVID protocol as of Wednesday afternoon.
And then there’s the most important part: the players. They are still the same goofy kids who play with as much passion, intensity and joy as they do when the crowd is at capacity.
During warm-ups, one of the Marquette players (I was too high up to see anyone’s face, I couldn’t read jersey numbers, and apparently I need glasses) tossed another an alley-oop. His teammate threw down a beautiful dunk. The rest of the team whooped and laughed, coming together near the basket. They put their hands in the center and lifted them up, cheering.
In that moment, the only difference was that I could hear every player’s footsteps as he walked off the court.
Charlotte Wilder is a general columnist and co-host of "The People's Sports Podcast" for FOX Sports. She's honored to represent the constantly neglected Boston area in sports media, loves talking to sports fans about their feelings and is happiest eating a hotdog in a ballpark or nachos in a stadium. Follow her on Twitter @TheWilderThings.