Opinion | Sports Helped Me Get Through the Coronavirus Pandemic - The New York Times

In late March, my uncle died unexpectedly. Phillip Randle was my dad’s little brother and his best friend. The loss, exacerbated by our inability to hold a funeral for him because of the pandemic, shrouded my father in a blanket of grief. I heard him weep for the second time in my life.

My father, Willlie Randle, was in Kansas City, and I was in New York, over a thousand miles away. For six months I struggled with how to comfort him, to provide any solace. Then sports swooped in.

For decades my dad, Uncle Phil and their crew of childhood friends would gather to watch the Kansas City Chiefs play football each Sunday. Knowing my uncle could not be there, I got tested, then booked a flight home to watch the September season-opening game on the couch by my father’s side. It was, my family tells me, the happiest they had seen him since the tragedy.

Since that game with my father, I have hardly missed a chance to watch my beloved boys in red. In New York, I’ve attended outdoor socially distanced watch parties in Washington Heights with fellow Kansas Citians who were also missing their families back home; I’ve continued clacking out annoying but insanely self-satisfying pro-Chiefs tweets into the ether and joined others in cathartically laughing at the head coach Andy Reid’s adorable struggle with a giant face shield.

I’m not supposed to say this. It hedges much of what I warned about in these pages just a few months ago regarding the dangers of holding N.F.L. games during the pandemic. But I have enjoyed, no — I have needed — the return of professional sports.

Pragmatism, science and common sense — your head — tells you that playing sports in a pandemic is a foolish idea. The heart says otherwise. It doesn’t make sense, but what has this year?

If anything, this pandemic has proved just how deeply Americans misunderstood and misinterpreted one another, our sense of values and our beliefs. One of the things we’ve misunderstood is the depth of importance that sports, and the accompanying community of fandom, has in so many of our lives.

When I had the first anxiety attack of my life this summer, as I juggled reporting on the George Floyd protests and the pandemic’s toll, I didn’t have a therapist to call. I had the N.B.A. playoffs. I countered those days of fury and grief with nights of laughs with Shaquille O’Neal, Ernie Johnson Jr., Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley, the avuncular crew of “Inside the N.B.A.”

I know — from the internet and the group texts on my phone — that I’m not alone in this. A college friend from Los Angeles, who, honestly, I am not sure was ever a baseball fan before this summer, called me, crying, when the Dodgers won the World Series in October.

“We needed this,” he told me in between a mix of sobs and chest-lightening laughter.

I don’t follow soccer much, but I could not help but be moved at the sight of Scottish players brought to tears after qualifying for the European Championship last month for the first time in a generation, or to relish the joy the feat brought their countrymen, seeing them high-fiving and dancing online.

I understand that to many this sounds silly, or offensive. Should we be celebrating goals and touchdowns when scientists warn we could be on the precipice of the pandemic’s darkest days, when some weeks more Americans are dying each day from the coronavirus than on 9/11 or at Pearl Harbor? Should I be thinking less about home-field advantage and more about the nurses in hospitals or the grandparents in nursing homes?

“It is impossible to separate the emotional from the moral,” Dr. Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist at Emory University, told me. The return of professional sports in America and abroad has ultimately contributed to the spread of the virus, Dr. Binney said, but there is room for nuance. “I try not to both sides things when I can, but here it is actually needed,” he said.

While high school and collegiate sports continue to “cause outbreaks constantly,” Dr. Binney says professional sports — partly because of their vast infrastructures, resources and relatively small number of players — have managed to effectively control the coronavirus.

“I don’t think, except for baseball’s outbreaks, which were tamped down quickly, that pro sports have created a substantially more dangerous environment for their players and staff than there would have been if the pandemic didn’t happen,” he told me. “For players and staff, sporting leagues have generally kept their infection rates below that of the general population.”

I’d expected the M.L.B., the N.F.L., pro tennis, European club soccer and every other pro sports league that was not operating in a “bubble” environment to shut back down within the first few weeks. The question was not if pro sports would prove dangerous, but just how dangerous pro sports would be.

The answer, miraculously: not as dangerous as many thought.

In a year drenched in despair, the continuation of professional sports has been an essential respite and a reminder of the normalcy we yearn for.

And it got me thinking.

I don’t want to sound like a sappy sports movie, because Americans are still as divided as ever and sports can’t suddenly change that — but as we begin to reach toward a semblance of normalcy in the coming months, I wonder if sports might give us an excuse to offer one another a little more grace.

I doubt the Kansas City liberals I grew up with and exurban Trump supporters in Missouri will set aside their differences if our fabled quarterback Patrick Mahomes wins another M.V.P. award at the end of this season.

But once the economy can safely, fully open, perhaps sports can supercharge our sense of community again.

I can’t wait to return to John Brown Smokehouse in Queens, without my mask, to watch a Chiefs game next season over K.C.-style barbecue and beer. When I get there, will I appreciate my surroundings a bit more? Leave my phone alone and strike up an extra conversation? Embrace a stranger with more gusto after a touchdown? I think so. And no one should underestimate the strength “our bonds of affection” can have after a compatriot unlike yourself buys you a drink.

After all, I’ve had more than enough reason to look inward, frown or be upset this year.

In the summer of 2021, when many hope vaccinations will be widespread, we may all turn our eyes to Tokyo for an Olympics unlike any before. Historically the world’s great unifying sporting event, its coming together of young talent and old nations will take on a new meaning, as the globe quite literally reunites.

We’ll watch as athletes, perhaps without masks and in close proximity, some of them coronavirus survivors, march together, united in sport and struggle. If we pull it off, I expect the world will heave a collective sigh of relief.

Will we see sports differently after that? On the other side of this coronavirus misery, it may turn out that sports — which have predominantly functioned as cherished but inessential extensions of leisure — are recognized as more spiritually essential than we realized. And sporting competition, as old as society itself, may be remembered as the first manifestation of a world reborn and liberated.

Aaron Randle, previously a Metro reporter at The New York Times, writes about New York and national affairs.

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