I was a perpetually terrified little kid.
Everything scared me. Thunderstorms, the existential dread of eternity, girls, virtually every front cover of the Weekly World News, a toothbrushing PSA created by Crest in the early 1990's, and pretty much everything else that was louder and bigger than me.
One of the ways that I escaped this perpetual hell of skittishness was Reds baseball. I obsessed over batting averages and ERAs, memorizing and monitoring the rise and fall of Eddie Taubensee's one base percentage and John Smiley's K/BB ratio. No matter how crappy school or life was at the time, I could count on the Middletown Journal publishing a box score from April through September that would make things at least marginally better.
The rest of the time, Ohio State football (and Cincinnati Bearcat basketball) filled in those gaps, and for the most part did it pretty well.
I'm sure that not everything in my life was going gangbusters when the Buckeyes beat Arizona State in the Rose Bowl, or when they skunked Miami for a national championship, or as they ground Michigan into a fine talc-like powder every late November over the past two decades. But even if my life was utter garbage when those things happened, I can't remember because it was drowned out by Ohio State kicking ass.
It's probably been the same for you. Sports are culturally important for approximately a billion reasons, but on a personal level they're important because sometimes we just need a televised buffer between the real world and our brains and eyes.
Now that buffer is gone.
Sports, all sports, are pretty much out to lunch and won't be back for a while. This is the right decision; just because we want to watch March Madness and attend the Reds' Opening Day parade doesn't mean we get to in the face of a health crisis that the world hasn't seen in generations. We're still allowed to be pissed about it, but that doesn't change the basic math that says putting thousands of people in an enclosed space is generally a recipe for transmission.
But, seriously, we're still allowed to be pissed about it.
Ohio State men's basketball was just rounding into form and could've possibly made a tournament run. The runup to the NFL draft was going to prominently feature several former Buckeyes. At least two Ohio State wrestlers were favorites to win national titles. Women's hockey had just won their first conference championship and might've challenged for a national title of their own. Spring football was ramping up and was giving us Ryan Day's first spring with real ownership of the program.
And it's all gone, like grains of sand through the world's dumbest hourglass, and there's nothing we can do about it except sit and stew and wash our hands every 25 minutes. During the upcoming days and weeks it'll be easy to be bitter and frustrated about all of this, and it'll be easy to forget about what's left, what's still great about Ohio and Ohio State.
Just because the sports are gone and the students aren't in class doesn't mean that the community doesn't still exist and that there aren't things to take pride in. There tens of thousands of people still working in the university and hundreds of thousands in this state working to make the lives of all of us just a little bit better in the absence of sports. Health care workers, firefighters and the police, community organizers, and people from all walks of life will continue to heroes for vulnerable people in our communities.
In addition, Ohio State University is home to an enormous amount of charitable giving, and associated organizations in and around Columbus and the wider state of Ohio will be working around the clock in the coming weeks and months to help mitigate the effects of COVID-19.
Its true! For every $1 donated, Mid-Ohio Foodbank can provide up to $9 in groceries for our hungry neighbors. https://t.co/anP0y2YWsn
— Mid-Ohio Foodbank (@Mid_OHFoodbank) March 11, 2020
Food pantries, homeless shelters, community outreach, and a thousand other places of care will be a very real point of focus going forward, as will the state and federal workers doing everything they can to keep people healthy and safe. As individuals, it's our responsibility to help support them and each other.
It'll still be hard. Not having sports to lean on will make some of the upcoming tough days tougher.
But I'm not afraid, because I have now I have faith and pride in the kind of community that a place like Ohio State and the state of Ohio is capable of building.
