.DeadlineDominic talks with RealSports’ Bryant Gumbel about reopening sports and greed fueled pro leagues wanting to start up amidst COVID19 realities & second wave worries
On tonight’s show, you sit down remotely with NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith, National Basketball Players Association executive director Michele Roberts and MLBPA executive director Tony Clark for a roundtable on what the short-term future could be.
None of them are wearing rose colored glasses on this, but based on what you and I have discussed, do they have a Plan B for their members if management and owner start tightening the vice?I think they do have a plan to back up their members, so I do think those three are very responsible, but I think they are much more responsible than the people they’re sitting across the table from.Historically, whenever there’s been a work stoppage of any kind, for whatever reason, the public likes to blame the player and I mean you take a guy like DeMaurice Smith, his constituency has a lot of varying and broad interests. It’s unreasonable to expect that they’re going to come up with a plan in which even 90 percent of them are going to think is great. What happened to the other 10 percent?So, with those odds in mind, and the various actions we’ve seen from league bosses from the decisive actions of the NBA’s Adam Silver to slower move by others at the beginning of this crisis, I feel like when we’re talking about sports here we’re falling prey to what I think is a great fallacy that occurs far too often in American public life, which is we’re talking about this as a monolith. So, in your opinion, what is the sports league that should least be considering coming back and what is the sports league that should be most considering coming back or popular sports?Obviously, the ones that are most impacted and the ones that are least able to come back are those in which close contact is an essential part of the game, and that would be football then followed by hockey. Close contact is an essential part of the game. You add to that the fact that there are so many people involved…if you’re talking about two basketball teams, yes, there’s close contact but we’re really only talking about 20, 24 people. If we’re talking about football, there not only is extreme close contact. We’re talking about 100 people, 110, 120 people and so your risk is greater by that number. You mentioned Adam Silver. I mean you picked the gold standard among the commissioners. He is the one that of all has, in my opinion, shown the greatest degree of maturity and responsibility. I wouldn’t necessarily extend that compliment to the others.And that is, in a sense the other elephant in the room, isn’t it? We can’t get 50 governors and the federal government to agree on a universal standard to counter coronavirus and reopening. How are we going to get 32 NFL teams, 30 NBA teams or 31 NHL teams to come up with a standard for their respective leagues? We all appreciate things in theory, but I don’t see the reality of this happening even more so when you bring up the excellent point of what if the Philadelphia 76ers can’t play because two of their members are now found positive?There’s so many little odysseys in getting this done that it makes you wonder if they haven’t thought this through. Let’s take, for example, the NBA again, and I’m going to assume you’re a Lakers fan.I’m actually a Detroit Pistons fan, but I do live in the great City of Angels so of course my heart breaks every time the Lakers lose, except to the Pistons … I get that, but let’s take, for example, that the NBA comes back and the Lakers, as a group say we’d like to be a part of that. What happens if two or three of those Lakers have somebody in their family, someone is close to them with a preexisting condition and they determine this isn’t worth it to them. They don’t want to take this chance. Well, now what are you going to do? What is the provision for those players who want to opt out for reasons of either precondition or family or their own particular safety and decide this isn’t worth it?In that context, the NHL laid out its plan to start training camps later this summer over the long weekend Commissioner Gary Bettman outlined his optimistic idea to have 24-team playoffs with dates TBD. What’s your take on that?Having not studied them, I really can’t speak to the new NHL measures. I’ve high regard for Donald Fehr and the NHL players so I can only hope for their continued safety. Given Gary Bettman’s track record on concussions, they’ve reasons to be wary.You recorded the interview with DeMaurice Smith, Michele Roberts and Tony Clark a few days ago, so with events and news moving as fast as they are in this pandemic media environment and the few sports we have pulling in big audiences, a fact lost on leagues, owners or broadcasters. How do you pull off a roundtable and protect its relevance?You know Dominic, I’m not a guy who tries to second guess what other people are interested in. At the same time, what I didn’t want to do was ask them something that would have them looking foolish by the time it ran. So what we were trying to look at was big ideas and conceptual ideas and things that would live on no matter what decisions were made between the time we taped this and the time when most people may get to view it. So that, to me, was an interesting diplomatic stance of trying to make sure to get something worthwhile without getting lost in the minutia of something that may be valid on Friday and irrelevant on Saturday.Having said that, let’s take it way up to the nose bleeds, is COVID19 the biggest story of your career?Wow. The intelligent part of me says yes because there’s never been anything that has been so all-encompassing in my life. That said, I am, in a relative sense, more on the sidelines of this than I was when I was engaged in the daily basis for two hours a day and speaking with world leaders and government officials on an ongoing basis. In other words, I was back then intimately involved 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s no longer the case and so it’s very difficult for me to make that judgement right now.
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