J.R. Amico

I will be writing about sports, society and culture here: https://jasonamico.substack.com/

April 15, 2020

“I really miss sports.” / Extraño los deportes mucho.

by Jason Amico 

I am currently a PA (Production Assistant) at ESPN, and today I watched a brief address from our President, Jimmy Pitaro. In it, he touched on something I have been contemplating probably too often lately, but it originally sparked in my head in the Summer of 2017. 

The concept is that sports, as a whole, provide us, as a society, with a beautiful gathering place where a collective shared interest is enjoyed by tens of thousands of people together in one place on any given night at any given venue. There are some parallels with music, film and other entertainment industries, but nothing feels quite as tribal and as “important” as a sports team (if you don’t think so, live in New York, Boston or Philly for a couple years, then get back to me).

I was interning for SportsNet New York (SNY), going through the long gruel of the summer during a Major League Baseball season with the New York Mets (as that regional sports network is predominantly owned by the team and the Mets are the main thing they cover) when this thought really struck me. I noticed during a Sunday game in July that, for so many blue-collar folks, the few hours they got to spend at the ballpark with their loved ones, enjoying a hot dog, beer and some ice cream whilst outside sitting and talking with one another, were really the most important, and many times the only, moments of solace these hard-working people got to enjoy with their families. That is, with the long grind of a Monday-Friday 9-5, or for many people, a sporadic week filled with early wakeups and staying up late or sleeping during the day to do a night shift, being “out at the ballgame” was really their only time to relax and enjoy anything leisurely in the midst of everything that life throws at them. Bills, raising kids, fulfilling tasks to earn a weekly paycheck and all the other tiresome, effort-laden tasks that life presents us….baseball truly was the one chance for these people to take a deep breath and enjoy themselves. 

This was novel because, for me, up until that point, baseball was so engrained in every aspect of my life. It felt like a part of me. It felt like as long as I was on this Earth, I was going to be obsessed with every facet of the game. After my less-than-glamorous 10 years of playing Little League and when the game was not being played each offseason, I still found myself studying the depths of its illustrious and significant history. (This whole hiatus I have been going ham on “Rewatchables,” a la Bill Simmons, watching the likes of Larsen’s perfecto in Game 5 of the 1956 Series, the Kirk Gibson moment in 1988 off my fellow Fremont, CA native Dennis Eckersley, etc.) I never thought of it as an “escape;” it was more like my heart or my brain, it was a lifeline of sorts that always made me happy even when other aspects of my life didn’t. It really struck me how for the average person, the joy from a game was a necessity in a different kind of way, perhaps more akin to a sauna or yoga than what is has always been to me, as essential as water or any sort of sustenance. 

I feel like many people, including myself, almost loved sports as a formality, because it was brought and taught to us by our parents, or our best friends. We love it, follow it and discuss it so much that we don’t ever really stop and think: why do we care so much about this specific team’s wins and losses? Why do we sit and try to draw up our own trades and offseason free agency signings, as if we are the GM, even though we have no actual professional sports personnel decision-making experience? Frankly, I don’t think we as sports fans really ever stop and ask, why are we at this game and why do we enjoy it so much? We just kind of go, and do, habitually.

Well, now those opportunities for a breather and a moment of solace at a ballgame, or any kind of sporting event, are gone due to the outbreak and subsequent pandemic of COVID-19. At this point, there has been nothing left unsaid by newsmakers and pundits alike. We are reaching a place where I see tweets like the following that indicate people are tired of even seeing and hearing so much COVID-19-related content:

https://twitter.com/sayrequevedo/status/1250097832578744321

Back to sports....

I just want to have a ballgame to look forward to at the end of the day...

Well, now it has literally become my job to follow the sports, and I was slated to be covering some MLB games for ESPN’s Latin American channels and the Deportes channel domestically, as well as for ESPN+. But, even then, I couldn’t help but count down the days until Opening Day, something all of us that are so overwhelmingly intertwined with the game seem to do each February and March as winter melts to spring. Even if it wasn’t going to be me going to ballgames with my dad to devour ice cream sandwiches and pound beers on-tap, it still felt important being on the horizon.

It still felt like baseball was going to come and make everything better once again. It was going to give us all something to follow for 162 games from March 26 until October, no matter how futile or potent our team’s current 40-man roster was. My beloved Giants from 3rd and King are in “retooling” (OK, let’s just call it “rebuilding,” Farhan) mode, so I was also looking forward to a full season of pitching and hitting regularly for my current favorite non-Giant to watch: “The Japanese Babe Ruth” Shohei Ohtani, who, oh by the way, is teammates with the best player in baseball, Mike Trout. I was looking forward to a full season with 21 year-old phenom Vladimir Guerrero Jr. I was excited to see how fireballer Garrett Cole (who’s married to Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford’s sister, by the way) would fare in his first season in pinstripes. Heck, I was curious to see how I’d feel about the Nike swoosh being on the front of MLB uniforms for the first time all season. I was all set to be enthralled by the 2020 season coming.

But it didn’t. 

It still hasn’t.

We don’t know when it’s coming back, and we don’t know if there’s any validity to any of the proposed plans for a quasi-”season” that the likes of ESPN MLB Insider and Senior Writer Jeff Passan and USA Today’s Bob Nightengale have been reporting on. We don’t have much clarity with any of the North American professional sports leagues (NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL) nor do we for any of the major sports governing organizations globally (FIFA, ATP, PGA, NCAA, UFC, etc.) other than that operations have been “suspended indefinitely.”

That said, we all have to us this time to reflect, internalize and realize how vital to our lives sports truly are. For me, baseball is the one I’m so romantic and nostalgic about, but I of course am a diehard Warriors, 49ers and Sharks fan and I’m Argentinian-Italian, so I follow soccer pretty regularly as well (Forca Barca and Man City because of Kun Agüero and co., sorry). So, losing all of those (aside from the Niners, who crushed my soul in Miami) mid-season has been quite tough. It can be any sport, and I know different people have varying levels of fanaticism within each one. But for each person who has a definitive favorite, losing one certain league or tournament has hit them in a very real, indiscernible and painful way.

The one that comes to mind for baseball is, of course, Tim Kirkjian, one of the only people on Earth whose genuine love and passion for the game seems to rival my own (we met before a Mets-Nationals game at Citi Field that same summer and had an awesome discussion about what else? Baseball.). 

For college basketball, I’ve thought a lot about Scott van Pelt and Rece Davis, who have covered every single NCAA Tournament over the last couple decades. This time of year brought a special kind of enjoyment and happiness to them, where they were able to cover each moment and stunning upset and be a conduit to the masses of fans every single time they spoke on-air. Now, it’s been taken from them, and from basically every sports fan who follows a league other than the NFL (which still continued on with its free agency and has plans to do the same with a scaled down rendition of its ritzy annual Draft, business as usual for “The Shield.”) 

Sports have a visceral connection to our daily lives, and we have a visceral connection to the players, teams, venues and cities we love most. Losing music festivals has honestly been equally painful for me, as I am an avid lover of many artists I was planning to see for the first and only time. This virus has literally stripped my two favorite things, sporting events and live music, but of course everything happening initially was out of our control. Luckily, we do have some say in the solution by following Word Health Organization and Center for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines by observing social distancing and doing our part to not worsen the issue.  

But Jimmy’s point and my own observations that date back to that warm summer day in Queens two years ago still resonate. Losing the one constant in our lives, that is there no matter our family situation, our significant other at that particular time, our socioeconomic status or otherwise, is extremely difficult. I don’t have the answers, and I don’t know how things are going to look as we progress forward and eventually, after the dust settles on all this. But I do know, all of our favorite leagues just ceasing operations midway through (or in baseball’s case, right at the outset of) their respective seasons is unprecedented.  

I hope we look within, rather than externally, at how we can utilize this time in a positive manner. I believe we can use this time to develop a skill, add knowledge or a depth of understanding about a subject that is important to us, or just simply veg out and watch movies and play video games, if that is what you feel you need to do.

And I hope when all the sports do come back, this current hiatus of all our favorite things can teach us all to appreciate them in a different when they do, in fact, inevitably return someday (*knock on wood*). Now, every single NBA game I attend, for work or for leisure, every single MLB game I’m at and every single concert I’m wailing at behind the sound stage, I know I myself will be more mindful and present, realizing how special and vitally important the thing I am at is. I now know that losing it due to a worldwide pandemic was excruciatingly painful, and I don’t ever want to have to go through it again.

I can’t wait to hear that crack of the bat and pop of the mitt again, I tell you.

Below are published articles I have done for chinaopen.com (official website for the China Open professional men’s and women’s tennis tournament), KBIA (Columbia, Mo.’s local NPR affiliate), and Vox Magazine:

 Here are 2 articles I did while working as an English language journalist at the 2018 China Open professional tennis tournament in Beijing:

http://www.chinaopen.com/2018-10-02/docen-ihkvrhps1032142.shtml

http://www.chinaopen.com/2018-10-06/docen-ihkvrhps7190742.shtml

This and the following clip are film reviews I did for Vox Magazine for the 2019 True/False Film Festival in Columbia, MO. (Many Oscar-nominated and accolade-earning nonfiction/documentary films have come through this festival over the years). https://www.voxmagazine.com/arts/movies/mike-wallace-is-here-explores-wallace-s-prolific-career-in/article_e047cfbe-3c9a-11e9-b26a-23670910d395.html

https://www.voxmagazine.com/arts/up-the-mountain-takes-audiences-on-a-breathtaking-artistic-journey/article_99d30cba-3c4f-11e9-a2ea-cb8921c51818.html