Hank Steinbrenner died yesterday; he was only 63 years old. He and his brother have been the co-chairmen of the Yankees’ organization since George Steinbrenner passed away about 10 years ago. The announcement of Hank Steinbrenner’s death specifically said that it was not due to COVID-19 but did not specify the exact cause.
Rest in peace, Hank Steinbrenner.
Finances at Disney Corp in general – and at ESPN in specific – must be in bad shape. The coronavirus has taken the steady inflow of cash from the Disney theme parks and reduced it to a slow drip; ESPN has been dealing with losing cable subscribers to cord cutting. I can understand the difficulties there, but a recent report puts a fine point on those difficulties:
“Highest-paid staff asked to take pay cuts by ESPN”
That was a headline in the Washington Post yesterday. Basically, ESPN asked those folks to take a 15% pay cut for the next 3 months and the report said that this would affect about 100 folks at ESPN. The report also said that folks making $500K or more were the ones asked to take this reduction. The report did not say how many – if any – of those folks agreed to this reduction.
Obviously, ESPN wants sports to return to normalcy quickly; its financial existence depends on that. In that sense, a giant enterprise like ESPN is not all that different from the Mom and Pop restaurant down the street that has been shuttered for the past several weeks. Lots of people are looking forward to a return to “everyday life” – including almost everyone in the media except for those people and outlets that are reporting on the pandemic 24 hours a day.
Imagine you are the restaurant reviewer for a newspaper; there isn’t a lot for you to recommend to your loyal readers and there is no point in panning a place that you did not like because no one is going there without your negative review. There are just so many times you can order takeout pizza and write about the service and the product before it gets pretty stale.
Thinking about our current situation broadly, my position is not what the execs at ESPN would want to hear. I think lots of things should reopen before sports returns to its normal way of life. As of today, much of the country goes about life in a way that limits gatherings of more than 10 people in close quarters. [Obviously, hospitals are exempted from that restriction.] A return to normalcy in the sports world would throw together groups of thousands of people in stadiums and arenas. I’m not sure that would be a smart strategic move if the overriding objective is to reduce the likelihood of a COVID-19 resurgence.
That looks at the sports world merely from the perspective of fans in the stands. I guess you could phase back in by playing games with no fans in attendance but that does not take into consideration the risk of viral spread among the players. You can stage a golf tournament without fans and put it on TV; you can enforce social distancing; you can have the players and caddies masked. It might look a bit odd – – but it could be done.
Now consider football … Social distancing in the huddle becomes a real challenge. How many locker rooms will accommodate 53 players and 20 coaches without having some of them closer than 6 feet to one another? Try the same mental exercise with baseball dugouts and basketball games; until there is a way to assure that everyone involved in a game is virus free, the danger of viral spread is real and significant.
I do not wish it were so, but I think that other segments of our economy and society will be opening in a staged and orderly fashion before sports makes its comeback. In fact, I believe that sports execs should anticipate that fans will not rush to return to stadiums and arenas when stay-at-home orders are lifted. I know that my thinking here runs counter to H.L. Mencken’s famous observation about people because I am attributing some reasoning abilities to the average fan. Here is Mencken’s observation with which I generally agree:
“No one in this world, so far as I know … has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
Finally, today was supposed to be Tax Day in the US before even that annual ritual was postponed for 3 months. [Aside: I don’t know about you, but when I prepare my tax returns there are never any other people within 6 feet of me. Why that activity was pushed forward by the coronavirus is unclear.] It seems appropriate today to close with this observation from Will Rogers:
“The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………