Saturday-Sunday are, to sports hacks, the absolute far side of a weekly wind-down. The rest of the world may be in drawing-breath-and-putting-up-feet mode but for those of us who work in sport (along with those playing it, of course), it's the prickly end. Sat-Sun is when sporting contests put out La Grande Finale of everything that happened in the week, fortnight or sometimes even months before.
As every sport's circuit churns on through its season, sometimes Saturday, mostly Sunday is Finals day. Every year there come by the Biggie Weekends, sport's witching hours. The ones marked down for the annual finals of tennis Grand Slams and quadrennial World Cups in football, cricket and rugby. The Super Bowl is on Sunday, the Champions League final has moved from mid-week to Saturday. The last two men's 100m Olympic finals were on Sundays. Sydney 2000 and Beijing 2008 picked Saturday once again. Tokyo 2020 has it marked down for August 2.
These are the times when, bursting through nobody-ness, champions are found, crowned or, like in contemporary men's tennis, continue to demand their worship on loop.
Weekends are when not only athletes and teams, but even those in the sports media business must be at the absolute apex of attention and performance. Something Definitive is about to take place and we'd better be ready. ESPNcricinfo and ESPN's many editions around the world run on a steady diet of these carnivals. At the backend, copydesk rotas are planned and the most able skippers are chosen to steer the ship though the waters. As the weekend kicks in, the social-media teams of media organisations flex wrists and fingers, sharpen their wits and get ready to rock at their most droll.
Yet now, this weekend, which ends the third week of March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought, one continent at a time, one event at a time, global sport to a bewildering, yet almost inevitable halt. Everything, stands suspended, postponed, cancelled, the weekend's calendar wiped clean, we don't know for how long. Given the scale of the disease erupting around the globe it had to be, but still. A forlorn Friday bliplessly turning into another Monday. This, mind, when I'm not a club football obsessive.
Like the fans hooked to the ever-spinning carousel of live sport, at the back of our minds we too imagined, despite everything, something would be going on. Last weekend, as the crisis spiralled, the All England Championships were wrapping up, the PSL played out had its last two round-robin matches, promising a mid-week semis and a finals, which went out the window. As did in churning succession, the schedules for the Premier League, the UCL and even the Euros. The IOC's dress-up priestesses in the meantime lit the Tokyo20 torch in Greece and sent it on its way without the cheering of streetside crowds. Without anyone watching.
If an Olympic torch is lit without anyone else watching, does its flame really burn?
Mournfully, a TV reporter asked, "Sport without any spectators, is that even sport?" Sport's addicted worldwide audience, its teeming universe of owners, officials, players, media, workers, spectators, audience, could respond with their own question -- without live sport, are we even here?
When sports journalists get called 'fans with typewriters', it's meant to be an insult but in the wider scheme of things, it happens to be a fact. What we are fans of, though, and at what times in our lives is another question for another time. However bad we feel, this crisis puts life into perspective. Still, even after having been through the sobering filters of perspectives and big pictures, we respond to this sporting shutdown like fans do -- with deep gloom.
Even if we weren't working on anything, our live sporting weekends mattered just as it did to the watchers' community. The live sport weekend set down markers for our seasons. They were tagged onto events in the other parts of our lives and became psychological pointers on our Maturity Tracker -- the thing which indicates whether we were inching towards reflective adulthood or still lapsing into juvenile mood swings.
Every Sunday more or less, also involved my weekly duty drawing up ESPN India's calendar of events to see where India's athletes will be competing in the week or weeks ahead. It meant you tapped through nearly 30 online links tabulating the latest event schedules or federation announcements around archery, athletics, badminton, boxing, golf, hockey, shooting, squash, table tennis, tennis, weightlifting, wrestling, sometimes extending to basketball, gymnastics, fencing, kabaddi and volleyball. This Sunday's calendar lies blank.
The stronger among us will remind the rest that our sports universe will at some point right itself and return. The fact checkers will tell us that, in reality, of course there is something on. There were shooting trials taking place in Delhi, no doubt some football teams somewhere are training for an event only they seem to be told will go on, there was even an in-house "Grand Prix" being planned for Indian athletes in Patiala.
Yet nothing compares to the absolute insouciance of the Candidates chess, currently on in Yekaterinburg, Russia. It began on March 17, will end of April 4 and is being followed by millions online. On Wednesday, world champion Magnus Carlsen, who the eight Candidates are competing to challenge for his title, put out this rapier poke out on behalf of his tribe.
Chess is tough, it takes skill, you can't just be 7 feet and dunk over everybody https://t.co/6LaR9MnKmX
- Magnus Carlsen (@MagnusCarlsen) March 16, 2020
Magnus vi elsker deg (we love you), okay, ja? But that is just cruel.