MIAMI — Before Erik Spoelstra had to fulfill the media responsibilities required of him as an NBA coach Wednesday night, he wanted to express the compassion expected of any human being. The day after the nation’s latest shame, in which 19 children and two teachers were massacred inside an elementary school, Spoelstra shared the recent memory of leaving FTX Arena before a playoff game to pick up his two boys from school. How his wife had once taught junior high. And how he can’t imagine the pain the community in Uvalde, Tex., is going through.
Americans, torn between mourning and normalcy, use our games to move on
Spoelstra, the Miami Heat’s coach, said all this before taking any questions, sitting down and adjusting the microphone so that everyone could hear him clearly. He summed up his thoughts — a stream of sympathy and grief and a call to action — by saying how much he felt for the families.
He then was asked about Tyler Herro’s playing status for Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals.
“Sorry to turn it back to basketball …” the reporter began.
It takes a special kind of skill for us Americans to go on with life as usual after a tragedy such as Uvalde. We have become such masters at moving on anytime a gunman walks into a public space and opens fire on innocent and unarmed targets that we all should be suffering from whiplash. Once unfathomable, now it’s just a Tuesday in Texas. Or a Wednesday in Parkland, Fla.
We pause and reflect or protest and rage, directing our indignation at legislators who refuse to create meaningful laws that would limit the proliferation of guns in our society. But mostly we mourn and then move on. This cycle may not be more obvious and inevitable anywhere than in sports, the great American diversion.
Heat fans on their way to Wednesday night’s game, some of them heading north on Biscayne Boulevard, may have spotted the electronic floating billboard that advised them: “Hug your kids tight today. In memory of the victims of Uvalde, Texas.” At the same time, those zooming south on Interstate 95 may have noticed the billboard advertising the Miami Gun Show this weekend.
Once inside the building, just as it had the previous night in Dallas before Game 4 of the Western Conference finals, the atmosphere turned somber as the public address announcer asked fans “to join us in a moment of silence.” The Heat then took a further step by projecting a black-and-white image, urging fans to “Support Common Sense Gun Laws” along with a link to register to vote.
Applause, from ticket buyers who presumably live in a state that does not require a permit to purchase a firearm, filled the room, but as always, the show went on. The cheers grew louder once the earsplitting bass line of “Seven Nation Army” piped in. The graphic eventually faded so the rallying cry “Let’s Go Heat!” would get the crowd excited once more. Because, after all, this was a playoff game. Entertainment. A happy distraction from the day’s bleak news as the number of dead children in Uvalde grew from the initial count of 14 to 19.
Spoelstra spent much of the start of the game with arms crossed, pacing the sideline as the teams toddled through a low-scoring first quarter. No doubt by this time his mind had shifted from feeling devastated for the families to focusing on how to stop all-NBA forward Jayson Tatum. He has practice in compartmentalizing. In being a coach who has to diverge from the script of basketball to address terrible days in America.
Before a game in Philadelphia on Feb. 14, 2018, Spoelstra offered his “thoughts and prayers” when it was still okay to use that phrase without critics weighing in and diminishing the standard expression of sympathy. He did so because earlier that day a gunman had killed 14 students, a teacher and two coaches at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Then Spoelstra went on to coach the game. The players went on to perform. Fans cheered as usual. Joaquin Oliver, a Parkland student who died that day, was buried in a Dwyane Wade jersey.
“It is tough. It’s very tough,” Spoelstra said Wednesday night about shifting from concerned citizen to a coach concerned about matchups. “My wife and I had kind of a tough afternoon reflecting on it last night for those very reasons, and it does feel like just yesterday that we were going up there [to Parkland] and spending time in that community and just the shock that it was happening, so real in our neighborhood really, in our community.
“But it just continues to happen. I know everybody is saying that there needs to be a call to action, and I think what this is forcing people to do is just to figure it out, including myself,” Spoelstra continued. “We don’t have the answers, but we want to be heard to be able to force change to the people that can actually make the change.”
Most sane people want this same change because we have fears and concerns over protecting the next school. But we also want life to go back to normal because our minds can’t easily process the horror of fourth graders having to duck and hide under plastic desks to save their lives. And so we look for familiar habits we love, distractions from our pain. Certainly, the majority of people inside the sold-out arena Wednesday night mourned over the lives lost. But that didn’t stop them from showing up to cheer for grown people wearing matching outfits and playing a child’s game.
However, some in sports — such as Steve Kerr on Tuesday night, such as Wade after the Parkland shooting — found that whiplash almost too much to tolerate.
“What started going through my mind was: ‘How do I dare come here and act like I know what you guys have been going through?’ ” Wade said of his visit to students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas less than a month after the shooting. “How narcissistic of me to think that I can come here and make a difference because I’m good at my sport?”
“Sadness and disbelief,” Wade tweeted Tuesday, when the familiar scenes repeated themselves in Texas. He later added another tweet about the updated body count. He did not mention Herro’s absence in Game 5.
Source: WP
