The azaleas, man. Now we don't even get the azaleas.
This upon the news that Augusta National has postponed the Masters, as the sports world continues to go dark in an America getting cozy with terms such as "social distancing." It's the proven best way to slow the spread of COVID-19, whose confirmed cases in the U.S. have breached the 2,000 mark in less than two months -- and whose unconfirmed cases are likely several magnitudes above that, given the shortage of available tests in this country.
On the other hand ... "social distancing" is a much more polite way of saying "Get the hell away from me." So maybe COVID-19 has at least introduced a measure of civility to our national discourse.
But back to the azaleas, and other stuff.
It's just not going to be the same, whenever (if ever) they get around to playing the Masters now, because part of its charm has always been its juxtaposition of beauty and lethality. Nothing like watching Amen Corner torture rich dudes in logo caps as they tramp around a transplanted English garden. All those chirping birds and tinkly piano music and A Tradition Unlike Any Other, and then the sheer horror of seeing it all unravel with the plop of a golf ball in Rae's Creek?
Chilling. But ain't the azaleas purty?
Now, of course, the azaleas will be long gone, and Augusta National will just be a golf course again. Which sets the mind to wandering toward other changed realities, and this mind in particular to one changed reality in particular.
Along with the announcement of the Masters postponement, see, came others. and here's the one that caught my eye: IndyCar pulling the plug on its season until the Grand Prix of Indianapolis in early May. And that got me wondering (fretting?) about what happens if COVID-19 is still spiraling then, and what a catastrophic incubator 250,000 people jammed into one place would be on the Sunday before Memorial Day.
I'm talking about the Indianapolis 500, of course. Speaking of iconic American sporting events.
I'm talking about the 500 because it's where my mind goes in May, and always has. It goes to that square-jawed 2.5 miles of asphalt that sprawls north and east from the corner of Georgetown Road and 16th Street in Indianapolis. It goes to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which once was a Brickyard and now, after a century and 11 years, is a sort of living museum crowded with ghosts and the remembered echoes of Deusenbergs and Millers and Novis and Offies and Lotus-Fords -- and, of course, the ruffling whisper of those Day-Glo STP turbines.
I caught Parnelli Jones in the first STP turbine in 1967, winging around the place in a gleaming neon blur on a gloomy Saturday in 1967. It was my first visit to Indy, and the place had its hooks in me thereafter. Now it's 53 years later and it still has its hooks in me, still is the one place I want to be on a certain Sunday in May even after 40 years of covering the 500 as a sportswriter.
The start of the 500, I always say, is one of the two or three greatest moments in all of sports. And if you're any sort of sports fan at all, it's a bucket list deal.
And so, yeah, I look ahead to that certain Sunday, and I fret. Probably it's for naught; this morning that certain Sunday is almost 2 1/2 months off, and with enough "social distancing" COVID-19 should be under control by then.
But no one really knows, of course. As with any new strain of virus we are still in a learning mode, still trying to figure out how and if it will mutate. After the initial outbreak of the Spanish flu in 1918, for instance, the virus mutated into something far more deadly. This may not, but, again, no one really knows.
They didn't run the 500 in 1918, by the way. But that was because of the Great War, not the flu. Had the war never happened, though, the flu would surely have shuttered the place, as it shuttered so much else in America that summer and fall.
In which case, there would be precedent to follow.
God help us if we have to.
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