An Athlete’s Ache

Just over two weeks ago, the sports world ground to a palpable and immutable stop. It was like the old Road Runner cartoon where the coyote is running along at Mach 1 chasing the bird and all of a sudden the road stops. His coyote legs just keep spinning in thin air for a few seconds and then he plummets, finally landing in a giant flat splat on the ground miles below.

We face-planted Thursday, March 12 when we packed up what we had scarcely unpacked and headed home from what was supposed to be our conference tournament. One by one in machine-gun rhythm every sport on our campus landed beside us, the proverbial weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth reverberating from the Lloyd Noble Center to Owen Field to L. Dale Mitchell Park like echoes in the Road Runner's canyon. 

At first it feels so personal, so specific, and so unfair. Then quickly it just feels necessary. And very, very sad. 

The hole is huge—the space where the play was. We all feel it. The general public longs for sports' salve. Coaches and referees and timekeepers and TV broadcasters pine for their relevance as cogs in the giant machine. And athletes ache. From Olympic qualifiers to high school seniors, competitors are adrift trying to make sense of hijacked journeys and ransacked dreams. Regardless of the level or the platform, the athlete's dent is deep. 

To the high school athletes who didn't get a chance to cut down the nets, or stand on tiered boxes with medals around your necks, or rush the mound on the heels of the final third out, you have to realize that it mattered. Your gym will have an empty spot on the wall where the 2020 banner was supposed to go. And no one will ever be able to say definitively that a trophy deserved to be in that case, but what you did with the people you roamed the halls with was significant. You were a part of a whole and your striving made you better even if you won't have tangible proof of a finish to mark it.

For the high school senior who didn't sign a letter of intent and has neither inclination nor aspiration to continue competitive athletics at the collegiate level, your end was an end with an enormous, bold period. Not a comma or a semi-colon, but a period. You are done. Maybe you haven't trained tirelessly throughout all the pauses of your life and maybe you haven't for the past four years poured over your athletic goals every morning with your cereal and every night by the light of your phone, but you have been a part of a team. You have represented your school. You wore the royal blue uniform with "Bulldogs" across the front. You performed the team handshake and the ritual on the bench. You sprinted onto the field with your closest friends. You smacked it across the net at your greatest rival. You played for your school. I want to say that again. You played for your school. And you won't ever get to do that again. Neither will your college-bound teammates—not in the 'once-in-a–lifetime-high-school-kind-of–way'—but they will be a part of another team, living another season, along another competitive highway. You won't. I ache for the last shot you won't get to take, and I want you to know that your pierced heart bleeds just as red as the others. In a strange sort of way, I think I'm sad most of all for you.

Trust me, however. All of you—college bound or not—you will remember. And over time, you won't just remember that the state championship run was snatched from you by an invisible, global thief. You will also remember how it felt to dog pile your buddy at home plate. You will laugh about your air ball free throw and you will get mad all over again at the call that changed the game. You will replay and reenact the best and the worst of times and you will be so glad that you played. Yours was among the purest of experiences and if you were paying attention (and maybe even if you weren't) you will find that the competition has shaped you.

Through the years you will likely always reference the unprecedented way in which your high school career ended. It will be one of those street signs like what my mother was doing when JFK was shot or where I was when the twin towers fell. But you won't stand and stare at the sign, you'll walk back down the road it marks. And you just might find that you make that walk more often than you would have had it had an alternate ending, and you just might appreciate it more, too. What mattered most was always what happened along the way, anyhow. 

To the college athletes, you guys get four shots. Collegiate athletes' lives are packed neatly in a four-square pill box. Some get drafted and use only the first or second squares and some have injuries that create subdivisions within the four, but when all is said and done you have four years max to live your dream, and it goes fast.  Even when not preempted. For all spring sports, COVID-19 stole a year from the box. So if you had four chances to make the tournament, now you only have three. Or if you were a junior en route to a title, back to back is off the table; your shot is down to one. The math is the easy part. Getting our guts to reconcile the math is what's hard.

It's hard because we pour so much of ourselves into the chase. And now, suddenly, there's not anything to catch.

And so, athletes ache. Especially college athletes whose sports are often the axis their lives revolve around. They long to hit balls and shoot baskets, lift weights and run laps… to punch an early morning alarm, even. They miss the grind and the camaraderie, the constructive criticism and the praise. And they miss the competition—the uniform and the jitters and the pregame prayers and the postgame sweat. They miss winning, and they even miss losing, because both made them feel so alive.

This is a regimented pause in their rapid-fire lives of pushing and pulling and reaching for better. Collectively, at least. Athletes miss their teams.

College seniors, especially, feel cheated. They had become the sled dogs pulling their squads, hoisting the flag for their programs. Their pride had arms and legs and a heartbeat reserved only for those who know they're on borrowed time. There was a way they wanted to go out. This certainly wasn't it. Some had played almost full seasons with only the mystical magical tournaments left to go. Others were digging into the dog days of conference play leading up to the late spring runs we all are accustomed to championing. All of them ended without an end. 

For a college senior, what's on the other side of a last game ever is adulthood—adulthood in a world they have scarcely stuck their toes into because their whole beings have been immersed in their athletic aspirations. Because of the unknown that lies ahead and the question marks left hanging of the past, the holes in their hearts are gaping. They have all thought about their last shot attempt, drive on the 18th hole, pitch at the plate, landing off the beam. Unlike their younger teammates, they had a vivid intention, a way they dreamed it would look or go or feel. Their last opportunity to be a champion was yanked out from underneath them like a squeaky toy out of a puppy's mouth, leaving them on the edge of a next they don't really know or understand. The college senior's heart isn't punctured by the hard line of the corona virus pandemic, it is broken by it. And the shattered pieces are scared.

And then there are our next-level hopefuls. Those precious, elite few waiting to be drafted, waiting to be called up, waiting to qualify for the Olympics, waiting to be what they've trained their entire lives to be. What happens to them in the interim? Better yet, what happens to them when the world gets going again? Elite performance doesn't idle well. Their respective windows have already begun to shrink. 

In the great scheme of things—the loss of life, our country's escalating poverty rate, the crashing of our nation's economy—how important, really, is a season sucker-punched and laid down for the count? Not very, of course.

But just because it's not important, doesn't mean that it doesn't matter.

I get a lump the size of a grapefruit in my throat every time Toby Rowland sets the scene on Saturdays prior to kickoff. In the spring of 2017, when Brad Dalke jugged the 30-foot birdie putt on number 12 to give our men's golf team a clear runway to the natty, I ran around the coffee table in my living room like a puppy trapped inside so long that he forgot where the door was. And while I couldn't tell you 'come here' from 'sic em' when it comes to the twists and turns of an airborne gymnast, when Maggie Nichols sticks her size 8 ½ feet in the mat and her whole body lifts skyward without a bobble, I can't help but think that's what Dr. King was referring to when he said, "… do your job in such a way that the heavens might pause and say, 'Herein lies a job well done.'" Sports pinch us and poke us and keep us alive.

They keep us yearning for better. And that matters.

Originally published on SoonerSports.com.