Anything we can do to keep our mind off the current global situation would be a good thing, right?
Sports have always been the best form of escapism from our daily lives, or from the information overload – when athletes aren’t desperately trying to selfishly infuse their politics into them.
And when it seemed like there was no end in sight when sports would return, this President Trump ally was really close to holding a huge sporting event on April 18th until Disney stepped in.
The sports world is officially closed until further notice. You can tell just how dire the sports “journalism” world has become when you see these talking heads yammering away on their shows about anything but what they were specifically hired to do – talk about sports.
All of the major sports around the world are on hiatus.
Major League Baseball is trying to work out a situation where they’ll begin the 2020 season as early as May in Arizona, which is one of the least exposed areas in the country.
The National Basketball Association has proposed a plan to finish the regular season and playoffs in Las Vegas, Nevada. The idea would be to have all 30 teams travel to the famous Las Vegas strip and hold every single game at the MGM Grand.
All of this is up in the air still and no final decision has been made thus far.
But Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) president, Dana White, was planning a huge highly anticipated UFC 249 event on April 18th but Disney, and parent company of ESPN, told him to “stand down.”
White told ESPN’s Brett Okamoto in an interview, “Today, we got a call from the highest level you can go at Disney, and the highest level of ESPN. And the powers that be there asked me to stand down and not do this event next Saturday.”
Originally, the plan was to hold the event in New York City to air on ESPN-plus but after the outbreak, White changed it to a private island so they can mitigate any spread of the disease. That apparently wasn’t good enough for Disney.
ESPN responded to White’s comments saying, “Nobody wants to see sports return more than we do, but we didn’t feel this was the right time for a variety of reasons. ESPN expressed its concerns to the UFC and they understood.”
President Trump held a conference call with the commissioners of major U.S. sports leagues recently saying that he hopes to have fans back by late summer or early fall.
Trump said of his conversation with the commissioners, “They want to get back. They’ve got to get back. They can’t do this. Their sports weren’t designed for it. The whole concept of our nation wasn’t designed for it. We have to get back. We want to get back soon.”
White said the UFC “will be the first sport back” of all the major sports.
In a recent interview with The Hill, White said, “I would never say anything negative about Donald Trump because he was there when other people weren’t. Any good thing that happened to me in my career, Donald Trump was the first to pick up the phone and call and say ‘congratulations.’”
The one good thing about sports being canceled for the foreseeable future is not having to listen to prima donna athletes on their soapbox preaching about their disdain for Trump and liberal politics. Thankfully, Dana White’s UFC will have none of that when it returns before the others.
