As Drew Brees learned this week, sports are returning to a very different reality Globe_Sports
Brees is an unusually savvy marketer of himself, but even he badly misjudged the moment. He failed to realize that, in the space of a week, the public-engagement rulebook has been rewritten.All of a sudden, athletes are no longer celebrities. Celebrities generally get a pass for the goofy things they say because, hey, they’re celebrities. What else can you expect?
One effect of the pandemic no one considered was what might happen when you close down all those amusements, all at once, for an indefinite amount of time. What’s new is that there isn’t an awards show on tomorrow night at 8 p.m. Eastern that can get everyone looking in another direction. The only live entertainment people have left is the news. News, by its nature, is more terrifying than entertaining.The NBA announced this week it will return in late July. The NHL is targeting roughly the same start date.
But evasion isn’t going to work any more. It’s no longer acceptable to retreat into dumb-jock mode. We’ve reached the point in this cultural reset where everyone is expected to choose a side publicly. And while there are a lot of bright people in sports, they are still vastly outnumbered by the ones who aren’t exactly deep thinkers.
Insofar as the word should ever be applied to the business of putting things in nets, none of this will treated with as much seriousness as usual.
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