Blue White Illustrated

P E N N S T A T E F O O T B A L L >> medications that could be brought to bear against the coronavirus. Spectator sports are a resilient institu- tion, having already survived one pan- demic. The so-called Spanish flu swept the globe in 1918 and early 1919, and sports were just one facet of American life that was massively disrupted. Even before the flu arrived, college football teams across the country were depleted because of enlistment in World War I. Among the absentees at Penn State was head coach Dick Harlow, who left in July 1918 to join the war effort. Harlow was replaced by Hugo Bezdek, manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team but also a seasoned football coach who had enjoyed success at Oregon and Arkansas. The combination of wartime austerity and public health fears delayed Bezdek's debut on the Penn State sideline, as games against Penn, Dartmouth, Cornell, Bucknell and Carnegie Tech were all can- celed. The Lions did end up having a sea- son, but it consisted of only four games, all in November. The first two of those games – a 6-6 tie with Wissahickon Bar- racks and a 26-3 loss to Rutgers – took place at Penn State, but attendance records for the football program's earliest decades are spotty, and there's no ac- count of how many of Beaver Field's 500 seats were filled on those two afternoons. There are records for other sports, though. Major league baseball consisted of 16 teams at the time, and all but one of them saw substantial declines in atten- dance in 1918. Those declines were partly due to the decision to shorten the season by 14 games because of the war, but that alone doesn't account for the dramatic falloff that most teams experienced. After drawing 684,521 fans in 1917, for instance, the Chicago White Sox drew only 195,081 the following year. The De- troit Tigers went from a cumulative at- tendance of 457,289 in 1917 to 203,719 in 1918, while the Philadelphia Phillies went from 354,428 to 122,266. By the spring of 1919, the war was over, and the last of the three spikes in in- fluenza cases had subsided. When the baseball season began on April 19, fans were ready to flock to the nation's ball- parks. All 16 franchises improved on their 1918 attendance, and 12 of them improved on their 1917 attendance. The season may have ended in infamy with the Black Sox scandal, but baseball's postwar atten- dance boom set the stage for the sport's explosive growth in the decades to come. There are obvious pitfalls when look- ing for synchronicity between events set a century apart. So asking whether col- lege football will snap back as quickly as baseball did is probably the wrong way to frame the question. To cite the most obvious difference, if you wanted to ex- perience baseball in 1919, the only place to do so was at a ballpark. The first radio broadcast of a major league game was still two years away, and television as we know it didn't exist yet. But sports have now been appearing on American TV since 1939, when NBC aired a college baseball game between Columbia and Princeton. The medium has become so good at capturing the de- tails of just about any sporting event that it has been blamed for eroding home attendance at a lot of places. Why sit in gridlocked stadium traffic and pay for parking when you can stay home and probably see more than you would have seen even if you'd been sitting at the 50- yard line? Here's why: The desire for a sense of connection and community is one of the most deeply embedded aspects of human nature. Perhaps more than any other sport, college football illustrates this point. Game weekends are about games, sure, but they're also about re- visiting old haunts, seeing old friends, tailgating, cheering and, at the end of game day, either celebrating a win with one's fellow fans or commiserating over a loss. It's those social bonds that make college football more than just a game to a lot of people. Over the coming weeks and months, we'll be turning mostly to virtual com- munities to satisfy that craving. They'll have to do. But they're not enough by themselves. What we really want is to re-experience the sense of common purpose that one gets from being in a roaring sports venue. As Penn State ath- letic director Sandy Barbour said re- cently, "This is far, far bigger than sport, but sport will absolutely play a huge part in bringing all of our communities back together again when the time is right. I certainly know that that's true for Penn State, for the Penn State community and for the State College community. We're going to be back at some point, we're going to be playing, and it's going to be a way for our community to rally and come out of this on the right side." At the moment, that day seems a long way off. With authorities recommend- ing that we keep at least 6 feet away from other people whenever we're out in public, it's hard to picture 107,000 fans crowding into Beaver Stadium anytime soon. Also, a return to normalcy will re- quire more than just the end of social- distancing recommendations and restrictions on the size of gatherings. It will require people to feel comfortable again in large crowds, without any of the public safety measures to which we're fast becoming accustomed. We keep hearing about how the pan- demic is a paradigm-shifting event that will permanently change life as we know it. In some respects, that's undoubtedly true. College sports will likely emerge from this ordeal looking different. Schools have already lost millions in revenue due to the cancellation of the NCAA men's basketball tournament and will be forced to do some serious belt- tightening if the upcoming football sea- son is shortened or canceled. Still, when the time comes, when the curve has been flattened and the virus has been conquered, I can't help but think that the masses will want to return to Beaver Stadium in the kind of numbers we're accustomed to seeing – not just for the sports but for the camaraderie. Oth- ers think so, too. The immediate future may be cloudy, but Penn State is eager for its teams and its fans to pick up where they left off. "Hopefully, sports will have a huge part in bringing communities back together and universities back to- gether and our country back together," Franklin said. "Because I think that con- nectivity is important." ■

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