Sports records are falling left and right. New stars are being made. Welcome to the life of an American sports fan at a time when no sports are being played in America.
If you’ve ever wondered at the appetite for sports in our country, April 2020 has provided a pretty clear lesson. With the NBA, the NHL, and, worst of all, Major League Baseball all locked down by COVID-19, sports fans are getting their fixes elsewhere.
Michael Jordan is back in the spotlight, in a big way. ESPN’s biggest draw since sports shut down in mid-March was The Last Dance, its 10-hour series on Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. An estimated 6.3 million people watched the first hour of the series in April, the best audience ESPN has garnered since the college football championship. Considering that the documentary didn’t have to compete with any live sports, it’s unsurprising that it was also the best viewership for any ESPN documentary ever.
Desperate football fans settled for the “Quarantine Super Bowl” on April 24, as millions tuned in for the NFL draft. Most of the top prospects streamed in live from their living rooms, along with the coaches doing the drafting. If you can’t see football, you can at least see into the homes of people who were football players, and one day will be again.
The draft hunger goes beyond football, though. Viewership of the WNBA draft more than doubled from 2019, as nearly 390,000 viewers watched the New York Liberty select University of Oregon point guard Sabrina Ionescu first overall.
And for actual competition, baseball fans are turning to Taiwan. The island nation that has so far successfully kept the coronavirus at bay through testing, tracing, and immigration controls has its professional baseball league up and running. While the stands are empty, Americans are tuning in to watch the English-language broadcast of the Rakuten Monkeys and the Fubon Guardians slugging it out.
South Korea is about to fire up its baseball league, too. Meanwhile, diehard fans of Major League Baseball can watch players go head-to-head over a Playstation game, MLB: The Show.
You take what you can get, I suppose.
