The player-fan relationship: We miss hearing the roars from the crowds

“If I show up to an arena and there are no fans in there, I ain’t playing.”

Can you believe it was just 10 days ago that Lebron James, the most famous athlete in the United States, uttered those briefly infamous words? James long ago walked them back, of course, and it was soon apparent that he wasn’t going to have any choice in the matter anyway. Last week, after one of the league’s players tested positive for the coronavirus, the NBA suspended its 2020 season indefinitely. Not only would there be no fans in the arenas, there would be no teams on the courts, either. Virtually every sports association, professional and amateur, has followed suit.

Tennis, as you’re surely, and painfully, aware, was one of them. As of now, the men won’t resume until late April, and the women won’t return until early May; both layoffs could obviously last much longer. If it wasn’t clear last Sunday that officials at Indian Wells were doing the right thing by cancelling the BNP Paribas Open, it should be by now. If the tournament had gone on as planned, it would still have nearly a full week to go.

The anguish over these events is more proof, if anyone still needed it, that sports, far from being a mindless diversion, help drive and define our world. It took the NBA ending its season to wake many Americans up to the seriousness of the coronavirus threat, and when the NCAA canceled its men’s basketball tournament, you could almost hear a collective cry go up: “Not March Madness!” While the Super Bowl is the biggest sporting event in the U.S., nothing is as unifying, or as fun, as the NCAAs each spring.

For tennis fans, something similar could be said for the tournaments in Indian Wells, Miami, and Monte Carlo. The first two have been aptly nicknamed the Sunshine Double. And the view of the Mediterranean we see from the top of the Monte Carlo Country Cub each April is a picturesque metaphor for the expanding sense of horizons that spring brings with it.

What have we missed without sports, and in particular tennis, over the last week? At the most basic level, the drama of a match serves as an immediate distraction from the news. At a more personal level, fans have missed the chance to see their favorites, their heroes, do whatever it is they admire about them most. One of those things is winning, of course, but it goes beyond that. The player-fan relationship in tennis may be more personal than in any other sport. Loyalty isn’t based on what city you live in, or even what country; it’s based on how much you relate, one on one, to a player. Fans of, say, Rafael Nadal are missing a chance to see him rip his forehand and pump his fist. But they’re also missing a chance to see how he handles a range of situations: adversity, success, pressure, victory and defeat. Tennis fans miss the sport’s personalities as much as we do the play itself.

But there’s something else I’ve found myself missing since sports disappeared, and it’s the same one that Lebron James anticipated missing: the fans themselves. Yes, I’ve wanted to watch the star players of tennis and basketball, and their aces, dunks, 3-pointers, and drop shots. But it’s the roar of the crowd that I’ve missed more. The silence from my TV over the last week has been deafening.

Jon Wertheim on how much has changed since the postponement of Indian Wells:

Sports, at the simplest level, is a way to see and hear other people. Where else can Americans get a look at 100,000 of their fellow countrymen and women in one swoop of a Spider-cam, the way we can during a college football broadcast? (The same is true, I’m sure, during soccer games in other countries.) How else can we fully appreciate the beauty and effect of Roger Federer’s game without the audience explosion that accompanies all of his winning shots? Skilled athletes give us contests worth watching, but audiences turn them into emotional, meaningful occasions, even for those of us watching from the other side of a TV screen.

It’s possible that Roland Garros and Wimbledon could stage their fortnights without fans this year. But if someone hits a spectacular shot and there’s no one there to clap for it, how spectacular will it seem? For now, I’m already looking forward to seeing James, Federer, Nadal, Serena Williams and dozens of others do their thing on court again. But what I’m really looking forward to is hearing the first roars from the crowd when they do.