A Year Like No Other Is Almost Gone
- Franz Beard
- Dec 24, 2020
- 10 min read
“Truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” – Gloria Steinem
Can 2021 get here soon enough? I know, I know. Just one more week and we’re over and done with 2020, but haven’t we seen enough? Haven’t we suffered enough in this year of the worldwide pandemic? Are you pissed off that we have had to endure a year like this? Are you as ready as I am to put 2020 in the rearview only to be remembered as one of the worst years in memory?
This has been a year like no other. My 92-year-old mother, who grew up in the Great Depression and was a teenager during World War II, says 2020 is the closest we’ve come to those years in terms of impact and upheaval in our lives. The Covid-19 virus has had the economic impact of the Great Depression and it has taken more lives than in all the wars combined that the United States has engaged in since 1945.
With each passing day, it seems we get news that contradicts what we heard the day or week before. What we have learned is that the more we know about the virus the more we know so little about it, but we do see the damage it leaves in its wake and wonder how it could further disrupt our lives. We wear masks in public and we hear that some who claim to be experts in infectious disease think wearing a mask in our own homes might be a good idea. Other doctors tell us that masks may not work at all. We are encouraged to keep our distance – six feet away whenever possible – and that essentially has eliminated the hug and the handshake from our daily routines.
Some states and big cities go on lockdown to prevent the virus from spreading. Maybe it works for our health, maybe it doesn’t but the economic impact has been devastating. In Florida, the lockdown has all but been eliminated but masks are required nearly everywhere. Churches, restaurants – anyplace where people gather – limit their capacity. We see businesses boarded up or reducing hours. We’re used to a 24-hour Walmart, but now that retail giant has scaled back its hours and shuts down at 10 p.m.
We shop in stores that in the nine months since the virus became Public Enemy No. 1 still can’t fill their shelves. Lysol has become a luxury. Some weeks the shelves are full of toilet paper of every brand. Other weeks you get what they have and they limit how much you can buy. We go to malls, shopping centers or stores that are like ghost towns.
When a friend or family member goes into the hospital, visitation is curtailed or, in many cases, completely eliminated. Some schools are open. Others have gone exclusively to online learning. The psychological impact on both patients and students is enormous due to the lack of interaction with family and friends and classmates.
As bad as the economic damage has been, has the psychological impact been worse? It’s almost as if five thousand years of societal evolution has been reversed. Our homes have become our caves to where we have retreated and where we stay, almost barricaded with the hope that our confinement will keep us alive and upright. When we dare leave home we double check to make sure we haven’t forgotten our mask. We work if we still have a job although in many cases hours have been greatly reduced. We shop only when we have to, so often with limited resources because our earning capacity has been diminished by this pandemic. When the sun sets, we return to our caves and sit in front of a TV where we binge watch on Netflix and Amazon Prime. When we’ve run through the movies, shows and programs that we know, we find ourselves watching re-runs of shows that were popular twenty or thirty years ago. Viewership of “I Love Lucy” and “The Beverly Hillbillies” re-runs is at a record pace.
If we turn on the news we are bombarded with doom and gloom. If it isn’t the virus it’s politics and if it isn’t politics it is social unrest. The virus rages. Elections are disputed. Cities burn. Sports, which have always served as our escape from all the bad in the world, have been turned into vehicles of social justice, constant reminders that for some in this country, a level field and equal opportunity is a dream and not a reality.
The NCAA canceled basketball just as March Madness was about to begin. We’ll never know if Mike White and the Florida Gators could have made it past the opening weekend. Was that season the lasting reminder of what Keyontae Johnson was truly becoming? All-SEC in 2019-20. Preseason SEC Player of the Year for 2020-2021 before his collapse on the floor in Tallahassee just four games into a new season. Fortunately, he’s home for the holidays although it’s questionable if he will ever play basketball again.
At the time when all sports were put on ice, Kevin O’Sullivan’s Florida baseball team was 16-1, ranked No.1 in the nation, and thought to be a serious threat to bring home the second national championship in the last four years. A pitching rotation of Tommy Mace, Jack Leftwich and Hunter Barco was the best in the country. Judd Fabian was emerging as a superstar in center field and nobody could find a way to get Jacob Young out.
Tim Walton had the Florida softball team at 23-4, steamrolling everyone in their path and looking capable of making their 11th Womens College World Series Appearance since 2008. Charla Echols was hitting with power to all fields, Kendyl Lindamin was launching the ball high and deep over the outfield wall and Natalie Lugo and Rylee Trlicek were emerging as a serious 1-2 pitching punch.
Jenny Rowland’s Florida gymnastics team was unbeaten, ranked second nationally and thanks to the truly gifted Trinity Thomas, ready to win UF’s fourth national championship and first since 2015. Thomas was the 2020 SEC Gymnast of the Year with a perfect 10 on bars, beam and floor.
Mike Holloway, who has won nine NCAA track and field championships in his Hall of Fame career, had the Gators ranked in the top five and poised to make national championship runs at both the NCAA indoor and outdoor events.
It could have been a spring that produced three or four national championships in Gainesville.
We endured a summer in which the NBA finished its season in Orlando, its players kept in what amounts to a cocoon and playing in an empty arena. Did anyone watch the playoffs? It was nearly 50 years ago since we saw TV ratings that low.
Major League Baseball played an abbreviated schedule of 60 games. Does anyone remember who won the World Series, which was played at a neutral site?
The NFL elected to play a full schedule in empty stadiums while placing plenty of emphasis on social justice issues. Ratings have plummeted.
It is college football that has provided plenty of debate and the most compelling sports story of the entire year in Florida quarterback Kyle Trask, who has a legitimate shot at becoming the fourth Heisman Trophy winner in school history. In a season in which the Big Ten has become synonymous with stupid decisions, the Southeastern Conference has proven that strong leadership and good planning can help make the best of a bad situation.
In a summer in which the powers that be in college football debated whether to play a fall schedule, a split schedule in which half the games were played in the fall with the other half in the spring, or a completely spring schedule, Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren announced his league would opt out of the fall and study possibilities to play in the spring. The Big Ten figured that everyone would follow their lead. They figured wrong. When SEC commissioner Greg Sankey decided to play, the ACC, Big 12, American Athletic, Conference USA and Sun Belt followed his lead.
Sankey went with a 10-game conference-only schedule with built-in flexibility that allowed 67 of the 70 scheduled games to be played. The other leagues allowed for some inter-conference play but all followed Sankey by allowing some flexibility to re-schedule on the fly. Once football was being played, the Big Ten saw the errors of its ways and hastily put together an eight-game schedule that had no margin for error, which led to Ohio State playing only five games yet still making the conference championship game. Once the Big Ten elected to play, the Pac-12, Mountain West and MAC also came up with shortened schedules.
Although the SEC played in stadiums limited to 20 percent capacity, it was still football and it produced two great story lines. Alabama went 11-0, winning the SEC with what many are calling Nick Saban’s best team no matter the year thanks to an offense that has put up 40 or more points in an NCAA-record ten straight games. The Crimson Tide is seeded No.1 in the College Football Playoff and is everybody’s favorite to win Saban’s sixth national championship since 2009. The playoff has a final four of Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Notre Dame. Alabama and Clemson are indisputable. They belong. No one is even remotely certain either Ohio State or Notre Dame could beat the Gators, Texas A&M or even unbeatens Cincinnati or Coastal Carolina from the Group of Five.
Florida came within 12 points of a perfect season in large part because Trask emerged as a serious Heisman candidate. Trask leads the nation in touchdown responsibility (46), touchdown passes (43), passing yards (4,125) and passing yards per game (375). Having never started a game since the ninth grade, Trask became Florida’s starting QB in 2019 when Feleipe Franks went down with a dislocated and fractured ankle. In the 21 games since he took over to lead the Gators back from an 11-point deficit in the fourth quarter to a win over Kentucky, Trask is 16-5 as a starter and is now eighth on Florida’s career passing yardage list (7,228), sixth in touchdown passes (69), first in completion percentage (68.28%) and first in efficiency (186.65). Trask has already been named a finalist for the Davey O’Brien National Quarterback Award and is likely to be a finalist for other national awards.
With targets like all-interplanetary tight end Kyle Pitts (43-770, 12 touchdowns), who is a finalist for both the Biletnikoff and Mackey awards; Kadarius Toney (70-984, 10 touchdowns), a finalist for the Paul Hornung Award; and Trevon Grimes (38-589, 9 touchdowns), Trask has carved up opponents at an alarming rate. Heading into next week’s Cotton Bowl game with Oklahoma, he’s thrown for more than 400 yards in three consecutive games and has a UF record five 400-yard games this season. Trask’s 13 career games with 300 or more yards ranks fourth all-time at UF.
That the Gators have lost three times weighs heavily on Florida fans, but nowhere close to what Trask is feeling. Did you see the tears that streamed from his face in Atlanta when he ran out of time in trying to do the unthinkable which is to bushwhack mighty Alabama? Add another minute to the clock on each of those three losses and the Gators might very well be 11-0, everybody’s favorite to win the national championship and Trask would be a shoo-in to win the Heisman. Kyle Trask thinks about such things as being unbeaten and playing for the national championship. The Heisman? It’s not on his mind because he’s far more interested in making the Gators better. That’s part of his charm and what makes his story the best in college football not just this year but in the past decade or more.
In reaching heights that no one expected or could have dreamed of when he came to Florida as an unheralded quarterback from Manvel, Texas that some services rated three stars Trask has taken the Gators to two consecutive New Years Six bowl games. Not bad for a kid that one recruiting service ranked behind more than 2,000 other players in 2017. It just goes to show you what perseverance, patience, faith and good coaching will do for you. Along the way, Trask has earned both a bachelors and masters degree from the University of Florida, never had anything close to an off-the-field problem or problem with teammates in the locker room. While doing all this, Trask has earned the respect of everyone for his calm, humble demeanor. He defines aw shucks. When he deflects praise to his teammates that’s not phony. That’s just the way he is. He builds others up which is why teammates would run through the proverbial brick wall for him.
If there is a story that salvages what has been an otherwise rotten and uncertain year for Florida football fans it is Kyle Trask. For UF basketball fans, Keyontae Johnson’s recovery and discharge from the hospital is another story that helps negate what has been a lousy year. The prognosis that he will at least have a chance at a healthy life moving forward is an added bonus.
We need good stories at the end of this year of so much that has been negative. We need to once again face a new year with optimism and the belief that things will indeed get better. We need once again to know that we can face the worst and emerge stronger for our ordeal. We need once again to be able to hug and shake hands. We need a new year, one that will restore our faith in each other and dissipate this cloud of gloom. We need to be able to shop in stores with full shelves, sit in restaurants brimming with customers, see businesses open back up and attend ball games in stadiums filled to capacity.
My 92-year-old mom Carleta Underwood probably said it best a couple of days ago: “I lived through the Great Depression and despite how tough times were, we grew closer and shared what we had with the people we loved and sometimes with total strangers. I lived through World War II when every day people I knew got news that a child or relative or a family member wouldn’t come back. Men went off to war and so many never came back, but when it was over, it was better and we were stronger as a country and the world was a better place for all the sacrifices that were made. When I look at 2020, I’m glad it will be coming to an end just as I was glad the Depression was over, just as I was glad World War II came to an end. It will be over. Things will get better. Life has gone on and will continue to go on only now we will be stronger for it. But let me tell you something, I’m glad this year is coming to an end. I’ve heard it said before that tough times don’t last but tough people do. The tough times won’t last but we will. I’m so happy in a few more days we turn the page on 2020 and we will have a brand new year, aren’t you?”
Possibly your best column in a most difficult year. Thank you for great journalism and great perspective.