This is sports?

 Are you having as hard a time watching televised sports in the Covid era as I am?

I find myself settling in front of the television these days, fully intending to watch any live sports action that might happen to catch my attention.

But we are, after all, living in strange times. What with self-quarantines, social distancing, appalling death numbers, poisoned politics and Lord knows what else, there's not much left for us to do these days.

So I watch games on television to help keep my sanity. Or I try to, anyway. It's what I try to do for entertainment.

Oddly enough, I find myself channel-surfing in the middle of tied ball games. I walk into the kitchen when somebody's attempting a game-winning field goal with time running out. College basketball in front of empty arenas means nothing to me. I suddenly missed those annoying shouts of "Go in the hole!" or "Yudda man!" at patronless PGA events. The Masters in the fall? Not right. Better if not at all.

Or it could be that after spending more than 45 years of my life as a sports journalist, I might just be tired of sports, period. I stopped covering high school events this year because of the pandemic and because I didn't want to put my nearly 70-year-old life system in unnecessary jeopardy, or perhaps put somebody else's life system in jeopardy.

And I missed none of it.

My sports ennui – or cynicism – really started this summer, I think, when I tried to watch major league baseball. But that turned out to be a joke. The 162-game regular season was shortened to a laughable 60 games, which means every player's stats has an asterisk behind it. Also, what kind of championship test is 60 games? Potential championship teams are just barely creating momentum 60 games into a season.

On top of that, players were performing in front of cardboard cutouts of fans in otherwise empty stadiums, listening to piped in cheers over loudspeakers. I barely watched the World Series, with my interest more peripheral than actual.

That concept of cutouts, incidentally, spread to nearly every stadium sport. It got me to wondering what was the real worth of these games? I mean, athletes, like stage performers, feed off their audience. It's part of the contest. I could only wonder how motivated players really are in front of empty arenas with cardboard fans wearing blank faces. Say what you will, but to me, something's missing from the heart of all this.

 In college football, teams were qualifying for bowls with ridiculous records. Back in the old days, you needed to win six games to qualify for a bowl. But now, we saw Wake Forest (4-4) meet Wisconsin (3-3) in the Duke Mayo Bowl. Mississippi State (3-7) and Tulsa (5-3) literally slugged it out with a massive game-ending brawl in the ironically named Armed Forces Bowl. Of course they did. C'mon.

At least 20 teams elected not to go to a bowl game at all, even if they did qualify.

Teams in every level were competing with corrupted schedules and depleted rosters, if they were playing at all. I actually found myself applauding programs that opted out of playing games for fear of turning them into super spreader events, trying not to get their players and fans sick.

You know why they're doing this, of course. Money. Sure, it's always been about money. But now, in the middle of a deadly pandemic, even more so. If you understand that, it all makes sense.

And here you were worried about voter fraud. The real fraud is happening on athletic fields.

In order to entertain myself, I found myself watching reruns of movies like Bull Durham or Major League, where the action, incentive and motivation seem more real to me now than reality itself.

Today is the last day of the regular NFL season. I know what's going to happen. I'll turn on a game between contenders, settle in, watch a few minutes, doze off, wake up, channel surf to The History Channel, or The Smithsonian Channel, get informed about something I didn't know about, like aliens or Nazis, then turn back to the game to see what the score is.

And go back to sleep.