WHAT, BIG SPORTS ACTUALLY THOUGHT COVID-19 WAS GOING AWAY?

A return to normal has been interrupted by a pushback into reality, with no end in sight to a pandemic that could wreak havoc on the Tokyo Olympics, the MLB season, the NBA Finals and all of sport

     Forget normalcy. It never did return to Big Sports, even as the industry’s money-grabbers tried to claim otherwise, and with large swaths of America still rejecting vaccines because Facebook friends and third cousins say so, let’s not downplay the unrelenting truth. The pandemic never ended, fans.

     The coronavirus will continue to disrupt the world’s fun and games — at the Tokyo Olympics, in the second half of the Major League Baseball season and into the NFL and college football seasons. If you don’t like it and you are sick of it, you have my permission to start jabbing the bare arms of COVID-iots everywhere. They are preventing us from living our dreams, and in some cases, they are ending lives.

     ‘‘They’re killing people,’’ President Biden said of the anti-vax mob and the disinformation it dispenses. ‘‘Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated — and they’re killing people.’’

     What the leagues and broadcast networks thought was a blip in time, an epidemiological pause, has become another stream of dark headlines. More than 16 months since Rudy Gobert Night in Oklahoma City, so long ago that Chris Paul was playing that night for the host Thunder, COVID-19 continues to own and wreak havoc upon a $600-billion machine. On our shores, the New York Yankees are worth $5.25 billion but remain helpless to the virus and its variants, which infected six players, including hulking slugger Aaron Judge, and prompted postponement of a Yankees-Boston Red Sox game that had been granted a special national-TV programming window. Next thing you knew, All-Star players who had joined Judge in this week’s All-Star Game festivities were rushing to be tested.

     This is what happens in sports when most players and personnel are vaccinated but some are not. No player is safe. No event is sacred. The difference this summer, as opposed to the previous year and a half, is that fully vaccinated athletes are being infected again. The group includes Paul, who tested positive in late June, recovered to lead the Phoenix Suns to the NBA Finals … and has played sluggish, turnover-filled basketball the last two games, leading to speculation that he’s still dealing with COVID aftereffects. Team USA has been popped, as well, its already-shaky chances for Olympic gold hindered by Bradley Beal’s virus exit. Sportscasters Rich Eisen and Jay Williams weren’t protected by the double jabs, either. Knocked off ABC’s coverage the rest of the Finals, Williams tweeted: ‘‘I have tested positive for COVID. I have received both my shots. I am fully vaccinated. But this is our new normal."

     I’d quote an old Elton John song, ‘‘The Bitch Is Back,’’ only The Bitch never left. And the inanity of it all? While Paul is concerned about a COVID spread that could impact the ongoing Finals, it hasn’t stopped Phoenix and Milwaukee fans from screaming like banshees inside arenas … many without masks. “I pay close attention to it,’’ Paul told the media before Game 5 in Arizona. “I have family just like everybody else. My parents are traveling (to the games), my kids. Try to control what I can control. Stay in the moment in the Finals, but health is a huge concern.’’ It’s more than that, actually. It’s Hell on Earth.

     ‘‘We are still vulnerable,’’ said Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ longtime general manager.

     ‘‘Nobody wants to be talking about this,’’ Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. ‘‘We want to go back to normal. But some things are out of our control. We just have to do the best we can with the circumstances and the hands we are dealt.’’

     They say this is the fourth wave of the pandemic. To me, it has been one, long, interminable, soul-crushing blob that will be with us as long as human beings remain divided about vaccines. In sports, the leagues can encourage players to be vaccinated but, constitutionally, they cannot force them. At the All-Star Game, MLB Players Association chief Tony Clark balked when asked if he was ‘‘pushing’’ players to seek the vaccine. ‘‘Push? No. Encourage? We’ve encouraged since the beginning, and we continue to,’’ he said. ‘‘So if guys ask, we’ll put players directly in touch with experts and make sure they have access to that information. Not push, but encourage.’’

     Thus, the Great Vaccine Divide seeps into locker rooms and impacts championship seasons … and sports history. As written here repeatedly, nothing is more fraught than trying to stage the planet’s largest sporting spectacle, the Summer Games, amid a pandemic when the host city is under a state of emergency. In more than a year of COVID money grabs, this is the most shameless, led by an International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, who insists that Tokyo and Japan are safe when case numbers are soaring in a perilously undervaccinated land. Add 11,000 athletes and tens of thousands of auxiliary personnel, from more than 200 countries, and it seems an afterthought that spectators won’t be allowed in venues. With no vaccine requirement for athletes, a superspread can happen even if fans stay home, karaoke bars are shuttered and athletes are confined to their rooms when not competing.

     ‘‘We’d like to reaffirm all our commitment on the side of the Olympic community to do everything, that we do not bring any risk to the Japanese people,” Bach said.

     Yeah, watch him catch the first flight to Geneva when the spread surges. The only reason Bach is in Tokyo, in his five-star hotel, is to make sure the Brinks trucks arrive and billions are deposited, made possible by NBC’s greedy, COVID-oblivious commitment to televise the Games and further line the IOC’s pockets. Jeff Shell, NBCUniversal’s chief executive, isn’t bothering to wash down his sushi with morality when he’s wedded to Bach with $12 billion in rights fees through 2032.

     ‘‘I think we're pretty optimistic about both the ratings and the economics of the Olympics, and advertisers have embraced it,” Shell said. ‘‘Depending on how ratings are, it could be the most profitable Olympics in the history of the company. … You have people who have been in their homes (during the pandemic), and you’ll have the world coming together after a world-changing event to celebrate athletes, success and their stories.’’

     He was just getting started. ‘‘What generally drives our ratings is the strength of the U.S. team, and we’re really pretty optimistic,’’ Shell said. ‘‘Simone Biles is just amazing, and for the first week of the Olympics she’s going to be on every night. And then our swimming team is really strong, and our track and field team is really strong, so I think we’re pretty optimistic about both the ratings and the economics of the Olympics, and advertisers have embraced it.”

     How conveniently reassuring of him. Isn’t he concerned about COVID-19, the state of emergency, the potential for mass outbreaks in a country that not long ago was devastated by an earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear disaster? ‘‘I think every Olympics has an issue that people worry about coming into the Olympics,” Shell said. ‘‘I lived in London (during the 2012 Games), and everybody was worried about the traffic. And last time (in Rio de Janeiro), it was Zika, and you know, once the opening ceremony happens, everybody forgets all that and enjoys the 17 days. And I think this is going to be the same thing.”

     Do Bach and Shell rehearse their lines in unison every day?

     NOW HEAR THIS, BOYS: TOKYO IS IN A STATE OF EMERGENCY!!!

     Not that the athletes get it, either. As they arrive at the airport, reports the New York Times, many are high-fiving others, taking photos and making plans for get-togethers. Wrote The Asahi Shimbun, an influential Japanese newspaper: ‘‘It has become clear that organizers’ plans to separate Olympic-related people and the general public are failing miserably.’’ The local organizing committee reports 30 confirmed cases within its confines this month, and already, Brazil and South Africa athletes have tested positive and caused concern in the ranks. It doesn’t require much imagination to realize how a series of infections could wipe out entire teams, delegations and, in the end, the Games themselves.

     The protests continue from Japanese dissenters who want to shut down the Games before Friday’s opening ceremony. One anti-Games petition has almost 500,000 signatures. Their efforts are waning. Money has won.

     ‘‘The Games draw attention from the world,’’ said Tokyo’s governor, Yuriko Koike. “They can be a light of hope under the predicament of COVID.”

     Or a blight of dopes.

     Will America watch? Will it make a collective appointment when Biles, given the 13-hour time difference between Tokyo and New York, serves up her G.O.A.T. memories for breakfast? With most TVs indoors when people have longed to be outdoors for months, I’m anticipating the same reduced ratings that have plagued networks and Big Sports throughout the pandemic. Also, who wants to watch the Olympics — a global festival of unity and conviviality — when the usual spectators and excitable family members aren’t in the seats?

     ‘‘I like to feed off the crowd,’’ said Biles, the greatest of gymnasts, ‘‘so I’m a little bit worried about how I’ll do under those circumstances.’’

     Said Biles’ mother, Nellie: ‘‘It’s hard for me to understand that they cannot make accommodations. Of course, that’s just me being selfish. This will be one gymnastics event that I will never forget because I will not be present.’’

     You will realize very quickly next week that normalcy isn’t possible in sports, maybe for a very long time. You’ll know it when athletes are on the stand after an event — and they reach down and place the medals around their own necks. The presenters, you see, might have the coronavirus.

     Jay Mariotti, called ‘‘the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes sports columns for Substack and a Wednesday media column for Barrett Sports Media while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts in production today. He’s an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and radio talk host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects. Compensation for this column is donated to the Chicago Sun-Times Charity Trust.