Bubbleball

Golliver Ben Golliver

Description

A captivating account of the NBA's strangest season ever, from shutdown to championship, from a prominent national basketball writer living inside the bubble When NBA player Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 in March 2020, the league shut down immediately, bringing a shocking, sudden pause to the season. As the pandemic raged, it looked as if it might be the first year in league history with no champion. But four months later, after meticulous planning, twenty-two teams resumed play in a "bub-ble" at Disney World-a restricted, single-site locale cut off from the outside world. Due to health concerns, the league invited only a handful of reporters, who were required to sacrifice medical privacy, live in a hotel room for more than three months, and submit to daily coronavirus test-ing in hopes of keeping the bubble from bursting. In exchange for the constant monitoring and restricted movement, they were allowed into a basketball fan's dream, with a courtside seat at dozens of games in nearly empty arenas. Ben Golliver, the national NBA writer for the The Washington Post, was one of those allowed access. Bubbleball is his account of the season and life inside, telling the story of how basketball bounced back from its shutdown, how players staged headline-grabbing social justice protests, and how Lakers star LeBron James chased his fourth ring in unconventional and unforgettable circumstances. Based on months of reporting in the exclusive, confined environment, this is an entertaining record of an extraordinary season.

Sujets

• Baloncesto
• Basketball
• Basket-ball

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 04 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781647003647
• Langue: English

Extrait

Text copyright 2021 Ben Golliver
Photographs Ben Golliver
Cover 2021 Abrams
Published in 2021 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944916
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5553-8
eISBN: 9781647003647
This book is based on reporting for the Washington Post during the 2019-2020 NBA season.
Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [e-mail] or the address below.
Abrams Press is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
To Grandma Pat and all librarians.
To Mom and all teachers.
Contents
1 Welcome to the Bubble
2 Shutdown
3 Data, Not the Date
4 Two Challenges
5 Final Pitch
6 Acclimation
7 Opening Night
8 Title Chase Commences
9 No Positives
10 Swept Out
11 Boycott
12 The Aftermath
13 Ousted
14 West Threats
15 Humiliated
16 Balls of Steel
17 Unauthorized Guest
18 Home Stretch
19 Mamba Shot
20 Old Man Game
21 Grand Opening, Grand Closing
22 Not So Fast
23 Champagne at Last
Afterword
Acknowledgments
1
Welcome to the Bubble
My first steps back into the Central Florida sunshine, with squinting eyes and a deep-seated paranoia, were cautious.
Even under normal circumstances, I would be headed into stimulus overload. Disney World s grounds were dotted with tall palm trees and bright tropical flowers; tiny geckos circled my ankles and egrets launched off the grassy banks of blue lakes.
But these were the most abnormal circumstances of my lifetime. Security guards were watching my every move. I had agreed to always wear a face mask and an identification credential in public. I had been issued a Kinexon proximity alarm that would beep like a smoke detector if I stood too close to anyone else. I had listened to detailed security briefings informing me that I would be confined to a small portion of the Coronado Springs Resort and that I wouldn t be allowed, at first, to get a haircut or walk to the hotel gift shop, let alone drive a car or visit the nearby amusement parks.
While the jarring restrictions were straight out of dystopian fiction, I realized quickly that I had stepped into basketball s Garden of Eden. Within minutes, I stumbled across NBA players, award-winning executives, and well-known referees. They mingled by the pool, power-walked along a simple oval path, and fished from three bridges that converged at a central lake. The players main hotel, the Gran Destino Tower, glimmered just beyond the bounds of the access allowed by my credential.
Donovan Mitchell, the Utah Jazz s All-Star guard, provided my official greeting to this hot, humid, and hectic new world: Welcome to the bubble.
I was glad to be there. I was nervous to be there. I was still getting my bearings. OK, I was tripping out a little bit.
For a full week, I had been strictly confined to a hotel room with two queen beds, a long desk, a big-screen television, and a simple bathroom. Once a day, I was allowed to step onto my front porch for a few minutes so that medical professionals in full scrubs could swab my nostrils and throat. Prepackaged meals were left at my door by scurrying staffers who wore face shields and medical gloves. I could faintly hear my neighbors through the walls, but we weren t acquainted and didn t communicate. My room s only window didn t open. Visitors were forbidden.
To pass the time during my quarantine, I paced back and forth for hours: eight steps toward the bathroom, heel turn, eight steps away from the bathroom. Each morning, I diligently completed a health checklist that required me to take my temperature, measure my blood oxygen level, and fill out a detailed health questionnaire through an iPhone app. I strapped my MagicBand, complete with an NBA logo and Mickey Mouse ears, to my right wrist; Disney s electronic hotel key doubled as my facility access pass and tracked my movements around campus. I slid an Oura tracking ring on the middle finger of my right hand to gauge my temperature in real time.
On long, empty afternoons, I stared out my window at a lake fountain that shot water high into the air, a taunting mirage. The isolation made me a little loopy, and I started to feel like a circus performer or a reality television show participant. With nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, I filmed myself pacing and uploaded it to Twitter. Nearly 100,000 gawkers watched the sad sight of a sportswriter turned into a caged hamster.
The social media buzz led to dozens of interviews with media outlets from around the world, and they all seemed to be enjoying my suffering a bit too much. Their rubbernecking was understandable: I was a hostage at the Happiest Place on Earth.
Well, that s how the sports talk hosts liked to phrase my predicament, but it wasn t quite true. I had volunteered for the assignment, a basketball obsessive eager to get a courtside view for the NBA s ambitious and unprecedented restart. The Washington Post , my employer, had paid more than $50,000 for my golden ticket as one of the few independent media members to live and work entirely inside the bubble. And I was technically free to leave at any time, although bailing out was an unthinkable proposition given all the money, energy, and stress required to get to Disney World in the first place.
How did I get here? The answer was simple and yet so big that it defied comprehension. All aspects of my new life in Orlando were shaped by the novel coronavirus pandemic, which spread from China to the United States in early 2020.
When I arrived at Disney World on July 12, 2020, Americans had been dying and American businesses had been struggling for months. This specific coronavirus, named COVID-19, caused a disease with a range of symptoms: fevers, fatigue, cough, shortness of breath, aches, and the loss of taste and smell. COVID-19 was deadly, especially among vulnerable populations like the elderly, and it spread rapidly. A widely available vaccine was still months away, and there was no sweeping federal game plan for confronting the virus or limiting its spread, only conflicting public health recommendations, shifting timelines, and a false hope, expressed repeatedly by President Donald Trump, that it would magically go away.
These invisible, unexpected killer germs rocked the American people and presented an existential threat to businesses. Twenty-two million Americans lost their jobs during the early stages of the pandemic, and the NBA wasn t spared. Thanks to a decade-long financial boom and a lucrative media rights deal, the NBA was an $8 billion-per-year business before the pandemic. Then, with little warning, the league had to shutter its arenas and indefinitely suspend its season when a player tested positive for the mysterious new virus on March 11, 2020. Our revenue has essentially dropped to zero, NBA commissioner Adam Silver admitted on an April 17 conference call.
Less than three months after Silver delivered the direst statement of his six-year tenure, nearly 350 players on twenty-two teams arrived at Disney World. Considerable planning and extensive negotiations between the league and the National Basketball Players Association had produced a radical and ambitious solution to the pandemic. By strictly limiting contact with the outside world and enforcing public health best practices, the NBA hoped to play hundreds of games inside a bubble environment. Walled off from the rest of society, the NBA could attempt to complete its regular season and hold the playoffs.
While the plan made sense in theory, basketball was especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. Experts were still grappling with how the virus spread, but it appeared that indoor gatherings presented a higher risk and that close-contact situations should be avoided. Basketball, of course, was a full-contact sport played indoors. If one player unknowingly contracted the virus and played in a game, he could easily expose teammates, coaches, opponents, referees, and, possibly, media members.
But the NBA was intent on generating television money and crowning a champion, and I was intent on being there to see it succeed or fail.
Raised in the shadow of Nike s world headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, I became enamored with basketball at a young age thanks to a steady diet of Michael Jordan propaganda and the Portland Trail Blazers Rip City runs to the 1990 and 1992 Finals. Since I began covering the NBA in 2007, I had structured my life around the league s schedule, covering games on Christmas, hitting the road every spring for the playoffs, and taking brief vacations during the late-summer dog days.
My typical week involved writing five basketball stories and appearing on five basketball podcasts. When the arenas went dark, my life got dark. If I needed to sacrifice the comforts of home and hand over my private medical information to see the 2019-20 season s biggest names-LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard, and Giannis Antetokounmpo-compete for a title, so be it. The three leading contenders-the Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Clippers, and Milwaukee Bucks-had to settle things on the court, and I was up for just about anything the NBA thought it needed to do to finish the season. Small price to pay.
Memphis Grizzlies guard Ja Morant said that he quickly settled into bubble life because he was not a silver spoon guy. Clippers guard Patrick Beverley noted that the bubble is what you make it. I sought to channel Morant s low-maintenance approach and Beverley s pragmatism,