Texas pro sports teams don’t ‘want to be sued into oblivion’ if they return too soon
The past couple months have felt like an eternity — an eternity slowly surrendering into the vapid vast nothingness of a supermassive black hole.
At least, for sports fans, it feels that way.
On March 11, the professional sports world was claimed as a victim of the COVID-19 pandemic at 9:27 p.m. EST, the minute the test for Utah Jazz star Rudy Gobert came back positive, according to Bleacher Report. Minutes later, the NBA suspended the 2019-20 season. Every other league fell in line, and suddenly the stands were empty.
On Wednesday, Texas Sen. John Cornyn held a video meeting with officials from the state’s major-league franchises about what can be done to slowly bring pro sports back to Texas as the state itself begins reopening.
The only thing is, the franchises, including the Dallas Cowboys, Dallas Mavericks, Dallas Stars, Texas Rangers and more, don’t want to be held responsible if bringing back sports means risking a COVID-19 outbreak.
“We want to go back to normal, but we don’t want to endanger anyone,” Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told The Dallas Morning News. Cuban was not on the call with Cornyn.
Cornyn said that the profession teams “don’t want to be sued into oblivion” or be “responsible for a public health outbreak” if they make the decision to return too soon, The Dallas Morning News reported.
“We’re all trying to work together to figure out what that may look like,” Cornyn said on the conference call.
Cuban has been vocal about the return of sports during the coronavirus pandemic, and said that he believes the NBA can resume its suspended season, but not until it’s safe. That will be when Cuban can “use the White House protocol,” as he put it to The Athletic on Tuesday.
What does he mean by that?
“The way the White House protects the president and vice president is the way that I want to protect our players and employees,” he said. “We’ll just try to copy what they do as a means of knowing when the time is right. They have access to the best science, the best information, and so it just makes sense to me that we just copy them.”
While that may work for players and team officials, what does that mean for the clusters of fans in the stands?
Ideas for bringing back sports with no fans have been tossed around between the leagues, along with conducting games in limited locations, but no clear way to return has been determined.
Cornyn told reporters that the nation is going to see “a lot more monitoring of people who come into public facilities for elevated temperatures, indicating that they have a fever,” along with widespread COVID-19 testing.
Cuban, however, disagreed with the senator when it comes to testing the temperature of fans, which will allow healthy spectators into venues.
“Anyone can crush and eat a few Tylenol to beat any system,” Cuban said, according to The Dallas Morning News.