Strange time to be covering UGA, college athletics

But mostly I enjoy my travel for work, especially when it’s attached to great events. The Final Four is one such event. So is the Masters.

Those are two of my favorite sporting events of all to cover in 30-something years as a sportswriter. I had a chance to be at both this month. Instead, I’m covering neither.

That is not intended as a “woe is me.” Everybody in the country is giving up something as we heed the order to shelter in place. And while my wife, a teacher, and I continue to work and draw paychecks, I personally know many others who aren’t as fortunate. So, I have that perspective.

But we’ve been tasked today to write about what it’s like to be a sportswriter during a time in which the coronavirus pandemic has brought the world that we cover to a screeching halt.

Let’s just say, quite different.

I tend to think mostly about all the elite athletes who would have been competing in these events about now. I’m sure Tiger Woods is going to be fine embedded at his compound in Jupiter, Fla. I tend to think more about the likes of Caterina Don and Candace Mahe.

Don and Mahe are members of the Georgia women’s golf team. Along with 2020 UGA signee Isabella Holpfer of Austria, they were set to compete in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur championship right before the Masters. That was supposed to be played April 1-4 on the same hallowed grounds Woods was set to defend his 2019 Masters title.

Now, it’s cancelled.

The good news is Augusta National has announced that everybody who had qualified this year will be invited back next year. But, of course, who knows where everybody will be a year from now?

Likewise, UGA men’s golfer Spencer Ralston lost out on his chance to play in the PGA’s RBC Heritage tournament in Hilton Head. Now he has to decide whether to return to UGA for an extra senior season or go ahead and turn pro, as was his plan after graduation. I heard recently that he plans to come back. Hopefully he’ll get another crack at the Heritage.

I was actually in Nashville covering the SEC men’s basketball tournament when this whole coronavirus thing became real for me. I drove up there on March 10 fully expecting the event to be played as planned but knowing that this was a developing national story. At that point, our leaders in Washington were telling us “the risk of getting the coronavirus was low,” which was an actual headline in our newspaper that day.

Credit: Chip Towers

Credit: Chip Towers

Georgia played Ole Miss in the opening round the next day and won impressively. But between their game and the next, the SEC went from deciding to play without fans in attendance to not playing at all.

I never entered Bridgestone Arena again. The Thursday afternoon Georgia was supposed to play its second-round game against Florida, I never left my hotel room. That was my first experience of covering developments remotely. I watched Greg Sankey’s press conference live from my laptop, talked to Greg McGarity and Tom Crean on the phone and delivered the news to you from room 1442 of the Omni Hotel.

Since then, everything I’ve done has been remotely. I did ride through UGA’s campus and take a few pictures at the outset of this. But otherwise my work has been done in my office at home. Just call it the Bogart Bureau of the AJC.

That has brought forth many challenges, as well as unexpected blessings. First of all, hats off to all the teachers in the world as well as home-schooling parents. Having a 12-year-old boy at home and making sure he is getting all his assignments done while also enforcing online game-playing limits is a full-time job. Never mind my inability to provide any meaningful help in sixth-grade accelerated math. Thank goodness my wife, now also working at home, is an educator.

We eventually found some rhythm-and-flow within all that. And on the other side of our work obligations, we’ve re-discovered the joy of old-fashioned board games, watching television together as a family and multiple daily walks around the neighborhood. While over-eating from a well-stocked, easily-accessible pantry hasn’t enhanced our fitness, I’m sure our labrador retrievers Baxlee and Watson have dropped a few pounds.

As for the work, that has slowed, too. On Thursday, I would have covered the 11th of Georgia’s 15 spring practices, the last of which would have been the G-Day Game at Sanford Stadium. Last time I caught a glimpse of the field now named after Vince Dooley, it didn’t even have yard lines painted on it.

I miss the live-action stuff most of all. The chance to get a look at new quarterback Jamie Newman and the other new Bulldogs and tell you about them. The chance to cover the Georgia baseball team, that appeared poised to make another postseason run. The Diamond Dogs were ranked No. 2 and heading to No. 1 Florida for the SEC tournament opener when their bus was ordered to turn around in Brunswick and make its way back to Athens. I’ll never forget talking to coach Scott Stricklin about how that all came down and what it was like breaking the news to his players, all of whom had their sights set on Omaha.

That’s another place I would have gone had Georgia made it that far. Hadn’t been there since 1990, when I spent 11 days at old Rosenblatt Stadium covering the Bulldogs’ run to the national championship.

I was particularly excited about this year’s Final Four. No, Georgia certainly wasn’t going to be a participant, but our sports editor Chris Vivlamore had big plans for our fair readers. Tens of thousands of people were expected to descend on Atlanta and were were going to put everything we had into covering that prestigious event.

Including me.

I was excited to learn only a month or so ago that I had been approved to stay downtown and report on the Final Four festivities from a hotel down on Marietta Street rather than negotiating traffic back and forth from Athens every day. With my son on spring break at the same time, it was one of those rare occasions I was going to be able to bring him and my wife with me and let them enjoy the sights and sounds of a major athletic event in a big city.

That would’ve been last weekend. Instead, we spent that time doing yard work, cooking burgers on the grill in the and playing Monopoly, Yahtzee and backgammon at night.

Yeah, I know. Not so bad.