Can’t we have anything nice? Right now, not much, as the ongoing drama over high school and college football illustrates. But drop down to this week’s Final Five for something great the pandemic has not sidelined. 

The One

If the coronavirus pandemic is, in part, an unwanted microscope on pre-COVID life, then here’s one potential finding: Maybe sports — and especially football — means just a little too much?

The Memphis 10: A six-month COVID check-in, a Lucero set wishlist and more

I’ll confess that I’ve had a lifelong on-and-off relationship with football fandom.

Growing up in Arkansas before it was SEC country, much of my family lived and died by the Hogs. My connections were more hazy. I remember head coach Lou Holtz giving way to Ken Hatfield. I remember the tizzy when star linebacker Billy Ray Smith — now there’s a Southern college football name — showed up at my grandparents’ catfish restaurant. I remember watching Barry Foster break off a big run against Miami and, later, Clint Stoerner take a bad fumble against Tennessee. 

But I came of sports-watching age in the 1980s, and was more drawn to the aerial exploits of Montana and Marino on Sundays than the wishbone offense on Saturdays. The much-celebrated “pageantry” of college football was never a pull. In junior high, I lived in a small town where “Friday night lights” was a social organizer and I ran the public address system for junior varsity games. After I moved to Memphis, football culture was a high school social option, not a governing principle. 

Shelby County Health Department: 46 active COVID-19 cases in Memphis athletics

My NFL fandom has ebbed and flowed in adulthood. A few years ago, I announced, to eye-rolling reaction from my wife, that I was going to “get into football again.” This was fun for a couple of years, especially with a fantasy team to manage. But I found myself drifting away in time, not in reaction to concussions or politics, but because there were other ways I wanted to spend my Sundays. 

This winter, I got the itch again. Because my wife works for the University of Memphis, I found myself as a “plus one” at the Cotton Bowl. It was great fun, even in a loss. I decided I’d dive into Tiger football the following fall.

Just when I think I’m in, they pull me back out. 

In terms of Tiger football, I’m talking COVID here. But to a larger extent I’m talking about the off-putting passion for the sport COVID has underscored: For me, at least, “it just means more” is a bug, not a feature. A George Carlin joke. Sports is supposed to be fun, not very serious.

This is not just a Southern thing. In my Minnesota-connected household, we laughed this week — as much “with” as “at” — a recent viral Twin Cities news clip in which a Minnesota mom laments, with high school football on hold, spending her Friday nights at the bar rather than in the bleachers. (People in the South think they know how to drink, but places where the windchill can hit -50 and neighborhoods have corner bars rather than corner stores would beg to differ.)

With two coronavirus clusters, U of M postpones next phase

If I’m reading the recent news correctly, playing high school football in Memphis amid a pandemic hasn’t just disrupted football, which was probably to be expected, but has disrupted school.

In Collierville, a football-related outbreak didn’t just halt play. It switched the whole school to virtual learning for two weeks. 

At Lausanne, a positive COVID test on the football team didn’t just take the rest of the team off the field. It took them out of physical school for two weeks. 

At the University of Memphis, there has been a football-related outbreak at a time when an increase in in-person learning is being delayed.

Division 1 college football is a different animal. It’s big business, for better or worse. And maybe in all of these cases, virtual learning and/or in-person delays would have always been for the best. 

Given these disruptions, it makes sense, then, that Shelby County Schools, currently all-virtual, wouldn’t want to begin high school football — or other contact sports — while they’re still trying to get kids back into school.

It’s hard to justify putting the extracurricular before the curricular.

That players and their parents are upset also makes plenty of sense, especially when they see yet another reflection of the inequity that exists in our separate spheres of school.

For many of these players, it just means more for very good reasons. But for the rest of us, the focus we give to the disruption of this particular extracurricular activity is a function of fandom. Football isn’t the only extracurricular activity. The pandemic is no-doubt disrupting not just other sports — some of them even played by young women — but other activities, be they theater performances and debate competition, mock trial and math teams, musical and dance collaborations and all the rest. 

It’s all bad, and the only way to get back to some kind of normal is to contain the virus enough to bring kids broadly back into schools. The “extra” can follow. Some might argue we’re already there, but these football-related outbreaks offer a yellow flag. 

Four More

Four more quick things on my Memphis mind this week, this time in alliterative form:

The Peabody: We don’t have rice paddies that need cleaning, as far as I know. And we don’t have an army of 10,000 to conscript. But in this time of need, I’m sure ducks can pitch in somewhere. And what we do have is a quack commando unit, an anatine assembly just floating around a hotel fountain awaiting flock of fortune duty.

Hey Peabody: It’s time to mobilize the ducks.

Pizza: With Hog & Hominy on hiatus, it’s not really surprising to see Memphis unmentioned on this recent list of America’s 101 best pizzas.

There are plenty of pizzas in Memphis I like and regularly eat, but absent those creative oven-fired creations on Brookhaven Circle, none that I’d say warrant a “we were robbed” claim. Truth be told, I’ve only sampled a handful of these entries. This includes the No. 1 pie (Frank Pepe’s in New Haven), which was spectacular, as well as a regional pick (DeLuca’s in Hot Springs) that I’ll co-sign. Of local interest: Nashville’s Slim & Husky’s Pizza Beeria all the way up at No. 5. A Memphis location of this small cross-state chain was announced pre-COVID, and seems to still be on tap, with Memphis news still posted on the company site and renovation work active this week on a reported Union Avenue spot adjacent to the coming Ravine park in the Edge District. 

Parks: I’ll confess I’m of the “good walk spoiled” variety when it comes to golf, but the notion of turning a relatively little-used course in Frayser into an urban park/orchard that would be potentially more widely used by residents sounds like a good idea to me. 

Postponement: High school and college sports aren’t the only things being pushed back. The NBA, despite a bravura success (so far) in its Orlando “bubble,” has continued to push back a potential timeline for a 2020-2021 season now likely to just be a 2021 season. Closer to home, the Orpheum made news last week that was not at all unexpected, pushing its Broadway calendar — which had already moved from a September to a December start — back to March. 

You plan for dates until they have to move. When I talked to Orpheum president and CEO Brett Batterson late last month, the Orpheum was still technically looking at a December start for its Broadway season, but it didn’t take much reading between the lines to see that this was already unlikely. 

“The producer has to be able to make money. So the first thing is, we can’t bring Broadway shows until we can sell 100% capacity,” Batterson told me then. “That’s entirely up to the local health authorities. But the producer has to have enough sites back-to-back that he doesn’t lose money.”

The idea of full capacity shows at the Orpheum by December seemed far-fetched, and the need for a string of cities in the same situation to enable touring even more so. 

But Batterson wasn’t trying to obscure that.

“Everything’s fluid,” he said. “We’re keeping our patrons informed as changes happen. We know we’ll have shows. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a question of when.”

The Final Five

It was a tough job, and no one had to do it, but I was willing to put in the work for the readers. I have to say, after a week-and-a-half of constant taco eating from trucks on Summer and Macon, I did not get tired of consuming tasty meats tucked into tortillas. My full findings are in yesterday’s story, but for a bonus here, I’ll power-rank my five favorite Summer/Macon food-truck tacos, limiting each truck to one entry:

1. Costilla (rib) tacos at Carnitas Gri’s (Honorable mention: Maciza, or “pork meat without skin”)
2. Barbacoa tacos with consomé at TacosNGanas (Honorable mention: Camarones)
3. Carnitas tacos at El Colibre
4. Birria tacos at Taqueria Express #5
5. Barbacoa tacos at Palenke Express