When You Watched TV: June 27, 2020 in Salt Lake City

When you watched TV on KUTV Channel 2 Saturday June 27, you were witnessing history. Now, you might say, tell us something we don't already know, right? Over the course of several weeks, the world around us has changed in ways that many may not fully grasp for decades--let alone years. On this Saturday afternoon though, you weren't watching police cars go up in flames, or smoke fill the air around you--or protesters filling Salt Lake City streets demanding social change. 

No, what you were watching was something that was also special in a different kind of way, a reentry into a world that has since been closed by a Covid-19 pandemic that cost the world half a million lives--one-third from the United States. But on this day, the conversation wasn't about a pandemic though it was foremost in our minds. Instead it was about the National Women's Soccer League, or the NWSL, which became the first pro sports league in America to begin play since Covid-19 halted all play in mid-March. 

When you watched TV and you watched two teams in North Carolina and Portland enter the tunnel of Zions Bank Stadium in Herriman, Utah wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts in front of a national TV audience on CBS, you felt a swelling of pride. Perhaps some anxiety was also present in your thinking, but as soon as the players took the field and kneeled, they made their presences known despite the empty stands draped in banners from all nine NWSL teams and their sponsors. 

The moment a CBS sideline reporter stood six feet from the player they were interviewing, you knew it was finally game time--even if the method by which the interview was taking place was historic in a rather sad way. Today, there would be no handshake, no fist bump. From a distance the reporter would show her gratitude to the player and vice versa, appreciative of the moment before them, they also knew that so many have lost so much along the way--from the point at which this pandemic started. 

When you watched TV on CBS, you didn't really care who was playing who; you simply cared that anybody was playing, at all. For it has been a long, long time since anyone has dared take the field in a team game, in a team sport, in America. So when the ball was kicked in this modern-day Mudville ringed by rows of identical high-density high-rise homes and orange cones indicating construction, a new Casey was at the bat, er, ball. 

And then the ball was kicked, eliciting cheers from people in their homes. Though no player could hear the applause, they could certainly feel the excitement as they began kicking the ball around the park. Even Alex Morgan, who was nursing her baby at home, was cheering for the girls from a perspective she described on Twitter as being "crazy." That it was, but it was ours to cherish after such a long layoff--moreso for these women who hadn't even kicked their regular season off yet. And so for them, for their commissioner who had to take out a PPP loan just to pay her players during the break it was not only a moment in American sports history, it was their NWSL season opener. 

When you watched TV, you probably couldn't believe you were watching live American team sports or players digging their cleats into the ball, and at times, each other. Despite all the fireworks causing a raging fire across the Interstate from Herriman on this day, there were fireworks on the field. There was a late winner in the first game of the NWSL Challenge Cup tournament featuring North Carolina and Portland after a heated 3-2 battle viewed by half a million people, setting the stage for another memorable story in the second game of the tournament. 

As Chicago and Washington took the field at the Zions Bank Stadium in Saturday's nightcap, it wasn't even the game itself that made national headlines. Instead it was US national team star Julie Ertz consoling her black Chicago teammate who broke down in front of the CBS cameras. As they were kneeling during pre-game for the BLM movement, the moment between the two players encapsulated this historic yet emotional day for many. On a day that seemed so difficult yet so invigorating to these women--and maybe even some Americans--it lent a perfect ending to this day in American sports history.