Columnist Dean Juipe: Shutdown has to be accepted

Dean Juipe

Friday, Sept. 14, 2001 | 10:14 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

By revised design, this will be a very slow weekend for America's sports fans.

One by one and slowly but surely, everything of national interest has been either cancelled or postponed.

Travel issues, arguably as much as anything, necessitated closing down the sports world. With many airports -- such as McCarran in Las Vegas -- not reopening until well into the day Thursday, sports teams and individual athletes alike were going to have a hard time getting from here to there even if they wanted to.

The shutdown is just as well, of course.

For those writers and barflies who shouted that schedules needed to be adhered to without interruption and that the games needed to be played, think again. The country can't stay in mourning forever, yet it clearly wasn't ready on the whole to rejoin the pennant races and football games whose significance had been undermined and affected by the events in New York City and Washington D.C.

To play this weekend was deemed too soon in most cases. People just aren't ready to pack into stadiums and cheer for their preferred team(s) as if nothing had happened.

When the teams and fans do return, a sense of passivity may permeate the playing fields as well as the crowds. Our perspectives have been changed by the events of the week, and, at least initially, I expect something of a subdued aura within stadiums that ordinarily bustle with excitement.

Normalcy will eventually return, but it will take awhile.

On the short term, it may be less important than ever who wins what game or whether Barry Bonds can hit 71 home runs or not. It may take the passage of time before our allegiances to individual teams are restored to their earlier luster.

In the meantime, we have this period of reflection and regeneration that's presently upon us.

For a while Thursday, a few sports were holding out and were sticking to their schedules. A couple of dozen college football games were still on the docket, an auto race or two was still on and Major League Baseball was tinkering with the idea of resuming play today.

But when the National Football League scrapped its weekend schedule, its counterparts were all but obliged to follow suit and the dominos began falling. The remaining holdouts -- the assorted college football games, the auto races, Major League Soccer -- relented and brought their seasons to a halt. In most cases it was impractical to play, and the implications of playing after the NFL had called off its games was a significant, if subliminal, factor as well.

The Southeastern Conference, for example, realized it didn't need the public relations headache it might have encountered had it played its football games as scheduled Saturday, so it joined the cascade and pulled the plug on them in an effort to join the majority if nothing else.

The ramifications include a dark weekend in Las Vegas sports books, as well as the possibility of no Sports Illustrated next week -- a decision that was being considered in the magazine's New York offices, according to a source.

These are unpleasant intrusions, to be sure. Yet ones we need to accept without complaint.