 Hello, I am Josh Levine. I'm the national editor of Slate, author of the book The Queen. I'm also one of the hosts of Slate's sports podcast, Hang Up and Listen. Today I'm going to be leading a conversation on how the pandemic has made us rethink our relationship with sports. This event is a social distancing social. It's brought to you by Future Tense, partnership between Slate, New America, and Arizona State University. We're doing this every Tuesday and Thursday to see the full list of upcoming events. Go to Slate.com slash live. Today I'm really pleased to be joined by two of my favorite sports writers. First, Johnny Smith, he is the Julius C. Budd Shaw Professor of Sports History and Associate Professor of History, and the great institution of Georgia Tech. He's the author of four books, latest of which co-authored with Randy Roberts, his War Fever, Boston Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War. Johnny, so glad that you're with us today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Also with us is Louisa Thomas. She's a staff writer at the New Yorker and has written three books, Among the Mind and Matter, A Life in Math and Football, co-authored with John Urschel. She's also the co-editor with Mary Pilon of an upcoming book, Losers Dispatches from the Other Side of the Scoreboard that is coming out in August. Welcome, Louisa. Thanks for having me. Johnny, I'm going to start with you. Your latest book is really relevant to what's going on in the world today. Tell us what was happening in Boston and the world in 1918 and how sports intersected with the flu pandemic that year. Yeah, it's interesting. Randy Roberts and I, we wrote a book, War Fever. And really, we began the project. We really interested in Babe Ruth and the Boston Red Sox in 1918. It's the year of World War I. And how the forces of World War I disrupted American society, changed majorly baseball, and really proved to be a transformative moment for Babe Ruth's career. It's the moment where he emerges as a slugger. And again, it's the backdrop of all of that is the 1918 flu pandemic. And really, in the second wave of the pandemic, which occurs in late August and into September, it happens in Boston. Boston is really the epicenter of this major outbreak. What's fascinating, I think, when we look back on this moment is that when soldiers and sailors were docking at the Commonwealth Pier in Boston in late August, it's the last week of the regular season for the Red Sox. They're playing games at Fenway Park. And by September 5th, this World Series is supposed to begin between the Cubs and the Red Sox. The games will begin in Chicago. But by the time the Red Sox and Cubs return to Boston, this outbreak has spread from Commonwealth Pier to the civilian population. And what we look back at this moment, although health officials were increasingly alarmed about the epidemic in the city, no one was campaigning and saying there should be no games at Fenway Park. We should call off the World Series. The games were played anyhow. And so when we think about this point in time in the first week of September of 1918, there's a number of social gathering events that are going to spread the plague in Boston. It's a registration drive. You know, 100,000 men are registering for the draft, Liberty Bond drives, parades, and three games at Fenway Park with tens of thousands of people. All of those events helped spread the virus. Now, in the end, Major League Baseball, the World Series was not interrupted by the flu pandemic. But as we move into October in early November, scores of football games were canceled in Massachusetts and in Boston throughout the Northeast and in the Midwest. By that time, basically every state in the United States is dealing with this flu pandemic. So we've seen stories about how a Champions League soccer game hastened the spread of the virus. In Europe, also, you know, if you guys saw recently just speculation that kind of a crisis was potentially averted in California because of the 49ers not winning the Super Bowl that there wasn't a parade. So it seems like that's one of the many tragedies of what we're living through right now is just this idea that these events where we come together to celebrate joyous occasions are really, you know, opportunities for this to spread. And it's one of the really cruel ironies is that every instinct that I have and that most of my friends and family have is to do everything to be together and sports are often, you know, really a huge part of that kind of community building, you know, part of our life right now. Every, everything that we know, you know, tells us that that's exactly what we should not be doing. You know, I live in Boston. So, you know, reading Johnny Smith's book I was really kind of thinking about imagining I was transported back in time in a kind of visceral way and, you know, it is amazing to me that until until this happened we were we were actually talking a little bit before filming, and I was telling him, you know, until I worked on my own book about World War I didn't really know anything about the Spanish influenza like it's just, it's just amazing that this thing that is so disruptive could have come out of. It seems like nowhere and yet we have been there before with the sports to, you know, to some extent, which is both sobering and kind of maybe hopeful to think of. Yeah, I mean the context of the flu pandemic. Johnny was that there was also World War one going on. And that was its own tragedy with with a horrific death toll sort of how did that influence the way that the pandemic was thought about given that it was playing out what with so much else going on in the world. It's the war that spreads the plague, you know, most epidemiologists believe that it started in the United States early 1918 certainly by March 1918. There's about 1100 cases in camp funds in Kansas. And what happens over the course of the spring is those soldiers who go from Kansas to other military camps, they're bringing the virus with them, and they're spreading it throughout the south, then to the northeast. And then what happens is they get on ships, and they head over to France. And then when they're in France, the virus spreads and the trenches, and all the armies are dealing with it. But here's the thing. In the spring of 1918, most Americans, they have no idea that there's going to be an influenza crisis there's going to be a pandemic because of censorship war time censorship, the government did not want people to know that our soldiers were inflicted with this disease. So most Americans didn't know how bad it was in the US military bases, or that it was really bad in Europe and it was hurting our soldiers. And of course, this is why it becomes known as a Spanish flu. During the war, Spain was neutral. And their press was transparent and talking about it in the press and so there was a sort of reaction. Oh, this is a problem that originated in Spain or it's only a problem for Spanish. Not true. Then what happens is, in late August, you have those troops coming back from Europe they bring the virus for the in the second wave to Boston, then a ship of sailors goes from Boston to Philadelphia Philadelphia was one of the hardest hit cities. And of course, it just the virus spreads into the interior of the United States so the war is completely intertwined in the spreading of the flu pandemic in 1918. Yeah. I think just hearing about about that reading about the virus now and the number of positive cases cases and the death toll just rising every day as people who write and think about sports. We can be susceptible to thinking that, you know, what we're doing right now is not that important that it doesn't really matter. And yet, I think I def I think and I think perhaps you guys think that that is ultimately not true. And Louisa, the piece that you wrote about the Boston Marathon, I think really got at why the sporting events do matter and why the postponements or cancellations of them really do hit us hard and that it's okay to feel a sense of loss there even when other losses might be greater. I mean, I really thought of the Boston Marathon is this kind of orienting event, you know, sort of this kind of I feel that sports are part of our our sort of social circadian rhythm, you know that they're one of the ways that we mark the passage of time and the one of the sort of ways that we understand ourselves, you know, there's sort of and I actually think it can be helpful to think about sports and historical context to see how kind of important they are that sort of sense of belonging that they foster and sometimes it can be very like negative. Thinking about the campus and you know, one of the ways in which one of the ways in which the war was sold a very originally unpopular war war one was very originally very unpopular United States and it became this kind of like there was a huge marketing effort around building it and these camps that were baseball teams that were basketball teams and there were sort of like that was one of these huge morale buildings and people really wanted to belong and that was one of the ways in which they they built this sort of like sense of teamwork that you know nationalism ultimately sort of built out of and I think that there's sort of there's a lot of downsides that obviously but I think that it is really important for people to feel like they have I think it is even essential actually to feel like you have some sort of, you know, connection to the plate the place in the people around you and the people far away and strangers and I mean, we are more than our, you know, more than our nuclear families, I mean, for better and worse, and sports are one of the ways in which those those that's manifest and I think in Boston is sort of Boston marathon is a really kind of vivid example of that because most people here are not marathoners, right. Most people here are not even runners, most people don't care about long distance running on any given day, but this sort of communal event happens and suddenly I had a marathoner who's run all of the big marathons around the world he said Tokyo and Berlin and he said the amazing thing about Boston and the thing that sets it apart is that everyone in Boston is a marathoner that day. And it really does feel it that way you know it sort of brings everybody together in this really beautiful and intense way and there's a loss when that doesn't happen. And it's a real loss it's not just a better loss. Johnny you've made your whole kind of life and career and studying sports and history and you've, you know, you've written a book about Muhammad Ali and how sports are kind of bound up in what's going on and in the world and all sorts of different and so you've thought about these really big questions like why sports matter and that's kind of, I think the question that we're trying to get at today, and what are some of the answers that you've seized on based on the work that you've done in the studies that you've done. Yeah, you know, I teach a course at Georgia Tech on the history of American sports and on the first day of the class I tell the students that sports are an empty vessel. And we fill them with our values our ideals and our politics, you know we assign the meaning to sports, we interpret the events in one way or another, you know we've been talking about World War one. And Louisa alluded to the fact that these baseball stadiums in particular became an extension of the war essentially you know this was a space that was no longer just about baseball, the games were not just a diversion. They became a space for promoting US foreign policy, promoting militarism and patriotism. And of course, this is the venue when the star spangled banner is first played in sporting events it's during the war the war makes that happen. And so that changes the relationship between us as fans, and how we demonstrate our patriotism in a public place and our loyalty. So I think when we look throughout the modern American history, roughly from the late 19th century through the 20th century, sports has often played a role as a source of diversion, a community bringing a community gathering site, but also I think a site of coherence, you know if we think about what we're going through now. The pandemic has created disunity and disorientation. And what we want from our sports, in addition to the diversion and community gathering is a sense of coherence, you know, each game is like a drama, there's an NBA game between the Lakers and the heat. It has a resolution, it's transparent, and it satisfies our needs to have some sense of coherence I have some certainty in our lives and there's so much uncertainty in our world and so I think people are drawn to that, particularly in times of trauma and certainly back in times of war, World War I, World War II. I think those sort of human needs are very present. Yeah, it's funny, you know, you can talk about an NBA playoff game being important, like a really important game, and people I think understand what you mean and I think we believe it in our hearts that it is important and we care about the results, millions of people care about the results, but I think what we've seen with what we're all going through now is that stuff that just seems cemented in the calendar in our lives that more things in this world are tenuous than we would have thought were tenuous and it just reveals like you were saying, Johnny, just that, you know, sports are this vessel that we fill them up with importance, but they can be emptied out too and we don't think of that emptying out, we only think of the filling. Yeah, I think that's true. You know, I was talking to a reporter who was asking me some similar questions that we're grappling with, and there was a part of me that day that I just thought, who cares? Who cares if the NBA comes back? Who cares when the major league baseball season comes back? I know there are people who do care, but for me on that day, I didn't care. It was hard for me to be focused on those events. But I also said, you know, when we think about the meaning of sports, I wasn't thinking about it really on the professional level, even the collegiate level is thinking, well, what about the kids who can't play at the soccer field down the street from where I live? Those fields are empty right now. And a week before I did this interview with this reporter, parents were out there with their daughters playing soccer, and it brought a smile across my face because I'm a dad now and I have a one year old baby girl. I started imagining someday I want to do that. There's a basketball court in my neighborhood and kids aren't there on the court now, right? Except for the kids who can shoot hoops by themselves. The tennis courts are empty. To me, that's where we see this loss, this loss of human connection, the loss of our ability to compete, which is something I think that a lot of us who love sports, we love to go to the gym or go for a run or participate in a marathon or whatever the case may be. We can't do those things. And so our sense of self has been compromised in many ways. Yeah. Louisa, what do you think about folks like Adam Silver talking, you know, pretty openly about what we're going to be a part of? You know, we play this role in bringing joy and entertainment to people's lives. You know, how do you, how do we separate out the kind of like revenue imperative that these leagues are facing versus what I think is actually a reasonable and genuine message that just is, you know, the NBA leaving, you know, post, you know, stopping when Rudy Gobert tested positive that that was a line of demarcation for us. Society that it'll be a line of demarcation when whether it's them or another league comes back. That's, that's real. I think it's pretty easy to be cynical about the motivations for these leagues coming back. I mean, there's just an enormous amount of money on the line. And, and, you know, in some cases, it's the it's not just like billion billionaires losing millions. It's, you know, there's real their jobs, you know, the people are facing losing and it's hard. And I feel like we had a little bit of a dry run for the NBA with the, the Daryl Maury's China tweets, you know, because there was a lot of idealism being fed to us, along with a kind of very visible financial consequences for for criticizing the, you know, Hong Kong protests and the way that NBA had to walk that line I sort of was thinking a lot about like well what to what extent is the idealism in sports real versus to what extent is it a kind of post facto justification for trying to make a lot of money. And, you know, I think that both things can be true. I think that the NBA really does and I'm we're talking about the NBA but we could just as easily be talking about any sport. And I really, really do believe in their idealism and the values. Sometimes those values become inconvenient when there's a lot of money in line but I mean, I do think that people within sports really have social value and I think that they're right. You know, then the question becomes, what happens when those, you know, values conflict either with the bottom line or with the safety of, you know, the public and it's all very well to say you want to be part of the solution but how do you do that without being part of the problem. You know, it is a sort of like you do. I do hear about these plans and I keep thinking like this is a little bit fantasy land I don't know I mean it's just hard to know. Yeah, I mean the initial major league baseball plan that was floated out there to have every team play in Arizona and have all the players quarantine from their families for months and then instead of sitting in the dugout they would all sit in the stands, all these seats and just deeply, deeply ridiculous and kind of profoundly diseased, I think, thinking. And yet, that to me, Johnny just felt like a case where that's more the financial imperative speaking than anything to do with what would be good for the country what would be good for fans what would be good for our psyches, but I think most other kind of plans or conversations we've been hearing there's a lot more gray area than that. I think it's a logistical nightmare. I mean, they just, I don't think they thought it all through this idea that you're going to have this biodome in Arizona, or they've thought it through and they just don't like, they don't like the answer is that they're right. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's completely unrealistic. They're the, it's, in my view, they're putting a lot of people in jeopardy, not just the athletes and the coaches and the staffs. But, you know, what happens the moment that another athlete whether it's a baseball player or basketball player or whatever gets sick. I think that's kind of a question to about college football. I've seen a lot of discussion. Dabbo Sweeney got a lot of heat about getting these young athletes backed on campus. They can make it through. They can fight off this virus. Of course, coach Sweeney I think, you know, tried to walk back his words but it was too late but it's clear that we can have college football can have college athletics if it's not safe to have the student populations on campus That's a major concern of mine is someone who is on a campus with a lot of students in a city that there's a lot of risks involved here. And I think the, the priority when we're answering this question for whether it's basically baseball the NBA or the NCAA is, are they working to protect the public good first. And I think as you pointed out, in the case of major league baseball the answer was no they were not thinking of the public good first. And I think that's where they have to be careful from the sense that maybe there's this clamoring from to provide the source of entertainment, but that people could become disillusioned if they make some missteps here if they rush to come back too soon that they'll have people who say, I'm not going back to a game because they put people's lives in danger. I'm curious what you guys think and let's let's just briefly bracket the safety questions that would be involved in playing games without fans because that there's certainly a scenario where even that would not be not be a good idea. I think it gets at something around, you know, these bigger issues that we're all grappling with about why these games exist, why we appreciate and enjoy them. What do you think, Louisa, just about the concept of games without fans in the in the arena's stadiums I mean, I think that to be honest, I'm, I'm really intrigued I almost wanted to have I mean, in a very abstract way almost wanted to happen just because I want to see because it is this amazing experiment, you know about what, where do the where do the energy of game in games come from. Because I mean, I think we can all agree that sports occupy a sort of national I mean the big sports are no longer the sort of like is locally focused so the number of fans who are watching are mostly watching on TV anyways. So it's not like we're depriving, you know, fans of the experience of watching games if you don't have stadiums but depriving more fans if you don't know exactly. I do think that that a game is a kind of almost an organism right and we talk about ecosystems when we talk about sports, and I think that there is this kind of beautiful thing that happens to arena or a stadium during a game where, you know, the what's happening on the court or what's happening in the on the field is only a fraction of what's happening in inside the game because the game is something much bigger it's a sort of this like you know, living dynamic thing and so much of that has to do with that kind of like hush the falls or the swell of the noise or, you know, at the same time I think that you know I think that everybody who couldn't believe who thought that sports needed fans has come around to the idea that if you want sports you're not going to have fans for a while so in some ways it's almost not even like worth wondering, you know, is it worthwhile we have to try it because I don't think we're going to have sports otherwise for for a while but I do think that this question of, you know, what is the sort of interaction between between the game and the community that's watching is really important one an interesting one and I'm going to be fascinated, you know, to see how it plays out. And James's initial reaction was right was I don't play if there aren't any fans. Once it became clear that, you know, that the conversation had changed and that that was going to be a possibility or likelihood he changed his tune but it was telling, I think Johnny that the initial gut reaction was hell no like there's no way that we're going to do this without fans how could we and it's just like so quickly that how our expert expectations and our sense of what's normal and acceptable have changed. So if you guys saw that LeBron James today tweeted Oh I heard the agents and their stories out there that people within the basketball community want to cancel a season but nobody's talking about that nobody wants that this is happening. And I was looking at his, you know, is looking at the responses just to sort of gauge how people were responding to that and, and there was a sort of like acceptance there was a sort of, at least what I was seeing there was this like glorification that sentiment that actually surprised me to some extent, you know, because we've been talking about, you know, that there was a sort of like, you know, it was like a, you know, almost like a post 911, like, we got to go out there or Boston's wrong or whatever I mean there was a sort of like idea that you know we had to We had just, we just sort of show up, you know, and do this and I don't know I mean it made me almost a little bit queasy and I was curious what you guys thought of it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it kind of gets back to what I was saying before where it just seems like it's not just days it's with that it's kind of within hours. It's where the conversation seems to shift and expectations shift around what we what we perceive as what's what's normal or what's okay or where things are going to go and I think it's really hard for for athletes who, you know, your, your life is governed by these rhythms. And, you know, Tiger Woods was saying that the week of the masters when it was scheduled, his like, he's just started acting really weird or like, you know, his, his mind was going in a weird direction he was just like, Oh yeah. He's getting prepared for the masters, even though there's no masters to prepare for. And so they're just these like kind of grooves that I think we're all like operating and where we're used to things being in a particular way, and just realizing that, you know, we're out of that groove. I think it's a really hard thing to reckon with. And so, yeah, that's kind of where my, my mind wanders. You know, in some ways, sports are built on rituals, right, I think Tiger has a ritual that he lives through. But the other thing too is it's hard to imagine, you know, what is college football without tailgating in the south, you know, what is a NASCAR race without all the RVs outside the stadium. Without fans seeming take me out to the ball game in the seventh inning stretch, you know, the fans are part of the event and they like to feel like they are participants, and of course they are part of the spectacle. So it's hard to imagine really what these sporting events will feel like, let alone look like if there are no fans and, you know, as Louisa suggested that dynamic that takes place between the crowd and the athletes who are performing. That's that's part of the event that's part of the energy that is packed into the stadium and, and so, you know, I was talking to Randy Roberts, my colleague about this and I said well what would sports look like if there are no fans in the stands. And he chuckled and he said, practice, you know, and that's what they would look like in a lot of ways and that's what they would sound like. But of course, the people in television are innovative, I think if we did have sports without fans, they would find ways to take us to the game since we can't go to the game physically you'd have more players mic'd up, you probably have different kinds of camera angles. They would find innovative ways to broadcast it in different on different channels. You know, so I think there would be things that they would try to do to alter the experience in some way I don't think we would just get practice on the television screen. Yeah, Louisa you've been you wrote a piece about the last dance the bulls documentary on ESPN that has become this kind of major cultural event that I think it probably wouldn't have in a time when there were current sports and sporting events to talk about and there is just this, I think nostalgia for a time when we did have this, this shared kind of cultural experience of watching this, this team of watching the greatest, you know, basketball player ever. And, you know, I've been kind of critical of that documentary I think it's like, not all that. But I think there's something about the fact that it is just about sports that it maybe it, it's, unlike say like OJ made in America, it's not trying to make a big sweeping argument about anything that's going on in the world. But I think people right now just want to watch a great basketball team play basketball, and I think that it's, it's just that kind of uncomplicated. I actually, I completely agree. I mean, I think that what you might see as this weakness is actually its strength that it is so purely about Michael Jordan and basketball and, you know, highlights and this kind of maybe inner psychological drive, but it, what I was sort of trying to say in the piece is that it really is, it's very, it always looks inward and never sort of looks out to, you know, to the kind of greater currents in American society with some, you know, big exceptions when it looks away from Jordan to some of the other, you know, characters involved. And, and I do think that that people want that actually that they do want, you know, to see sports as a scapegoat industry right now and we need that that's okay, you know, it's totally okay for people to want to, you know, want something that brings them pleasure and, you know, nostalgia is like a very important and real thing I think I feel it when I was watching that and I was thinking, Oh, yeah, like, you know, look at Jordan 85 like I could just live there for a few hours. Thank you. Yeah. But I also think, you know, I think I also think that it's interesting, you know, I want to go back to something that Johnny said, which I thought was really apt is that a lot of this has to do with ritual, you know, and what we are kind of trained, we've trained ourselves to do. And I think that the last dance actually, it's kind of kind of like communal interest in it gets at that too that, you know, people sort of want to come together in a kind of like scripted way like you know on Sunday night at nine o'clock or whatever so that we can all sort of get around Twitter and talk about it or our friends and hopefully but that there's a kind of aspect to sports which is, which is just like really practice habit, you know, we want some something kind of like to organize our lives and sports fills that for a lot of people and there's actually a soccer writer worry Smith who writes the New York Times I don't actually follow soccer but he writes an amazing newsletter is a beautiful writer so I read his stuff and he had this really kind of interesting post about soccer as a habit. And the ways in which people relate to it, literally kind of as a habit like it's sort of just an immediate turn of mind when you know triggered by certain things and and and he made this point that habits change, you know, and I do wonder the longer we are away from live sports, whether people have new habits and they'll be, you know, watching more Netflix and the same way that they used to watch sports or something else that you know that a lot of people will come back but I sort of wonder if if everyone will and I'm curious I honestly don't know. Yeah, we've got a couple questions from our audience that I want to get to. But before that. Yeah, Johnny I'd be curious for your response there and I think there's a way in which sports serves as a connective tissue between us between. You know, us in our family it's us and our friends it's a thing to do together it's a thing to talk about, even when you're not watching. And so that's a thing that's that's missing it's not just the games it's the conversations about the games it's the relationships built around having watched the games together, growing up all that totally I think to Louisa makes a great point if you're on Twitter and you're a sports fan or the cover sports in some way the way the two of you do. You know that people are responding to the last dance because it seems like everybody's watching it and then it's being talked about throughout the week and participation for Sunday night again as if it's you know the Sunday night game of the week and everybody's waiting to see this match up. But you're right I think that that a big part of this is that you know sports are often the common thread in the fabric of America, it is the connective tissue that links us together in many ways it binds us together. But there's a certain irony here right now, I think as we're dealing with the Coronavirus, the way the Coronavirus is operating is on a regional and local level in many ways what's happening in California is very different than what's happening in Iowa, or what's happening in New York is very different than what's happening in South Carolina in terms of hospitalizations, government response we don't have a coherent national government response we've seen states, organizing like direct athletic conferences and their response to get supplies for health providers and so it's sort of this tension right now that we've lost this one cultural practice this cultural institution the social in the world sports that brings us together as a country, and we become more fractured as a nation in many ways and become more localized, and the way we're responding and experiencing the Coronavirus. And so it'll be interesting to see how do the sports leads which are national sort of bring us back together, if they can in some way. Yeah, that's a great point. And she's a Daria Stigman who's, who's watching raises the point about social media and whether that could potentially be a substitute for fans being in the stands, saying, although miss the roar of the baseball crowd there are communities on Twitter, and elsewhere around every game. It's true, to some extent, I mean everybody who's involved kind of intimately with any sport, sort of knows their, their, they call them Twitter right so there's tennis Twitter, there's Seahawks Twitter, there's whatever you know, pick your group. And I think a lot of people found a lot of a lot of community in that and maybe it will, you know, continue has to, I mean if something does. But at the same time, you know, I think that. I'm sorry for my daughter, sort of popping up here. I think that the hard thing is that, you know, there's no replacing that the energy like I don't know what happens. I don't know what happens to that feeling, you know, the TV needs actually communicating feel the game. Johnny, we have a World War One question from David Gottfried who wonders and you were getting at this before but can you describe how the pandemic and World War One kind of kicked off the connection between patriotism and sports, the connection between the military, the national anthem, all that just give us a kind of capture treatment of that. Yeah, so it's interesting. Major League Baseball owners are really concerned going into the 1918 season of whether there's going to be a season. And even once they know there is a season how long it's going to last and the reason is that the draft, you know, 90% of Major League Baseball players were eligible for the draft in 1918. And of course, the Selective Service Act or having these drafts, the United States Army needs men. And so how the owners respond to this. Well, one of the things they did in 1917 in fact, is before games had players doing drills with drill sergeants they were marching and the idea was that they were trying to demonstrate that Major League Baseball was an essential industry in military preparedness. And so it turns out that these were not just guys going to play a boys game. They were in fact preparing to become soldiers, so that when their number their draft number was called, they would be ready. So that was number one. The second thing that the owners did is they wanted to create their stadiums, transform them into theaters of patriotism. Not only by having military bands play the Star Spangled Banner, but also conducting Liberty Bond drives, Red Cross charity drives, honoring soldiers and sailors. And so in many ways, the baseball stadiums became intertwined with the war efforts that was the case that they made. But the problem for Major League Baseball came in May of 1918, you know, about a month after opening day, the War Department issued what was called the work or fight order. And basically what this said was that if you're eligible for the draft, you had to do one of two things. You had to work in an essential industry, which was not Major League Baseball, or you had to fight. And so this jeopardized the season. So the owners behind the scenes are trying to lobby to get exemptions for their ball players to extend the season. And at the same time, the ball players are being criticized for not just volunteering. They're being accused of being slackers. You have a number of significant players who leave Major League teams and they go and work. I put that in quotation marks for these shipyard teams, which had baseball teams. So basically, you go to a munitions plant or a shipyard company, and they would sign you into contract. If you don't want to do real work, you're basically being paid to play for their baseball team, which is essentially an advertising vehicle for the company. And so the relationship between sports and nationalism and sports and the government was fundamentally altered during this period. And it just so happens that the star spangled banner, which begins during World War One, it really becomes more common as a practice after World War Two. And it's to this moment that we can trace its origins. I think we're going to wrap it up shortly, but Louisa before we go. We're both big tennis fans, tennis nerds, I think you might say. And a couple of things that have come up recently, you had like a Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, like Instagram live chat of Venus Williams and Victoria Azarenka. And we're talking to, there has been an aspect of this, where like, we are, you know, all kind of doing the similar things where we're stuck at home. We're talking to our friends on on zoom or on Instagram or whatever there is has been kind of like a stars. There's just like us aspect to this and you wrote about this with NFL draft to like we got a kind of look at the human side of some of these players and decision makers and are there have there been any moments like that, that, you know, stuck out to you or just kind of your thoughts on getting this window into the lives of these athletes. I mean, I do think that one of the things that's been interesting watching tennis is actually watching these players. It seems, at least in some instances fairly spontaneously come together. I mean, it was pretty delightful to get better and it all together I mean they were cracking each other up and, and not just them you know there's the wrinkles talking to Joe Covich which is another interesting pairing and they have, you know, some good banter and Gregor Dimitrov and Venus Williams have been working out together. I mean it's just like and you do sort of see. Part of the reason I'm in sports is because you know I love watching competition but part of it. I, I love the weirdness of the people involved and that that hasn't gone away and we've kind of gotten more of that. You know, as we see them sort of in their natural habitats and or unnatural habitats. And so I do think that it's been fun to see, you know, see some of their personalities or their sort of backstories sort of manifest, you know, in their decor choices or, you know, things like that and there's been interesting to see who continues to be like highly I watched a, you know, Instagram video from Serena Williams this morning and I was like come on how many people worked on this. I mean, it was like the most highly produced thing. But I mean there is a kind of way in which we really are in this together I mean this is not this is not something that is. I mean, some people are in it to a degree I mean that you know the essential workers, both healthcare responders and people bagging groceries are not allowed to sit home and go on tick tock. And, you know, so it's not it's a very, very class based. You know, the dimensions of like the class dimensions and this are very, very real but at the same time, it's not like, you know, celebrities are right now going to the beach while the rest of us are, you know, stuck inside. And so there is a kind of leveling interesting aspect to it and it's been interesting to sort of, you know, meet people at meet people at our level. All right, Johnny, quick last one for you. What is the thing that you're most looking forward to when sports are back. Oh, wow. You know, I was really eager to watch LeBron James and to see if he and Anthony Davis could continue with they had built so I wanted to see the NBA finals so at some point, I'll be curious to see what is this delay this off time due to their journey together. You know, I love following the NBA so I'm looking forward to watching that. I think you and LeBron both are eager for the NBA playoffs to happen. Johnny Smith, Professor of history at Georgia Tech, the book is war fever Boston baseball in America in the shadow of the Great War, obviously, a really important, you know, piece of narrative history and gives us a window into what's going on in the world now. Johnny, thanks for being here. Thanks so much. Great meeting you both. And Louisa Thomas is writing about sports and our lives regularly for the New Yorker on the book that's coming out this summer coming up is losers dispatches from other side of the scoreboard that'll be out in August. Louisa, thank you. Thank you so much. 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