Dispatches From a World Without Sports

I’m a big comic book reader. Marvel of course. You don’t have to be a comic book fan to understand what I’m about to tell you, but I’ll give you a primer just to be sure. In the Marvel Universe there exists a multi-verse. Each universe has a designation. For instance, the main Marvel universe is Earth-616. Each time someone goes back in time and assassinates someone it sets the course of the universe slightly off where it was meant to go it creates a new universe. For instance, Miles Morales, originally created in the Ultimate Universe, is from Earth-1610 but has since moved over into the main Marvel universe and Earth-616 because he gave a guy a cheeseburger during the end of the world. Comics are weird man. Remember the movie X-Men: Days of Future Past? Regardless of if you do or not it took place in Earth-811.

Right now, I can’t help but think that we are living in some alternate universe where all sports have been cancelled permanently and I aim to determine who went back in time, who changed something, or who changed the history of our world such that this has happened. Ultimately, I want to put together a list of ideas and see if we can’t use some sort of Dr. Doom time machine, or superpower of some type to go back and prevent this all from happening.

1. Everything was fine in our world until Bob Knight returned to IU on February 8th. I don’t know who made a pact with Mephisto (Marvel’s equivalent, one of them at least, of the devil) to get Knight back to IU but as I’m sure you know any deal with the devil comes with a great price. I suspect it somehow involves Dan Dakich and he must be punished. For this case I’d recommend the use of the Infinity Gauntlet or perhaps Kobik. The problem here is that this occurred after the Coronavirus appeared in the US on 01/20/2020. Perhaps we need to go back further.
2. SB Nation announced on December 16th, 2019 that due to the new law in California all of their independent contractors are now going to have to be either hired as employees or else will be forced to cover a California team or some such nonsense. I honestly don’t know. By doing this SB Nation angered many of their independent contractors and I can only imagine that at least one of them has access to a shard of a cosmic cube. However, as you might know these cosmic cubes are tricky things. I assume that, much like a monkey’s paw, someone wasn’t specific about how they wanted to punish SB Nation and it resulted in this terrible situation we find ourselves in. Our only hope here is to get SB Nation to be a company that treats its employees much better and for that I think we’re gonna struggle even with mythic and mystical powers.
3. On March 4th Spike Lee and the New York Knicks escalated their feud when Lee was more or less escorted out and told not to use a specific entrance that he’s apparently been using for years. It’s all a bit absurd with a rich person arguing with yet a richer person. Frankly, it’s hard to be too invested but it’s hard to root for anything the Knicks and specifically James Dolan do. Sports were obviously still going on at this point since petty feuds were going on. I imagine that Spike Lee convened a meeting of the Sports Fan Illuminati (Spike Lee, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Jerry Seinfeld, and Ashley Judd) to determine how best to punish the greedy owners. As is often the case with the Marvel Illuminati (Mr. Fantastic, Tony Stark, Charles Xavier, Black Bolt, Captain America, Namor, and Black Panther) things go awry when you put this many powerful people in one room regardless of their intentions. I’m sure strings were pulled and things got out of hand which ultimately resulted in the cancellation of all sports. The only thing you can do in situations like these is hope that one member of the Illuminati, normally Captain America, reminds these people of their conscience and the results can be reversed.

These are just a few suggestions for how we can get our world back to normal. I don’t know what event has led us down this path to this alternate Earth we sit in but I hope that we can figure our way out of it so that this time next year we are watching March Madness as was always intended. Stay in, stay safe, wash your hands, use FaceTime with your old relatives. Get through this together.