Bench Life Sports

For a guy trying to make a career in sports, went to school for Sport Management, and basically has based his entire life around sports, every league postponing or cancelling their season is just about the worst thing that could possibly happen to me. I’d rather take a Mike Tyson punch directly to the chin than live without hockey, especially considering playoffs are (were?) right around the corner and my Bruins were pretty much a lock to win the Stanley Cup.

I know I’m not the only one feeling this way. Tom put together a great article summing up how he’s feeling about this Sports Quarantine, but I figured that it’s my turn to take a crack at this.

This shutdown of sports leagues across North America has had a pretty direct impact on my life. Without Bruins games, it’s pretty tough to keep writing new articles for my role with Causeway Crowd, and now that the OHL has postponed their season, it looks like it’ll be a while before I’m back volunteering with the Guelph Storm. I still don’t know how this will impact the upcoming CEBL season, but things aren’t looking promising at the moment. As of right now, my work is still open, but it seems like it’s only a matter of time before that gets shut down too.

Oh yeah, and I’m currently waiting to find out if I’ll get my money back for a Bruins vs. Sabres game that I was supposed to be going to on March 13, but ideally, the game gets rescheduled and I can go watch my guy David Pastrnak hit 50 goals.

So what have I done over the last few days to keep busy?

I’ve made my way through about half of these, but if this quarantine keeps up I’ll be out of books to read by the end of the month. My other option? Endless hours logged on my Xbox playing a rotation of NHL 20, FIFA 20 and Madden 20. I haven’t quite reached the betting on video games stage of my sports depression yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I get to that point over the next few days.

I’ll have to get my sports fix somehow and watching some simulated video games seems like my only option at this point. Maybe I start streaming games and reach Ninja-esque fame over the next few weeks. Unlikely? Sure. Impossible? Absolutely not.

But for real, I’ll probably use this time to send out a few resumes (please hire me) and figure out a way to pump out some sports-related content even with though the sports world feels like it’s standing still. There are rumours of the Bench Life Podcast making a comeback, which would be exactly what the people need during this dark time.

Thinking about it, this pause in sports might not be so bad. If the NHL and NBA decide to continue their season later into the summer, that just means that we’ll have less of a gap between the ends of those sports and the start of the NFL, meaning the dog days of summer and only being able to watch MLB will be shorter than usual. Kinda sounds like a win if you ask me. However, if this goes on for a while and the leagues are forced to cancel their seasons, I’ll probably lose my will to live.

So in the meantime, I’m just going to keep trying to catch up on some reading and log more than a few hours on my Xbox. But I know that a person can only play so many games of NHL 20 before you get tired of the same cross-crease one-timers over and over again. After so long you just need to see some real NHL action.

As Drake would say, “What a time to be alive.”