In a new world defined and condemned by coronavirus, at the start of the week the global death tally surged beyond 36,000 with 750,000 cases and 150,000 recoveries worldwide, much of the burden falling across Europe. Spain reported another 812 deaths, a slight fall on the previous day’s record, as the total number of cases at 85,195 surpassed those registered in China. Still as the Spanish government enforced tighter lockdown measures, halting all non-essential activities and effectively asking people to stay in their homes over the Easter period, the falling rates of death and infection sounded notes of optimism. Deaths in Italy also rose by 812, and the country became the first in the world to record more than 100,000 infections, but there was a significant drop in the number of new cases. Austria emerged as one of the first countries in Europe to make face masks compulsory in public settings, joined by the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In Hungary, a law that allowed prime minister Viktor Orbán to rule by decree during the crisis sparked concern among human rights advocates. Meanwhile on the supply front Mercedes Formula One – one of the many high-profile manufacturing and tech companies to turn their hand towards medical devices and protective equipment – touted a new Continuous Positive Airway Pressure device, created in less than a week, while President Trump boasted of United States ventilator production.
Farther afield the effects of COVID-19 were being felt, as deaths in Iran officially surpassed 3,000, Israel shut down most public gatherings, and the United Nations suggested that reported cases in Syria were just ‘the tip of the iceberg’. The World Health Organization and the World Bank warned of a prolonged impact across Asia, Mexico declared a health emergency, and Uganda followed other African countries like Zimbabwe, Ghana, and Nigeria in imposing lockdown strictures. Ups and downs felt exacerbated and there were more downs than ups: Spain continued to set grim records for daily deaths, culminating on Thursday when an additional 950 deaths took the toll in the country beyond 10,000, fatalities soared in France and the United Kingdom, and while cases in Italy levelled off, there were renewed doubts around data accuracy.
In Russia Vladimir Putin extended the paid non-working period for non-essential jobs until the end of April, Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell described a ‘new level’ of infections as the country continued to attract attention for its reserved approach, and Germany strove to increase its already high volume of testing. Iceland bore evidence of asymptomatic infection. Three out of four Americans were set to fall under some form of lockdown, as fears grew for the situation at Rikers Island jail, Florida implemented statewide measures, cases across the country topped 200,000, and Donald Trump warned of ‘painful’ weeks ahead. That pain certainly extended to the economy, as another 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment, shattering last week’s record to total in the ballpark of ten million claims over the past two weeks.
As the weekend approached, global cases of COVID-19 passed one million. With the bulk of the money going to India, the World Bank launched a $1.9 billion fund. Hong Kong ordered a two-week shutdown of bars and pubs, Thailand announced a nightly curfew, and Singapore prepared to close most workplaces and schools. The death toll in Germany remained relatively subdued but still surpassed 1,000, Spain overtook Italy for total cases, and the numbers in France and the United Kingdom continued to grow. In the United States antibody tests offered faint light at the end of a long tunnel, as the death toll raced beyond 5,000. On Friday alone New York State suffered more than 500 fatalities, and over 100,000 New Yorkers had now contracted the virus as the death total approached 3,000. Donald Trump announced new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recommending that Americans wear face masks, although the President personally declined to partake.
Saturday was a day of mourning in China, where new cases were down to the double-digits but the coronavirus had exacted a hefty toll, amounting to 81,639 total cases and 3,326 deaths. Across continental Europe at least there were signs of a slowdown over the course of the weekend, as deaths remained high in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France against a declining number of hospitalisations, while Spain showed a downward trend and deaths in Italy fell to their lowest for two weeks. In the United Kingdom, a record 708 deaths reported on Saturday were followed on Sunday by a slight decrease, and it was a similar story in New York State, which registered 630 deaths on Saturday, subsequently dwindling deaths and hospitalisations characterised by Governor Andrew Cuomo as a ‘hopeful beginning’ or an ‘interesting blip’. New Orleans emerged as a virus hotspot and the numbers remained high in New Jersey and Michigan, but Washington State – home of the original outbreak in America – returned four hundred ventilators to the Strategic National Stockpile for use elsewhere. By Sunday evening, Singapore had witnessed its biggest daily jump in cases, leading to a quarantine of two foreign worker dormitories. Boris Johnson, the prime minister of the United Kingdom and the only major political leader known to have contracted the virus, was admitted to hospital for persistent symptoms. Like in China, Italy, and the United Kingdom, aspersions were being cast over the official figures in the United States, as the surgeon general warned ‘This is going to be the hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives’.
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Following Shinzo Abe and the International Olympic Committee’s belated acceptance that the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics must be postponed, new dates were pencilled in this week for the multi-sport extravaganza. Tokyo 2020 will retain the name, while the Olympics are now scheduled for 23 July to 8 August 2021, with the Paralympics to follow between 24 August and 5 September. The changed dates were styled by IOC President Thomas Bach as ‘a light at the end of this tunnel’, and are intended to give athletes, organisers, sponsors, and health authorities plenty of time to prepare for the games while limiting the impact on the international sports calendar. Rescheduled football tournaments like the European Championships and Copa América will be unaffected, and the traditional summer dates should allow for the participation of major names from tennis and golf, but in conjunction with the IOC’s announcement, World Athletics said that the World Athletics Championships in Oregon would be moved to 2022, with the Commonwealth Games, European Athletics Championships, and World Swimming Championships also sure to be impacted.
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Nintendo unveiled this week plans for the thirty-fifth anniversary of its Super Mario franchise, in which the squat Italian plumber and his dependable brother Luigi hop over plant pots and quell boiling lava in bucolic and dungeon surrounds, invariably in an effort to save Princess Peach from the dastardly demon Bowser. According to Video Games Chronicle, Nintendo hopes to hold special events to mark the anniversary of its mascot and second-biggest franchise – the cuter critters of Pokémon hold the top slot – while remastering much of the Super Mario catalogue for its latest console, the Nintendo Switch. Super Mario 64 from 1996, Super Mario Sunshine from 2002, and Super Mario Galaxy from 2007 will be among the remastered platformers. Meanwhile a big reveal at the E3 trade fair in June has been cancelled owing to coronavirus, and the opening of the Super Nintendo World theme park in Japan has been put on hold, as it was meant to coincide with the Summer Olympics. Still an animated Super Mario movie remains in the works, scheduled for 2022, and in March Nintendo collaborated on an interactive Super Mario LEGO set, encouraging kids to ‘experience the playful world of Super Mario like never before’.
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Wimbledon was the next major sporting cancellation, forced to fold its whites and keep its fluffy yellow balls packed in pressurised canisters, as the pristine showpiece of the tennis calendar was called off for the first time since World War Two. This year’s iteration of the tournament was scheduled to take place between 29 June and 12 July, but instead the entire grass-court season has been cancelled and there will be no professional tennis anywhere in the world until 13 July at the earliest. The French Open, the climax of the clay-court season, originally scheduled from 24 May to 7 June, has been pushed back to September, setting up a potential clash with the US Open which still hopes to proceed across its usual dates. Roger Federer and Serena Williams were among the tennis stars professing their sadness, while the 134th Wimbledon Championships will now take place from 28 June to 11 July 2021.
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The great soul singer Bill Withers, whose songs including ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ and ‘Lean on Me’ are so elemental in their expression and so often covered that they seem bedrocks of the popular form, died on Monday from heart complications in Los Angeles. He was 81 years old. Born in Slab Fork, West Virginia, as a child Withers endured a stutter and he enlisted in the United States Navy at the age of seventeen, serving as an aircraft mechanic for nine years. After leaving the navy in 1965, he relocated to Los Angeles, and while he continued to work as an aircraft assembler, in his spare time he began recording demos and performing at clubs. In early 1970, he signed for Clarence Avant and Sussex Records, and was paired up with the Stax Records stalwart Booker T. Jones who produced Withers’ debut album Just as I Am. The cover of the record shows Withers, lunch box in hand, outside his workplace at Weber Aircraft in Burbank.
With its acoustic strum and soulful intonation, Just as I Am climbed to number nine on the Billboard R&B chart, and contained the hit single ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’, which sold more than a million copies and won Withers his first Grammy Award for Best Rhythm & Blues Song. Boasting string arrangements by Jones, guitar playing by Stephen Stills and a stellar band of session musicians, Withers reportedly wrote the words for the song after watching Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in the 1962 film Days of Wine and Roses, while the repetition of ‘I know’ in the third verse was a placeholder which Withers only retained upon the recommendation of his studiomates. Still Bill was even more successful, as it reached number one on the R&B chart and number four on the Billboard album chart, carried by the universal solace of ‘Lean on Me’. Deceptively simple with its piano runs and plainspoken lyrics, an entreaty as much as it offers assurance, ‘Lean on Me’ reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and was followed by the scabrous funk and sexual imbalance of ‘Use Me’, which peaked at number two.
In the meantime Withers recorded Live at Carnegie Hall, wrote and produced a couple of songs for Gladys Knight & the Pips, and engaged in an acrimonious and short-lived marriage to the actress Denise Nicholas. After Sussex Records folded, he signed with Columbia Records in 1975. His sound mellowed and he suffered various label disputes, but scored hits with ‘Lovely Day’ in late 1977 and ‘Just the Two of Us’ in 1981, the latter a collaboration with Grover Washington Jr. which landed at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and won for Withers his second Grammy Award. After a seven-year hiatus, Watching You, Watching Me in 1985 proved to be Bill Withers’ last album, as his contract with Columbia ended and he waved the music industry an easy farewell. His songs were routinely covered and sampled by other artists, and in 1988 he won another Grammy for the Club Nouveau version of ‘Lean on Me’. Revered as a songwriter, his smooth baritone and performative lustre briefly returned to the spotlight when Live at Carnegie Hall was reissued by Columbia in 1997.
Withers’ songs were imitated so often that they could start to seem trite and sentimental, an impression utterly dispelled whenever one returns to Just as I Am and Still Bill. Beyond some of the rawness and sultriness which inhabits those records, Withers imbues a song like ‘Lean on Me’ with an unmatched plaintiveness and urgency, clouds filtering behind the sun. In 2005, Withers entered into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and in 2015 he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by his friend and contemporary Stevie Wonder, describing the honour in an interview as ‘an award of attrition. What few songs I wrote during my brief career, there ain’t a genre that somebody didn’t record them in. I’m not a virtuoso, but I was able to write songs that people could identify with. I don’t think I’ve done bad for a guy from Slab Fork, West Virginia’. His passing was announced by his wife, Marcia, who married Bill in 1976 and subsequently managed his publishing business, and their two children Todd and Kori.
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The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, which opened and inducted its first class in 1959, named after the Canadian-American physician and basketball inventor James Naismith, can claim to be the most comprehensive hall of fame in all of American sport. The Naismith Hall of Fame also boasts an extensive basketball library, while it inducts athletes with professional and amateur credentials achieved internationally as well as across the United States. Players, coaches, and officials are eligible for selection three years after retirement. For the Class of 2020, that meant three outstanding candidates in their first year of eligibility: five-time NBA champion, two-time NBA and three-time NBA Finals MVP, the greatest power forward in the history of the sport Tim Duncan; the versatile fifteen-time All-Star Kevin Garnett, one of only four players to have won the NBA Most Valuable Player and Defensive Player of the Year awards; and the five-time NBA champion and eighteen-time All-Star, Los Angeles Lakers icon Kobe Bryant.
Following Bryant’s tragic death in late January – in a helicopter crash above the hills of Calabasas, which took the life of nine people including Bryant’s thirteen-year-old daughter Gianna – the NBA honoured the late forty-one year old by naming the All-Star Game MVP award in his wake. At the head of this year’s star-studded Hall of Fame class, he is joined alongside Duncan and Garnett by WNBA All-Star and Indiana Fever favourite Tamika Catchings, Baylor University’s three-time champion coach Kim Mulkey, five-time Division II coach of the year Barbara Stevens, four-time NCAA coach of the year Eddie Sutton, Rudy Tomjanovich who coached the Houston Rockets to successive NBA championships in the mid-90s, and longtime FIBA executive Patrick Baumann. The accomplishment was described by Bryant’s widow Vanessa as ‘the peak of his NBA career’.
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COVID-19 might have caught other sports in a sleeper hold, or choke or leglock or vice-like grip, but just like a blood-soaked Steve Austin locked in the sharpshooter or Mankind after falling sixteen feet through an announce table or John Cena in any sort of submission, World Wrestling Entertainment steadfastly refused to quit. Instead after a clap around the ears, a jawbreaker or some other stunning reversal, WWE retreated indoors for WrestleMania 36, the latest iteration of professional wrestling’s annual showcase. Scheduled for Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay, the event shifted inside to the WWE Performance Center in Orlando, where WrestleMania 36 took place across two nights without fans. Most of the matches were pre-recorded, and the empty arena allowed the company’s much-vaunted writers and producers to indulge some of their more lurid tendencies with cinematic encounters set in a Boneyard and self-styled Firefly Fun House.
Titles were defended valiantly on the first night of the event, as Becky Lynch rolled up Shayna Baszler to retain the RAW Women’s Championship, Sami Zayn held onto the Intercontinental Championship versus Daniel Bryan thanks to a Helluva Kick, and John Morrison triumphed in a triple-threat ladder match to retain the SmackDown tag titles on behalf of a sick-at-home Miz. Braun Strowman survived Goldberg’s onslaught and after a quartet of running powerslams, he hoisted the Universal Championship, the strongman’s first world title belt. Then in the main event set inside an Orlando warehouse and cemetery, AJ Styles emerged from a casket to catch The Undertaker by surprise, but even help from his old Bullet Club buddies couldn’t prevent his being buried alive.
Charlotte Flair kicked off the second night of WrestleMania 36 with a surprise victory over Rhea Ripley, as she claimed the NXT Women’s Championship for the first time since 2014. A returning Edge outlasted Randy Orton to prove the last man standing after a gruelling bout, The Street Profits retained their Raw tag titles, and Bayley persevered amid a hectic five-way elimination to hold on to the SmackDown women’s belt. As WrestleMania 36 drew to a climax, Bray Wyatt and John Cena took a trip down memory lane replete with dream sequences and shock tactics, as The Fiend prevailed in the first ever Firefly Fun House match following a Sister Abigail and Mandible Claw. Finally the main event served as a mirror image of the night before, as Drew McIntyre ousted his own ogre, four Claymore Kicks enough to beat Brock Lesnar for the WWE Championship in another short-lived title match. In the process McIntyre became the first ever British-born world champion in the history of WWE.
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Tom Dempsey, who became a record-setting kicker for the New Orleans Saints despite being born without fingers on his right hand and toes on his right foot, died on Saturday aged 73 from complications of coronavirus. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Dempsey moved to California where he attended San Dieguito High School and Palomar College, both in San Diego County. He spent a season on the practice squad of the San Diego Chargers, before making his name in the NFL across two seasons with the New Orleans Saints. Dempsey became iconic for kicking a 63-yard field goal in Tulane Stadium on 8 November 1970, as the Saints came from behind to beat the Detroit Lions 19-17 in the final seconds of the game. The kick gave the Saints one of only two wins that season, but it remained the longest kick in NFL history for forty-three years, matched three times before Matt Prater broke the record with a 64-yarder in 2013. Dempsey retains the record for the joint-longest game-winning field goal.
Wearing a modified shoe curtailed at the end of his right foot, giving the boot a flattened and enlarged toe surface, Dempsey’s career spanned eleven seasons in the NFL, as he went on to play for the Philadelphia Eagles, Los Angeles Rams, Houston Oilers, and Buffalo Bills. Selected to the All-Pro team as a rookie, in 1973 with the Eagles Dempsey made a career-high twenty-four field goals and scored a total of 106 points, while three years later for the Rams his field goal percentage stood at an impressive 80.8%. His prowess from distance encouraged several rule changes, as in 1974 the NFL moved the goal posts from the goal line to the back of the end zone, and in 1977 implemented the ‘Tom Dempsey Rule’ standardising the shape of shoes worn by players with artificial limbs. After retiring from football, Dempsey worked as an oil field salesman in Louisiana and ran a car dealership owned by Saints owner Tom Benson. He was inducted into the Saints Hall of Fame in 1989, and his modified shoe remains on display at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In 2013, Dempsey revealed he had been diagnosed with dementia, and last month he contracted coronavirus at his retirement home in New Orleans. He is reportedly one of at least fifteen residents to have died after contracting the virus. Dempsey is survived by his wife Carlene and their children Ashley, Toby, and Meghan.
