The trials and tribulations of the sporting world over the past few months can be bookended fairly neatly by two incidents. The first helped trigger the shutdown of pro sports, and the second demonstrated the folly of trying to bring them back as we once knew them.

On March 11, two days after he made a ridiculous show of touching every voice recorder and microphone in his vicinity following a press scrum, Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus. The NBA suspended its season minutes after Gobert's positive test was announced, and the rest of Western society soon followed suit.

Three months later, Novak Djokovic, the world's top-ranked men's tennis player, organized the Adria Tour, a charity exhibition series scheduled to be played in cities across four Balkan countries. In Djokovic's words, the tour was designed "to help both established and up-and-coming tennis players from southeastern Europe to gain access to some competitive tennis while the various tours are on hold due to the COVID-19 situation." While the event was perhaps conceived with what Djokovic called "a pure heart and sincere intentions," it was staged in an alarmingly irresponsible manner.

The first legs of the exhibition were played in relatively unafflicted Serbia and Croatia, with none of the now-familiar distancing regulations in place: No testing was required of the participants when they arrived, unmasked fans packed stadiums, players hugged and shook hands with each other and the umpires, ball kids handled towels.

Off the court, the players played pickup basketball, posed for photographs with tournament staff and fans, and partied with their shirts off at a club in Belgrade. The second half of the tour was canceled after Djokovic, his wife Jelena, his coach Goran Ivanisevic, two trainers, three other players (Grigor Dimitrov, Borna Coric, and Viktor Troicki), and Troicki's pregnant wife tested positive for COVID-19. Lord knows how many spectators were also exposed to the virus.

In the wake of their public embarrassments, both Gobert and Djokovic tried to wipe the egg off their faces by encouraging the public to follow the appropriate guidelines and take the pandemic more seriously than they had. In his apologetic statement, Djokovic vaguely committed to "sharing health resources" with Belgrade and Zadar.

Gobert's antics didn't rise to nearly the level of Djokovic's brazen idiocy (especially given Djokovic's belief in pseudoscience), but it's easy to see the parallels, both in the karmic retribution experienced by those who scoffed in the face of a public health crisis and in the opportunity for those incidents to turn into teaching moments.

Pro athletes - most of them fit, healthy, young, and rich, with access to the best health care resources their wealth affords them - represent about the least vulnerable population imaginable when it comes to the coronavirus. But this moment isn't just about personal responsibility, it's about social responsibility: a commitment to making sacrifices for the good of everyone around us. Athletes feeling invulnerable is actually a big part of the problem.

The Orlando Pride were forced to withdraw from the NWSL Challenge Cup after a slew of players reportedly contracted the virus at a bar. Tom Brady practiced with his new Tampa Bay Buccaneers teammates against the advice of the NFL players' union. He responded to the backlash by Instagramming, "Only thing we have to fear, is fear itself" - proof that some people still don't get it, and refuse to even try. As Andy Slavitt, the chief of Medicare and Medicaid at the end of President Barack Obama's second term, succinctly put it: "Science is not our missing ingredient in beating this virus. Empathy is."

That reality leaves pro sports in a strange place. It's unclear what they have to offer a world in which an airborne illness has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in a matter of months and shows no signs of slowing down.

As much as anything, this pandemic has forced us to consider to whom and to what we are responsible. With so many elected representatives abdicating their leadership responsibilities, it's been left to the people to make sense of the missteps and misinformation, the disregard for the advice and warnings of the scientific community, and the mandate to Open Up the Economy and Get Back To Work at all costs. Everyone's basically been told to fend for themselves. There's been a dispiriting lack of common cause.

That's the context in which Djokovic took it upon himself to treat the people of his country to his "philanthropic idea." While he wound up completely undercutting his purpose, and has deservedly shouldered the brunt of the blame, it's worth pointing out that neither the tournament organizers he worked with nor government officials in Serbia or Croatia made any attempt to mitigate the risk. Even after the fact, all the president of the Croatian Tennis Federation could say for himself was: "Some minor mistakes may have been made, but the idea was a good one. In Zadar, we had players for whom we usually have to pay 10 million euros to bring them, it was an opportunity that may never come to us again." Priorities, people.

We talk a lot about athletes' platforms, and the type of messaging those platforms can and should be used for. But the message people need to be receiving right now is that in spite of what various corporate entities or government officials might have us believe, we're still dealing with a deadly virus that is spreading undetected, ravaging marginalized populations, and may cause lasting damage in even asymptomatic carriers. (Gobert, by the way, says he still hasn't fully recovered his sense of smell.) It's unclear how the return of sports helps convey that message.

While Djokovic and his infected peers self-isolate, the NBA is forging ahead with a return to games a month from now in Orlando, even though case counts, hospitalizations, and positive test rates in Florida are exploding, and some Disney World employees began a petition to keep the theme park closed. NBA commissioner Adam Silver suggested that despite the spike of infections in surrounding Orange County, players will be safer inside the NBA’s carefully managed Disney site than they'd be in their home cities.

That may be true, but if the virus gets in - which seems eminently possible given that Disney staffers won't be staying on site or be subject to coronavirus testing - it will have the potential to spread quickly among a group of people playing a contact sport indoors. And on top of concern for player safety, there should be concern for the potential collateral damage involving non-players inside the bubble. (Consider, for example, the NBA cameraman who had to be placed in a medically induced coma after contracting the virus in March.)

Just getting league personnel into the bubble virus-free is going to be a huge challenge. Sixteen NBA players slated to travel to Orlando tested positive for the virus last week, including Djokovic's countryman Nikola Jokic, who recently spent time with the tennis star in Serbia. Jokic's Denver Nuggets had to close their practice facility because of a separate spate of infections. The already shorthanded Brooklyn Nets are dealing with their own cluster of cases.

And all of that is to say nothing of the worldwide marches for racial justice. For a league in which three-quarters of the players are African American, there's a particularly urgent sense of responsibility to be a visible part of the Black Lives Matter movement in its fight to, among other things, dismantle the criminal justice system that is disproportionately killing and incarcerating Black people.

The National Basketball Players Association announced that "the goal of the season restart in Orlando will be to take collective action to combat systemic racism and promote social justice," and the NBA and WNBA are reportedly planning to paint "Black Lives Matter" on all the courts the leagues will use at Disney and the IMG Academy. A handful of WNBA stars have opted out of their season in order to focus on furthering the cause.

The extent of the players' responsibility to each other has also been a subject of some debate within the union. Athletes' careers are short, and not all of them are multi-millionaires who can withstand a year of missed paychecks. There's a huge incentive for them to not only get paid for the rest of this season but to prevent the league's owners from tearing up the current collective bargaining agreement.

Some players in the league's middle class have even argued that it's important they get paid specifically because of the systemic racial inequities fueling protests, inequities that have prevented Black people from creating generational wealth. That can't happen without the majority of players, particularly the high-profile ones, being on board.

"The financial stuff that's coming in is so heavy, and I think everybody has to share in that responsibility," one general manager told The Athletic's Sam Amick in an anonymous survey. "If you don’t at least try and see how this goes … the NBA could be impacted easily in the next five to 10 years in a way that it'd be very similar to what (the media) industry is going through as well. There's just going to be mass layoffs, and it could really change."

Other sports leagues have run into their own complications with their attempts to resume. MLB and NHL training camps in Florida were shut down following outbreaks. The PGA Tour, which resumed its schedule in mid-June, saw numerous positive tests last week, despite the fact golf is as conducive to physical distancing as any sport. Several MLB (and NBA) players have opted out in order to be with their families.

It's easy to understand why sports are trying so hard to come back in spite of all the challenges, and why so many people want them to. Apart from being billion-dollar enterprises with a ton of employees, professional sport is one of the closest things we have to a global cultural imperative. Part of the reason sports have become such a gigantic industry is that they've been successfully sold as a social good, perhaps even a social necessity.

That same logic is what's led franchise owners to extort public funds in order to build new stadiums, preying on the illusion that these privately owned businesses actually belong to all of us. Perhaps that's also the logic that made the Los Angeles Lakers, a franchise valued at $4.4 billion, feel entitled to a $4.6-million government loan that was intended as a bailout for struggling small businesses amid the shutdown.

The message that's been peddled to us is that the return of sports will correlate to a return to some semblance of normalcy and that this correlation is in the public interest; that sports can help spiritually bring people together at a time when it's important that they remain physically apart.

"We’re coming back because sports matter in our society," Silver told reporters on a conference call last week. "They bring people together when they need it the most."

Sports are amazing, and plenty of people believe in their unifying power (myself very much included), but it feels awfully disingenuous to paint that as the reason the NBA is trying to return. "You know and I know why we are playing - for the money," another GM told Amick. "If not that, do you really think we would be playing?"

Which is a perfectly understandable reason to want to play. There's no need to pretend sports are going to save us right now. In March, Silver's decision to halt the season had a domino effect with other sports and the cumulative move may have forced society at large to realize the scope of the problem. Returning to play is a different calculus. Maybe they'll momentarily distract from the natural and man-made forces currently ravaging the globe, for anyone who wants the distraction. But at the end of the day, athletes live in the same world we live in, and they aren't impervious to those forces. If anything, sport's central function right now seems to be serving as a visible example of how profit-driven businesses behave in a global disaster.

There are, of course, more responsible ways to resume sports than the way Djokovic and the Adria Tour organizers did - as leagues like the Bundesliga, English Premier League, and the Korean Baseball Organization have shown - but that doesn't mean it will do much good for anybody other than the people who will be getting paid (or even much good for some of those who will).

It may be that pro sports in North America come back and stay back, that those returns result in minimal additional infections, and that a wide spectrum of viewers takes great joy and comfort in the spectacle. But that scenario, should it come to pass, will be less a triumph of sporting institutions and their healing power than an illustration of how a population can be kept safe so long as it has enough resources, will power, and financial incentive.

One way or another, sports is not our missing ingredient in beating this virus, empathy is. And the former won't amount to anything without the latter.

Joe Wolfond is a features writer for theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.

As with most things in the world right now, the short-term future of pro sports is murky. While some sports in some parts of the world have resumed, others remain suspended indefinitely. Nobody knows for sure when, or in what form, they'll be back.

It seems evident that when sports do return, they'll do so without fans in attendance. We've already seen that happen with pro baseball in South Korea, and with pro wrestling, MMA, and NASCAR in the United States. Germany's top soccer league, the Bundesliga, returned with fan-less matches last weekend. Until a vaccine or a provably effective COVID-19 treatment becomes widely available, cramming tens of thousands of potential spreaders into a single venue won't be tenable.

That will present a strange new environment for everyone involved in pro sporting events, from players to coaches to officials to broadcasters to the fans watching from home. The live audience is what turns a game into the interactive, operatic spectacle we know and love. It's right there in the description: Spectator sports. What is a spectator sport without spectators? At what point does it stop being the thing we recognize, and become an altogether different entity?

In trying to conceptualize the new sports reality, I've found myself thinking a lot about those old NBA promos - the ones that open on a shot of an empty arena before reconstructing an iconic postseason play, piece by piece, player by player. The fans are last to materialize, and the moment feels incomplete until that final addition. Then the whole scene vanishes as quickly as it appeared, leaving only the empty gym once again.

I always found something haunting about the idea of these incredible, historic moments taking place against a silent backdrop of vacant seats. It felt like a brief glimpse into an alternate reality in which we'd decided not to imbue sports with meaning. There's a reason LeBron James initially reacted to the prospect of playing in empty arenas by dismissing it out of hand.

Those ads probably wouldn't feel out of place if they ran tomorrow. They speak simultaneously to what we're currently missing, and what we'll be gaining - and yet still lacking - when sports return.

It's not impossible to imagine what sports without fans will look or sound like. The difficult thing will be trying to reconcile the idea of a sporting event that looks and sounds like a scrimmage with one that ostensibly carries monumental stakes. Will those stakes resonate in the same way for the players or their homebound fans? Can players perform at the same level without a crowd there to pump them full of adrenaline? If a three falls and there's nobody there to cheer it ...

History provides us with some examples. The one most people might remember is the Orioles-White Sox game that was played in an empty Camden Yards in Baltimore just over five years ago, while protests raged throughout the city in the wake of Freddie Gray's death in police custody.

The players who participated in that game talked about the eeriness of the quiet. They were put off not only by the lack of reaction to big plays, but also by the absence of the ambient noise that had unconsciously become a staple of their experience.

"It's the same as waking up having coffee every day for five years and then waking up and having zero coffee, and kind of being dependent on that energy," then-Orioles catcher Caleb Joseph told The Athletic's Kaitlyn McGrath. "And then out of nowhere it's gone."

Back in 1989, Siena and Boston University played the North Atlantic Conference championship game in an empty arena because of a measles outbreak on Siena's campus.

"It was definitely an adjustment," Siena forward Tom Huerter told The Times Union's Mark Singelais of the game, which Siena won by one point to punch its ticket to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in school history. "I think the best description is it felt like playing in a preseason scrimmage, against a really good team."

We can also now draw on examples from our present-day situation.

The WWE - which was deemed an essential business by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis - has been taping matches in empty venues for weeks. The fan-less experience is particularly strange for pro wrestling, which is by definition more performative and more of a pure entertainment product than non-scripted spectator sports. When theatricality is the whole point, what are you supposed to do when the theater's empty?

With the performance greeted by silence, both the physical and dramatic components of the sport are rendered bizarre. The performers still play to a nonexistent crowd, complete with over-the-top walk-out introductions and pregnant pauses in dialogue for effect. It's like a dress rehearsal for a hammy stage production.

"You know they're there watching at home, and that's what you have to try and focus on," wrestler Adam Joseph Copeland, aka Edge, said on WWE's "After the Bell" podcast. "The performance for the people at home that are hopefully reacting the way that you would want them to within the arena."

The Korean Baseball Organization began its season last week against a similarly silent backdrop. Umpires and coaches wear protective masks, while cheerleaders and mascots dance in front of empty seats. In Incheon, the SK Wyverns tried to create the illusion of a home crowd by filling the outfield bleachers with rows of banners displaying fans wearing the team's hat. As if to add an element of realism, the fake fans are also depicted wearing protective face masks.

There are still a lot of practical questions to answer about how the games will be packaged when team sports return in North America.

Will they be played in smaller, more intimate facilities? That might take some of the strangeness out of the endeavor; the sounds of the game would otherwise echo through cavernous, empty stadiums and serve only to emphasize the quiet of the place. Other sports may borrow the KBO's cardboard-fan idea. Perhaps some will take it a step further and stage games in front of a green screen so broadcasts can show a digitized live audience.

Another unknown is whether arenas will still feature the work of game-ops staff. Will they pump in artificial crowd noise or music during the run of play? Without any of that, viewers are likely going to hear a lot of stuff they aren't used to hearing, from the otherwise obscured sounds of the game to things said in the heat of the moment: sideline play-calling, profane trash talk, and heated arguments with officials.

Maybe the participants will tone down their usual mouthiness. Or maybe they won't. Steph Curry suggested that games without background noise "might be something that's really appealing from a fan perspective, to get real up close and personal with what we do on the court."

Orioles and White Sox players and coaches said they could hear everything the other team was saying, on the field and in the dugout, be it cheering or heckling or strategizing. Hearing a coach bellowing instruction from the bench won't be a novel phenomenon to anyone who's ever watched a Tom Thibodeau-coached team play, but there's a different level of tactical transparency in a silent stadium. On the playing field or in the huddle during a timeout, teams will have to go to greater lengths to conceal their intentions. Baseball players holding their gloves in front of their mouths to discourage lip-reading won't be enough.

"I had to change my coaching style because I was kind of an emotive guy," former Siena coach Mike Deane told Singelais. "If there's nobody in the gym, and no noise to filter that, you've got to be a little different."

As for the broadcast, will commentators be on site or off? If it's the former, I can tell you - as someone who used to call Atlantic University Sport basketball games for Dalhousie campus radio in Halifax, Nova Scotia - that it's a strange, self-conscious feeling to be describing the scene on display in a quiet gym where all of the players and attendants can hear you. The players, meanwhile, have to try to focus on playing while essentially having their actions narrated back to them in real time.

"When I went in to pitch, I just heard (Orioles play-by-play announcer) Gary Thorne the whole time I was in my delivery," former Orioles closer Zack Britton told The Athletic's Dan Connolly and Dan Hayes of his relief appearance in empty Camden Yards. "I'd get my pitch (signal) and I could hear him say, 'Britton's coming set. And the pitch.' I'm like, 'Oh my gosh, Gary, can I just mute you right now? Because I hear everything you're saying.'"

Not all athletes have found that to be problematic, though. In fact, two fighters in UFC 249 earlier in May said they won their bouts in part because they overheard and heeded tactical suggestions from fighter-turned-broadcaster Daniel Cormier.

If the NBA and NHL return in the near future, they'll either jump directly to the playoffs or be in the midst of the home stretch of the regular season, with some playoff positions still to be decided. If MLB returns, chances are it will play in empty stadiums. That Orioles-White Sox game was just one early-season game out of 162. How will it feel to play in or watch a fan-less game to decide a playoff spot, or a series, or a championship? How do you generate the requisite level of intensity and tension for a contest of that magnitude without a crowd?

We often reference "playoff atmosphere," which connotes a particular energy in a venue that is equal parts sound and texture. When we think of memorable postseason games we think of crowds so loud that players and coaches can't properly communicate. People who dream of being pro athletes dream of performing miraculous physical feats in front of thousands of roaring fans. Imaginary plays pantomimed in the driveway or the backyard are customarily followed by, "And the crowd goes wild!"

There won't be any substitute for the goosebump-inducing thrill of a momentum-swinging run or a game-breaking play in front of a frenzied home crowd; the murmuring angst between pitches during a crucial, drawn-out at-bat; the roar after a successful penalty kill; the swelling sound as a visiting team lines up for a third down; the anticipatory hum as a play develops into a breakaway or an open 3-pointer; the cathartic explosion after a frantic sequence of events is punctuated by a goal or a dunk or a tape-measure home run. The gravity of these moments is communicated, in large part, by a crowd's reaction to them.

Maybe the biggest question in all this is one that has nothing to do with practicality and everything to do with emotional gratification. The special thing about sports spectatorship is that it's interactive; you feel like you have a role to play in the production, however small. That feeling may not persist when the interactive element is taken away.

And what about the communal element? A common refrain about the power of sports is that they bring people together. That's often meant figuratively, but there is, of course, a literal component as well, whether that means populating stadiums or going to friends' houses or packing into sweaty bars to take in the spectacle and react among fellow fans.

Will it feel the same to root for a local team if that team isn't even playing in the local market? Can a fan base collectively celebrate a victory if its members can't celebrate with each other in person? Can sports still bring people together on a spiritual level if they can't do so on a physical level?

And if not, then what, exactly, is left?

Joe Wolfond writes about basketball and tennis for theScore.

Copyright © 2020 Score Media Ventures Inc. All rights reserved. Certain content reproduced under license.