There are no right answers in face of tragedy

So Washington State will play football Saturday, but the University of Washington will not.

Gonzaga isn't playing anything. The high schools in Spokane are playing everything, and did so within hours of our world being turned upside down.

The Pacific-10 Conference, persuaded by its well-meaning commissioner, feinted at making the grand gesture, then retreated into making a muddled one.

Grief, respect, propriety are not exact sciences, it turns out, any more than recruiting or play-calling.

The world of sports, barely relevant in the best of times, is a parallel Limbo at moments like these. The horror of Tuesday's hijackings and their unthinkable conclusions leave us sotted with the same rage, the same helplessness as our real-life neighbors, but with a damnable sense of triviality all our own.

Everyone struggles. Our additional struggle is in doing the right thing.

Or maybe not the right thing. The proper thing.

"Because there isn't any right thing," WSU athletic director Jim Sterk pointed out. "We're just trying to do the best we can in a situation where no one wins."

Just how far along, we must decide, in the wake of an obscene act of war is it proper to open the stadium, suit up and keep a score that simply doesn't matter?

And what exactly does matter?

Because we all do what we have to do. Yes, we stay glued to the news, we watch, we stew, we pray, we comfort and console where we can, we give blood, we volunteer, we write a check to the Red Cross - but we also get on. Store clerks clerk, CEOs CEO, doctors doctor, sports writers sports write. Be it job or way of life, we do what it is we do, and sooner rather than later. To suggest that coach Mike Price and the Cougars - or the Huskies, Mariners or Seahawks - shouldn't do what it is they do, well, there is some hypocrisy in that.

Now, because what our athletes do has assumed a stature in our culture so ridiculously out of proportion to their actual importance, maybe that's why it should be later rather than sooner.

Judgment call. No right answer.

The view from here is that a pause through the weekend - for every coach and athlete, every sport - would have been appropriate, but it's a personal prejudice, and one without any official psychology. It seemed reasonable that football at least take a deep breath, as baseball did. It seemed necessary, but there is no offense.

Simply put, the NCAA was not willing to speak for all its members on this one, so they were left to their own judgments - and if there isn't a right one, there isn't a wrong one, either. Even if you suspect some of the grieving is being done with an eye to somebody's bottom line.

"I was hoping for the conference commissioners to come to some kind of consensus," said Sterk, speaking of a Wednesday conference call among the NCAA Division I leaders. "Then everyone would be on the same page, dealing with the same issues.

"In our case, the (football) game couldn't be rescheduled. Oregon State's in the same boat. So what do you do with that, when the rest of the conference didn't have that issue?"

And that's very unfortunate - that it became a practical issue.

Grief and respect shouldn't be matters of practicality.

It is further seen in the Pac-10's quick decision to call off all conference competition - but not non-conference football. League matches in soccer and volleyball can be rescheduled; non-league matches don't need to be. But football gets a more noble mandate, if for no other reason than teams travel by charter and not commercial air.

Not that football feels very noble at the moment.

"I don't think anybody wants to play today," Price acknowledged. "It's hard to do any cheering right now."

But that will change over the next two days - 48 hours is longer than we think - and, yes, there will be a profound catharsis of some kind in Martin Stadium on Saturday. And it is a widely held opinion that it's a necessary catharsis. Apparently, President George W. Bush imparted such a thought to NCAA boss Cedric Dempsey in a phone conversation Wednesday that tipped the prevailing sentiment from canceling most of Saturday's football schedule to playing it.

Sterk summarized most of the arguments heard over the sports airwaves and e-waves Wednesday when he talked about "returning to normalcy as quickly as we can, not allowing the terrorists to win, basically. In our small way, if we can provide some distraction, something else besides all the tragedy, maybe that's something they're looking for us to do."

No question. Many are looking for just that.

On the other hand, do we need a distraction already? Have we come to that point as a culture? There are few enough times when we sit down and invest our spare hours - not just minutes - to watching the news or reading the paper, when we care enough to be truly informed about the events and circumstances that shape our society. Taking time - taking stock - is an important fiber of our uncommon resiliency. Yet already we're being told (and we're accepting) that we need a diversion from it, that we cannot be left alone with our thoughts for even a weekend.

That seems just a little bit insulting - though it's true, we cannot do sobering and frightening 24/7.

As for showing these despicable terrorists that this is a refusal to capitulate, that we're taking back our lives, let's not kid ourselves.

The vermin who did this won't care. They did what they did because they hate us that much - a blind, irrational, deep-rooted hate - and TV images of us bonding at a ballgame are not going to soften their resolve any more than this senseless attack and slaughter will soften ours.

We'll be going to a game. That's all. And that's OK.

Copyright 2001 Cowles Publishing Company
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