Patrick Johnston: The day in Arizona that rocked the Canucks' world — and those that covered them
In another year, it might have been considered the worst trip ever to Arizona.
It rained when we landed. A baseball game was rained out.
The hockey game didn’t happen.
All we had was work. And when we came home, we had to self-isolate for two weeks while the rest of the world came to a halt.
There is no doubt that the best perk of my job is I get to travel. And because of that, I could never really call a trip to Arizona where it rained a bad one.
And then we remember COVID-19.
One year ago, I got on a plane to cover a hockey game in the desert. The game, as you’ll recall, didn’t happen.
The timing of the trip was such that baseball spring training was in full swing and since you make sure you can cover the game on the Thursday by flying down on the Wednesday, there’s time available to check out a ball game.
Like, say, the Oakland A’s — your team — playing the Los Angeles Angels at Tempe Diablo Stadium, near the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport.
If the World Health Organization’s announcement that day that a pandemic had started didn’t tell us something, when Jeff Paterson, then with TSN 1040, and I arrived at the stadium amidst a heavy rainstorm — a rarity for Phoenix — maybe that should have been our first sign that nothing to come in 2020 would be normal.
“Sorry, the game has just been cancelled,” the police officer directing traffic — while getting soaked in her regular uniform, no rain jacket — told us.
We were still hours from Rudy Gobert testing positive for what we were still calling just “the coronavirus,” but what we thought would be our slightly altered reality had only just entered our existence a few days before.
The Canucks had beaten the New York Islanders on March 10, the day before flying down to Arizona, ahead of a game in Glendale against the Coyotes at Gila River Arena on March 12. They were then to fly on to Denver for a game against the Colorado Avalanche on March 13, then return home before playing a home game on March 15, a Sunday.
“We didn’t think anything was going to get cancelled until we were already in Arizona,” Tyler Myers said this week. They’re just hockey players, they were off to do what they do.
While Paterson and I were sorting out what to do instead of attending our now rained-out ball game, the Canucks were landing in Phoenix.
Once the players got settled at the hotel near the arena in Glendale, about a 30-minute drive from the airport, they started making plans for dinner.
Myers and about 10 other teammates went out to a restaurant in Glendale, happy to enjoy each other’s company, totally unaware of how this would be the last time for months they could do something like that.
Off the ✈️ and onto the 🚌 in Arizona. pic.twitter.com/9YHaLj40AA— Vancouver #Canucks (@Canucks) March 11, 2020
I was on the radio, finishing up a hit on Sportsnet 650 when suddenly players from the NBA’s Utah Jazz and Oklahoma City Thunder were pulled from the court in Oklahoma City,
moments before tipoff for their game that night
. Gobert had tested positive for COVID-19.
“Was like a movie, figuring out that the dams are breaking, or the zombie invasion is real. Very surreal,” recalled Andrew Walker, who was on air with me.
Walker and co-host Sat Shah were hosting the show from the JCC Sports Dinner. Their next guest was the special guest for the fundraising dinner: Drew Brees.
“Sat and I started the show at 4 p.m. local, and the first segment I remember saying, ‘Hey there’s a chance by next week, I’m not sure if fans will be allowed in the building to watch a Canucks game on their next home stand.’ And the text line was furious. Texts about fear mongering and overreacting.
L
ess than an hour later, the entire scope changed and the text line did, too,” Walker recalled.
“We were told no COVID questions to Brees, but when he came over the whole situation had blown up, NBA had cancelled, so of course we opened with that.
A
nd I’ll never forget the look on his face: One of instant regret that he has gotten on a plane to come to Vancouver. He knew shit was going down. There were hundreds of people at this event and I opted out of staying for the dinner.
It was wildly uncomfortable starting then … Two days later we were working from home and still here.”
Just over an hour after the radio hit, the NBA announced it was suspending its season.
Paterson and I were at Camelback Ranch, not far from where we were staying, for that evening’s Dodgers vs. Brewers game. We caught the news on Twitter at the same time as everyone else. We had no idea what was coming next.
“At the time who could have thought the spring training game between the Dodgers and Milwaukee would be the last sporting event that I would see in person for nine months,” Paterson noted.
At dinner, Myers said the news started to filter in to him and his teammates that the NBA was stopping. The NHL played through its slate of games, but even those were in question because of the NBA’s situation.
“That’s when it kind of clued in for us,” Myers said.
But they still believed they had a game to play the next day. Even when they woke up on the 12th and that morning’s skate got cancelled, they thought maybe they were still going to play.
And then NHL announced everything was going to stop, that teams on the road should return home.
NEXT GAME
Edmonton Oilers (17-11-0) at Vancouver Canucks (12-16-2)
Saturday:
7 p.m.,
Rogers Arena
.
TV:
Sportsnet, CBC.
Radio:
Sportsnet 650 AM
Derek Jory, the Canucks’ head website writer and social media producer, said he found himself thinking about the safety of his family.
“I’m a father and a husband and my mind was back in Vancouver,” he said. “Everything was so unknown. That’s who I wanted to be with.”
But the moment still had the players in a bit of a daze. I was at the team’s hotel for a time, but mostly spent the day working in my room at the hotel Paterson and I were staying at on the other side of the Westgate complex that the arena and the team hotel are part of.
At one point, I called my company’s travel agent to see if I could fly home early, but the timing of the one realistic option meant I would be leaving soon and I felt I should stay to finish covering the story.
Paterson spent much of the day in the team hotel lobby, chatting with players and staff here and there. No one, he said, really had any sense of what was going on; in fact, they were coming to him to find out what he had heard as much as anything.
“It wasn’t like any day I’ve ever had in the business where things were literally changing by the minute,” Paterson told me this week.
TSN had equipped him with a small camera to take with him on the road to shoot short interviews and the like for its website and with everything happening, he went to shoot images that might be of use.
At one point Paterson went across the street to the arena, assuming he’d be able to get access and shoot footage of the empty building. But security denied him access and even shooed him off the property.
He shot video of the Canucks’ training staff loading their truck with team bags.
“This is news,” they questioned him in a mocking tone. Although I was a little perplexed that people who worked for a pro sports team would see that yes, obviously they were news, I also did recognize what most of us had no inkling of: We were actually part of history and when you are in such a moment, it’s not often obvious until much, much later.
“The news guy in me had kicked in,” Paterson said of the moment. “You just don’t know when you’re going to see them again … absolutely it was all newsworthy then.”
Jory said that as players were getting on the bus before heading to the airport, some expressed bafflement at why Paterson was shooting video that seemed so banal and uninteresting.
“It didn’t really sink in what that meant. We had it in our minds that we were going to start back up again in a few days even, and then it turned into a few weeks. And then we got told we could go home and we didn’t really know what that meant,” Myers said.
Canucks staffer Mike Brown would spend the day scrambling to figure out how to get the team a charter flight home. The original plan had been to fly to Denver post-game, but that booking now had to be cancelled and a new plane arranged.
The Canucks found a new plane and flew back to Vancouver that afternoon, just ahead of the announcement by Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry that people arriving home from abroad should self-isolate for 14 days, just to be safe.
“We didn’t really know what to make of it,” Myers said. “And for me it probably only sunk in a few days later, when we were back home. And we realized, OK we might not be playing for a while here. And then things started coming out, you know about masking and try to limit touching certain things and touching your face. I was like OK, we’re in something pretty serious.”
As they were flying home, Jory found himself pondering something his coworker Jessica Marks, one of the team’s two main videographers, along with Paul Albi had said to him once.
“When I travelled with Paul, it was fun, but we’d go for beers and talk sports. With Jess, it was always bigger-picture stuff. We’d got to a Broadway show when were in New York, for example. ‘You never know when it will be the last road trip,’ she would say. At that moment, I found myself wondering that. Turns out she was right,” he said.
Jory was terminated as a full-time Canucks employee in December, but has been helping cover games this season on a contract basis.
Jory did admit that on the afternoon of March 12, with everything cancelled and the team waiting to find out when they’d fly home, he wasn’t stressing.
“I was in heaven,” he said. “I’m a huge book nerd. It’s a rare thing to get five hours away from kids to just read.”
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Paterson’s kids are teenagers and his own situation, working for a company that had laid him off before, doing a job that was amazing but he knew also was very precarious, sent his mind spinning.
“At that point, like we just didn’t know if it was going to be a two-week break or a two-month, break where we’re gonna continue to cover hockey. There were so many questions,” he said. “I think for me it was just, we were still trying to wrap our heads around what ultimately COVID was going to become. … I wanted to get home. You want the safety of home. You just feel you can deal with things better.”
My wife was 32 weeks pregnant and on the day we flew back to Vancouver, an ultrasound scan suggested our baby might need some sort of procedure after she was born. The doctor also told my wife, Candice, that I absolutely had to do the 14 days of self-isolation.
I found these things out as Paterson and I waited at the Phoenix airport for the plane to get a deep clean. It was as stressful of a time as I’ve ever experienced.
(Our second daughter is now 10 months old and the worrying scan turned out to be nothing, probably just a blip. I was able to spend the two weeks in my parents’ basement suite in Dunbar. In those days, self-isolation meant staying away from people, so I was able to go for daily walks, which helped a lot.)
Back at the airport, headed for an uncertain future, Paterson and I realized just from reading accounts on Twitter that we were the last two NHL-related media — maybe even NHL-related people — to come in off the road.
In the end, there was one guy who thought the season was in trouble, who a week before everything stopped had said he thought the season would be cancelled, Myers recalled.
“I remember thinking he was nuts.”
That man: Chris Tanev.
pjohnston@postmedia.com
twitter.com/risingaction
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