The oral history of the 2020 SEC Tournament cancellation

Part III: Rudy Gobert’s test leads to sports cancellations

PART I: COVID discussions leading up to the tournament
PART II: COVID news spreads further, fan attendance gets canceled
PART III: Rudy Gobert’s test leads to sports cancellations
PART IV: The SEC Tournament is canceled
PART V: The NCAA Tournament is canceled

Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert is one of the first prominent athletes to test positive for coronavirus, on Wednesday night. The announcement of Gobert’s positive test sets off a chain of events and has people questioning what will happen to other sports and leagues.

Adam Sparks, Tennessee Volunteers beat reporter for The Tennessean and USA TODAY Sports: Rudy Gobert had tested positive, then we started hearing rumblings between the teams, and then MLS announced their season was done, the NHL announced their season was done. And then you start to think “It’s real.”

Steven Pearl, assistant coach, Auburn men’s basketball: When we saw the news with Gobert testing positive for COVID and them canceling that game, that was the first thing we had gotten. And when we saw the first big tournament get shut down, we were like “Oh, this is not trending in the right direction.”

Dan Leibovitz, associate commissioner for men’s basketball, SEC: All of a sudden it went from something that’s happening in Europe, to something that’s hit the United States to all of a sudden, “Oh my God, it hit a basketball player. This is everywhere.” So at that moment, I was hearing from a lot of the coaches and a lot of the administrators in our league.

Justin Lee, sports editor, Auburn-Opelika News: The moment I remember most vividly was when Rudy Gobert tested positive and they literally cleared out the Utah Jazz game mid-game. I was hanging out with [Auburn Observer writer] Justin Ferguson at the time. We were watching SportsCenter and we see the fans leaving the Jazz game, and we’re like, “Oh my God, pause it!” We found a guy in an Auburn hat at the Utah Jazz game and took a picture of it and posted it on Twitter. That is where it literally hit close to home, all of the Jazz fans getting up and leaving, and there’s this guy in an Auburn hat.

Jacob Hillman, president, The Jungle (Auburn basketball student section): So, when they were doing the SportsCenter coverage of [Rudy Gobert] they were going around to the rest of the NBA, of different games that were being canceled or postponed. What I remember was there was a Mavericks game going on and they showed Mark Cuban on the baseline in shock of what he was reading because that’s how everyone was. You didn’t expect it to start up and spread like that. It was wild to watch.

Jimmy Dykes, ESPN/SEC Network analyst: Wednesday night we had games and I was at dinner with my crew, my producer, my play-by-play guy, director. There were five or six of us at dinner and on our phones. We all get notifications from ESPN, it was that the NBA game had been cleared from the floor. And as soon as we saw that, we looked at each other and said “This isn’t going to happen. This is the first domino to fall.” But there was no official announcement that night.

Auburn, a No. 2 seed for the tournament, was scheduled to play its first game in a quarterfinal match-up at 6 p.m. on Friday, March 13 against the winner of Game Five. The team arrived Thursday morning to practice in Bridgestone Arena before tip-off between Alabama and Tennessee. But Auburn’s postseason ended before it even started.

Lior Berman, guard, Auburn basketball team: We just kind of kept getting better toward the end of the year and we were kind of at our peak when we were entering the SEC tournament.

Cody Voga, assistant athletics director for athletic communications at Ball State University; Auburn Basketball SID in 2020: It all happened very fast. I know that when we got to the SEC Tournament we were prepared to play the whole thing out, play the NCAA tournament, and be good to go. I was actually at the SEC Tournament the first night.

Pearl: We had practice, we tried to keep it as normal as possible and immediately following practice. We only got an hour on the floor, then we were going to Vanderbilt to do the rest of our walk through. So as we’re on the bus we are driving to Vanderbilt, we keep seeing the Big Ten’s tournament has been shut down, Pac 12, ACC, all these big conferences were shutting down, so it was only a matter of time and we just knew it was happening.

Leibovitz: I remember too, that when teams that played Wednesday came into practice on Thursday. And I remember they were so much more relaxed than we were. We were at the conference office and we were scrubbing everything and people walked in and we were giving them like the elbow shake and the teams were just coming in and shaking hands.

Sparks: We treated all the interviews the night before in a normal way because at that time the thought was, “It’s OK to have media here.” It was from a distance, but social distancing wasn’t really a thing yet. At the SEC Tournament, the media is set up on a riser way above you. In a press conference setting, you are away from them, so I think that helped things after the game.

Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University, and member of the NCAA COVID-19 Advisory Panel: This began to look like a virus that could spread very very rapidly and had the potential to make many people sick. The virus had certain characteristics. It was very contagious, and it could spread through people who show no symptoms.

Leibovitz: We had nothing but hand sanitizer. The Predators have some kind of fogger that disinfects spaces. So we were fogging, we were wiping down the balls, but no, we had nothing else. And the mask, as I said, was a total foreign concept to us.

Devan Cambridge, guard, Auburn men’s basketball: We were heading to Vanderbilt for a shoot-around since we didn’t play until the next day, and I noticed that we were taking longer than I know it takes to get there. We were just down the street.

Voga: We were the 2-seed, so we weren’t supposed to play until Friday, but we were there on Wednesday. I actually went to the two early round games, and that’s where they announced that there weren’t going to be any spectators for the rest of the SEC Tournament. The SEC made that announcement over the PA system. I was just there to watch. When we got back to the arena to practice on Thursday before the first game, we conducted our practice and then we were leaving to head to Vanderbilt.