D2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2020SNOOKER
SHEFFIELD, England — The
2020 world snooker champi-
onship, which began on Friday,
had a familiar feel. The stage of
the intimate Crucible Theatre, the
event’s home for more than 40
years, was bathed in klieg lights,
the green cloth of the snooker ta-
bles and the red carpeting so
brightly illuminated it was like
stepping inside a Skittles bag.
Judd Trump was back to defend
his title, and for the first time in
months, there were fans in the
seats.
On opening night, the event had
a bigger audience than the one in
the theater. Originally scheduled
for April but delayed by the coro-
navirus pandemic, it had been
designated by the British govern-
ment as the first indoor test event
for the phased return of live
crowds. That made the champi-
onship, a staple of the British
sports scene and a riveting televi-
sion mini-series with a global au-
dience of more than 300 million,
suddenly of great interest to
leagues and championship organ-
izers in dozens of other sports, es-
pecially those held indoors, all of
them invested economically and
emotionally in the return of spec-
tators.
How well the 17-day champi-
onship fared with a reduced fan
presence, they knew, might set
the stage for similar experiments
in other sports in other places, like
basketball and hockey in Europe
and netball and badminton in
Asia.
The experiment lasted one day,
undone by outside forces, re-
newed virus fears and govern-
mental second thoughts.
“You can feel that something is
not quite right,” Trump said.
Ticket-holding fans, who were
not subjected to temperature
checks or testing before entering
the theater, emerged from Fri-
day’s three sessions and spoke of
the subdued atmosphere, as if
their church had turned into a fu-
neral parlor. There had been only
137 spectators at the first night
session, including a few family
members and friends of Trump’s
who watched him close out his
first-round match.
To make the test event happen,
the World Snooker Tour had
walled off its event as well as it
could. It instituted regular coro-
navirus testing for players, their
support staff, contractors and
television personnel, and com-
petitors were urged to maintain
proper social distancing meas-
ures and to self-isolate as much as
possible.
Hand sanitizer was as ubiqui-
tous as cue chalk, and the specta-
tors holding tickets for each ses-
sion — limited to 300, about a third
of the Crucible Theatre’s capacity
— were required to provide con-
tact tracing information and to
wear face coverings until they
were in their seats. Some of the re-
strictions defied logic. There were
no concession stands, the better to
limit interactions between strang-
ers, but one fan in the evening
match, in desperate need of a pick-
me-up, left the arena briefly and
slipped into a convenience store
around the corner for a coffee that
he brought back to his seat.
The one factor the tour could
not control, however, was the be-
havior of those well outside the
theater. This led to the surreal jux-
taposition Friday of the prime
minister of Britain, Boris Johnson,
announcing a policy U-turn and
the end of the pilot program for
live sports during a news confer-
ence at the same moment that,
roughly 180 miles away, specta-
tors were watching Trump and
Tom Ford play the first nine
frames of their match.
Citing concerns about a second
coronavirus outbreak and rising
infection numbers, Johnson an-
nounced that he was ordering a
halt to the programs the govern-
ment had approved for select
snooker, horse racing and cricket
events.
“We can’t just ignore this evi-
dence,” Johnson said. The restric-
tions will remain in place for at
least two weeks, leaving a glim-
mer of hope for snooker fans that
they might still get to see their fa-
vorite players in person before the
championship ends.
The government’s policy shift
came a day after a snooker player
with a high profile, the five-time
world champion Ronnie O’Sulli-
van, had referred to the players as
“lab rats” in an interview. O’Sulli-
van, who opened play on Sunday,
made his comments in a video
teleconference with reporters, but
many suspected that his words
were directed at government offi-
cials.
“He does carry a huge amount
of influence in the U.K.,” Shaun
Murphy, the 2005 world cham-
pion, said. “When he speaks, peo-
ple listen.”
Murphy, whose first match is
scheduled to be played on Mon-
day, said that he was comfortable
performing in front of fans again.
But not every player felt that way.
Anthony Hamilton, who qualified
for the field of 32 but expressed
reservations about competing be-cause he has chronic asthma,
withdrew from the event on
Thursday. Hamilton argued that
the decision to phase in fans was
premature.
“They said it was a trial, and for
me that word underlines every-
thing,” Murphy said.
The crowd at Friday’s morning
session included two local
snooker enthusiasts, James Ar-
thur and Karl Brownlow, who
emerged from the arena looking
disoriented in the 90-degree Au-
gust heat. The men said they have
been regulars for decades at the
event, which has been held annu-
ally at the Crucible Theatre since
1977.
“Usually people are breathing
down your neck,” Arthur said,
“but the atmosphere was totallymuted today.”
Even when the Crucible is
packed and the fans in the first
row are close enough to nearly
reach out and touch the players,
the atmosphere at snooker — a
billiards game played on a 6-foot-
by-12-foot table and scored by
players’ pocketing 21 colored balls
to earn points — can have the so-
lemnity of a church service.
Spectators clap for well-execut-
ed shots, but it can grow so quiet
at tense moments that the players
can hear a commentator’s voice
leaking from a front-row fan’s ear-
piece. Fans don’t often open their
mouths unless it’s to cough, which
in normal times can make specta-
tors feel, rather bizarrely, as if
they were sitting in a doctor’s of-
fice and a snooker match brokeout.
When O’Sullivan spoke to re-
porters last week, he recounted
the experience of riding in an ele-
vator with someone who started
coughing. It reminded him, he
said, of the risk every player is
taking to compete. His mother,
Maria, has pneumonia, O’Sullivan
said, and he worries about infect-
ing her.
“I defy anybody, if they have
been keeping their distance from
people for four months, to say, ‘Oh,
right, now you’ve got to go into a
room full of people,’ unless you
have got a death wish, and some
people have in many ways, and
they just don’t care,” O’Sullivan
said.
And if the general public just
don’t care, said Django Fung,Trump’s manager, it doesn’t mat-
ter how many precautions sports
leagues take. “You need the peo-
ple of the country to be sensible to
keep the numbers down,” he said.
By the time Fung spoke on Sat-
urday, the government’s edict had
dispersed the small snooker
crowd like red balls on a poor
opening break.
Hours earlier, Chris Ellis, a se-
curity guard at the Crucible, had
been stationed outside the the-
ater’s entrance when a fan with a
ticket approached him. The man
explained that he had traveled
from Ireland and had tickets for a
week of sessions. How could he
get in? he asked.
It was left to Ellis to tell him that
he couldn’t. It was a safety shot he
took no joy in executing.The players maintained social distancing and the crowds were small when the world snooker championship began on Friday. Ding
Junhiu, above right, the highest ranked Asian player, competed on the event’s first day, when fans were still permitted to attend.PHOTOGRAPHS BY BENJAMIN MOLEReturn of Indoor Fans
Lasts One Day in Britain
The experiment was
being closely watched
by other sports.
By KAREN CROUSEPRO BASKETBALL
J J Redick of the New Orleans
Pelicans came prepared.
Ahead of the N.B.A. season’s re-
start at Walt Disney World last
month, Redick crammed his lug-
gage full of everything he would
need for a stay of indeterminate
length — and that included his
podcasting equipment. Laptop.
Microphone. High-tech digital re-
corder. He also made sure to pack
some reading material: “Our
Time Is Now,” by Stacey Abrams,
a former candidate for governor
in Georgia and one of Redick’s fu-
ture podcast guests.
“My prep for Stacey Abrams is
going to be way different than my
prep for Joel Embiid,” Redick said.
Consider the evolution of
Redick, who has long been a sub-
ject of fascination for basketball
fans of a certain vintage. Once
upon a time, he was the brash, of-
ten-reviled star at Duke, a shoot-
ing guard whose confidence irri-
tated opposing crowds to the point
of madness. Now 36, he is one of
the N.B.A.’s more esteemed fig-
ures, a mentor to younger team-
mates and a 14-year pro whose
work ethic borders on compulsive.
“I kind of see him as an older
brother,” said Nickeil Alexander-
Walker, a 21-year-old guard for the
Pelicans.
In recent years, Redick has add-
ed another dimension to his public
persona by hosting his own pod-
cast. He has interviewed athletes
and chefs, authors and bankers,
politicians and actors. For a self-
described introvert, Redick thinks
of it as an exercise in personal de-
velopment — and as a way for him
to connect with an even broader
audience.
“It’s given me a medium to ex-
press myself,” he said.
Now, Redick hopes to expand
his platform. In a telephone inter-
view, he said he was set to start his
podcast company, ThreeFourTwo
Productions, this week with his
co-host and business partner,
Tommy Alter, along with a new
weekly podcast, “The Old Man
and The Three,” which ticks the
obligatory podcast box of having a
pun in its title.
“It’s a little play on Heming-
way,” Redick said. “I’m the old
man in this scenario.”
Redick’s final podcast for The
Ringer website, which had
produced his namesake show
since 2017, was released on July- But he said the idea of starting
his own company had been perco-
lating for months when he
brought the idea to Alter, 29, a
producer for shows like “The
Shop” on HBO and “Desus &
Mero” on Showtime.
“He has this institutional
knowledge of the industry al-
ready,” Alter said, “so this was just
the natural progression.”
Redick and Alter, who are team-
ing with the podcast company Ca-
dence13, said they hoped to build
out a small network of additional
podcasts over the next two to
three years. (ThreeFourTwo rep-
resents Redick’s routine of mak-
ing 342 shots every Sunday in the
off-season.)
“We want to bring on people we
know in different industries,
whether that’s doing another bas-
ketball pod or a food pod or a polit-
ical pod,” Redick said. “These are
the sorts of conversations we’re
having right now. But the focus
right now is on launching the new
podcast.”
The first two episodes — one
featuring Abrams and another
with Damian Lillard of the Port-
land Trail Blazers — are sched-
uled to debut on Wednesday.
Redick, who continues to score
for the Pelicans, averaging 14.9
points this season, said it wasnever his intention to moonlight
as a podcaster. He sort of stum-
bled into it. In 2015, he was playing
for the Los Angeles Clippers when
the sportswriter Adrian Woj-
narowski, who was then working
for Yahoo Sports, approached him
about writing personal essays for
a series on the site. Redick said he
briefly considered the idea before
he succumbed to his anxiety.
“It’s taking me back to college,”
Redick recalled telling Woj-
narowski, “when I’d procrastinate
and have to write a 20-page paper
the night before it’s due — I don’t
want to do this.”
A few months later, Woj-
narowski came to Redick with an-
other possibility: Would he be in-
terested in hosting a podcast?
“I did not know anything about
podcasts,” Redick said.
Redick’s wife, Chelsea, advisedhim to check out “Serial,” the true-
crime podcast that had become a
phenomenon. It probably was not
what Yahoo Sports had in mind, he
recalled telling his wife. But after
sampling a few more conversa-
tional podcasts, Redick decided to
take the plunge. He figured it
would be good preparation in case
he wanted to work in sports media
after he retired from the N.B.A.
For his first show, Redick
booked a telephone interview
with Jared Dudley, one of the
league’s chattiest players and
someone he had known for years.
But Redick still treated it as if he
were studying for the LSAT exam.
He compiled 15 pages of notes. He
knew more about Dudley than he
ever thought he would need to
know about Dudley.
“I was terrified,” Redick said.
It got worse before it got better.
On the night he was supposed to
record the episode, the power
went out at his home in Southern
California. In search of power and
a reliable internet connection,
Redick scrambled over to the Clip-
pers’ practice center. After setting
up an ad hoc studio in the media
work room, he got some bad news
from his engineer in New York:
There was a lot of background
noise from the traffic outside.
“I was just like, ‘Well, this is not
going well,’ ” Redick said.
It was an inauspicious start, but
he pushed through the growing
pains. Early on, he said, he would
self-medicate by chugging a beer
before each episode. He would
also work up a list of questions for
each guest that looked more like a
flow chart: “If he answers it this
way, then I’m going to ask this.”
By his own admission, there was
room for growth.
“But I think it was still such a
novel thing at the time that people
really responded to it,” Redick
said. “And by the fifth episode, I
felt like I had something here.”
Like anything else, he said, im-
provement required reps. He said
he had now made exactly 100episodes: 40 for Yahoo Sports, a
single episode for Uninterrupted
and 59 for The Ringer. Over time,
Alter said, a crustier segment of
the listening public seemed to
come around to viewing Redick in
a different light.
“You could see it in the com-
ments,” Alter said. “People were
like, ‘I want to hate you, but I can’t
anymore.’ ”
At the same time, Redick has in-
stant bona fides with many of his
guests, particularly with his fel-
low players.
“I think there’s a level of candor
there that’s unique,” Alter said,
“and fans have picked up on that.”
That dynamic was clear last
month when the Clippers’ PatrickBeverley, one of the league’s most
tenacious defenders, was a guest
on one of Redick’s final episodes
for The Ringer. Beverley prefaced
the interview by asking a pressing
question of his own.
“We can curse on this, right?”
Beverley asked. (Yes, he could
curse.)
Beverley spent parts of the next
hour sharing stories from his
childhood in Chicago and from his
playing days overseas. He re-
called how he once wrote his
dream of reaching the N.B.A. on a
scrap of paper when he visited the
Western Wall, the iconic holy site
in Jerusalem, and how he still
scribbles his goals on Post-it
Notes.
“These are stories — I’ve never
told anyone this,” Beverley told
Redick.
The goal is always authenticity,
Redick said. He wants his guests
to open up. In the process, he has
done the same.For Many Years, Redick Attracted the Derision of Fans. Now He Has Their Ear.
J J Redick, who interviews players and politicians alike, says he is set to start his own company.MICHAEL CONROY/ASSOCIATED PRESSBy SCOTT CACCIOLAPodcasting opens
doors and helps an
introvert loosen up.