Greeson: Florida wrestling with future of business, entertainment during coronavirus

A trailer set up near a satellite truck to transmit wrestling broadcasts is parked outside the WWE Performance Center Tuesday, April 14, 2020, in Orlando, Fla. Florida's top emergency official last week amended Gov. Ron DeSantis' stay-at-home order to include employees at the professional sports and media production with a national audience, if the location is closed to the public. (AP Photo/John Raoux)
A trailer set up near a satellite truck to transmit wrestling broadcasts is parked outside the WWE Performance Center Tuesday, April 14, 2020, in Orlando, Fla. Florida's top emergency official last week amended Gov. Ron DeSantis' stay-at-home order to include employees at the professional sports and media production with a national audience, if the location is closed to the public. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

The questions about the coronavirus have been constant; lots of those questions are unanswerable.

And those questions are almost always answered first with the biggest catch-all response since a parent invented "Because I said so."

"Listen to the experts."

But the health care experts and some politicians are preaching isolation. The economic experts and other politicians are screaming "open up the economy."

That divide this week takes us to Florida, where that state's leadership has deemed World Wrestling Entertainment as an essential business. (Again, the issue of WWE being more vital in one government's eyes than church gatherings in the eyes of other governments is an issue we perhaps can wrestle with another day.)

Bluntly, Florida is telling sporting and entertainment entities that the Sunshine State is open for business of sports and entertainment.

As long as the verbiage includes "no crowds" and all of the safety measure buzzwords are in place, who can blame them?

We know Nevada's economy has been crushed by this. But Florida's has, too.

Florida lost the spring-break tourist dollars. Florida lost the back half of the spring-training tourist dollars. Florida icon Walt Disney is reportedly losing $30 million a day. Florida's cruise industry faces a Titanic collapse.

Opening the gates on the WWE makes sense (and a lot of cents). It also has to have the attention of boxing promoters, MMA leaders and every other sports league trying to discover ways to get back in the business of doing business.

There could be meaningful professional golf in Florida - and several events in subsequent weeks, too - rather quickly considering the number of PGA players who live within driving distances of the courses around Orlando.

There could be meaningful baseball in Florida, too, considering the number of spring training facilities as well as the ball parks in Tampa, Miami and other college campuses around the state.

Heck, Arizona's governor personally invited all 30 Major League Baseball teams to his state to play as many games without fans as possible, which would be a giant windfall since state income taxes are issued where the games are played and not from where the checks are issued.

As for Nevada, any sports activity for a betting industry relegated to Russian table tennis and super-charged Nintendo events would be welcomed with open arms and wallets.

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, our nation's leading coronavirus counteragent, said sports without crowds could be back this summer.

It's not the all-important medical answer, of course.

But it could be a step toward our familiar routine, and a big step for our uncertain economy, considering the effects sports have for advertisers, broadcast partners and the thousands of jobs lost since the sports world stopped.

Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com and follow him on Twitter at @jgreesontfp.

photo Jay Greeson

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