The voice on the other end of the phone line, that of a close friend, was venting a bit about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
"I'm just so tired of it," he said. "Tired of wearing masks. Tired of always worrying about getting it. Do you think it will ever end?"
We're all feeling it. COVID fatigue. And not to be Ned Negative here, but has the flu ever ended? No. And on some level, COVID-19 probably won't either.
But getting vaccinated and then getting boosted apparently helps. Tremendously. You. Me. Those we love. Those whose health and safety we should care about as human beings whether we want to have a cup of coffee with them or not.
Which brings us to the somewhat aligned yet fairly different cases of Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving and tennis star Novak Djokovic, the poster guys in the pro sports world for the anti-vax crowd.
Djokovic has been in the news almost nonstop the past week or so for both failing to get vaccinated before arriving in Australia for the Australian Open, as well as misleading the authorities about his travels prior to coming there.
His visa was first denied, then approved, then denied again. He is now both out of the country and out of the Aussie Open he has won nine times previously and his supporters claim that the whole controversy was politically driven. And one could certainly argue with much credibility that everything about the pandemic and the vaccines rolled out to halt it has been far too politically driven from the outset.
Yet before anyone goes too overboard to defend the Djoker, may the public be reminded that against all sound and prudent advice, Djokovic convinced a few of his well-known tennis buddies on the ATP Tour - Aleksander Zverev, Dominic Thiem and Gregor Dimitrov, to name but three - to participate in a tournament he'd created at the height of the pandemic. Labeled the Adria Tour 2020, it was to be held in Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina at a time when all sports were pretty much on hiatus worldwide.
Novak Djokovic looks as his documents after landing in Belgrade, Serbia, Monday, Jan. 17, 2022. Djokovic arrived in the Serbian capital following his deportation from Australia on Sunday after losing a bid to stay in the country to defend his Australian Open title despite not being vaccinated against COVID-19. (AP Photo/Darko Bandic)Unfortunately, Dimitrov, Borna Coric, Viktor Troicki's pregnant wife, as well as Djokovic and his wife all came down with the virus and the event was eventually canceled before its conclusion. At no time did the players practice social distancing or wear masks. Fans who paid to see the matches contracted the virus as well.
So if Australia seemed overly cautious about allowing an unvaccinated Djoker in its country as COVID-19 cases were spiking, it had its reasons.
Then there's Irving, who isn't allowed to play in Brooklyn or New York City without being vaccinated, which means he's now taking the court for the Nets a shade less than half the time after originally being declared out for the season.
Such a move is expected to cost him somewhere between $15- and $16.5 million for the year, given that he makes $380,000 a game. And whatever one thinks of Irving's stance, at least he's putting his loss of money where his mouth is. If the Nets are willing to go along with this, and it seems they are, then who are we to judge?
But here's the other thing, and a trio of fairly important NBA greats - the retired Hall of Famers Shaquille O'Neal and Charles Barkley, as well as fellow TNT studio host Kenny Smith - weighed in on it during Monday night's late night show.
From Barkley, who reminded folks that the chief reason the currently injured superstar Kevin Durant is with the Nets is because of Irving's wooing of him: "He talked Kevin Durant into going to Brooklyn," as if to say that because of that, Irving owed it to Durant to play all the games he was healthy enough to play, not just those in other states that didn't require him to be vaccinated.
From Smith, who stopped short of publicly criticizing Irving, "The vaccine is a great seatbelt. It helps all of us stay alive for longer."
Finally, from Shaq: "I don't care what (Irving) does, but in this (NBA) thing of ours, when you want to win for your fellas, and everybody else is (getting vaccinated), sacrifice plays an important role in trying to win a championship."
Sacrifice. For a championship in a team sport, to be sure. But in the bigger, far more important picture, sacrifice for the greater good of mankind. Sacrifice that the 851,000 people who've died to date in this country alone from COVID-19 may soon slow to a crawl, if not stop completely. Sacrifice that all those lives permanently altered by a virus we still seem to know less about every day may at least be kept alive for longer, hopefully until we learn how to heal them completely.
It was Shakespeare who coined the phrase "To thine own self be true," and Irving seems to embrace that above all else in his continued rebuffing of the vaccine.
But the Bible says, "Love they neighbor as thyself." When the overwhelming evidence shows the vaccine helps us all live longer, does getting both the vaccine and the booster seem too big a sacrifice to help our neighbors as well as ourselves as we approach the two-year anniversary of this wretched, wearying pandemic?
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.