With the COVID-19 pandemic changing how we do, well, everything, the NBA was forced to come up with a new game plan to finish their 2019-2020 season.
The solution—the much-discussed bubble—saw some 300 players from the league’s top 22 teams sequestered in one of three Disney World resorts for up to three months as they strive to be crowned champions of this long, strange season.
But what about the those on the outside feeling as if their bubble had burst? With their partners locked down in Florida, scores of women have been left to navigate work responsibilities, bedtime routines, middle-of-the-night feedings, meal prep and, in some cases, even childbirth without their teammate. And now they’re speaking exclusively with E! News about that new normal. These are their basketball diaries.
When the NBA first floated this “bubble” idea, count Callie Rivers Curry among the initial skeptics.
“My first thought, truthfully, was great,” the wife of Dallas Mavericks guard Seth Curry told E! News in an exclusive interview. She figured that Seth and his fellow players could at least earn back a percentage of the salaries they’d lost when the NBA abruptly suspended its season on March 11 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“But I truly did not think it was going to work,” the mother of 2-year-old daughter Carter Lynn Curry admitted. “I thought he would probably be gone for, like, five days and there would be too many positive tests, and he would be back. But obviously,” she added, laughing, “I was wrong.”
Next she remembered thinking, “Whatever, it’s 57 days, it’s not that long.”
