&nb sp; IN THE WEEKS AFTER THE TRAGEDY OF 9/11, SPORTS PROVED TO HAVE A REMARKABLE HEALING POWER. IT WAS
UpdatedSep 14, 2011 12:32 AM ETIT RAINED that Monday night, in sheets, in buckets, in torrents.Roger Clemens was supposed to go for his 20th win of the seasonthat evening, against his old friends from Boston, but the skyopened up and the clouds parted and Yankee Stadium looked like anovergrown rice paddy before long.In September 2011, they would have waited until closing time toplay the game.But on Sept. 10, 2001, it wasn't considered a venial sin to banga game, even if that game might never be made up. Even aYankees-Red Sox game. See, it isn't just fuzzy memory that hintsthat the world was a quainter place in the years, months, weeks,days and hours ... before.In many ways - in almost every way - it was.It just was.I was driving home from the Stadium that night, and on the radiothe Giants were opening the defense of their NFC Championship inDenver, an adventure that would not go well, Brian Griese throwingfor 330 yards, Terrell Davis rushing for 101. The Jets had gotten stomped a dayearlier by the Colts, 45-24, in Herman Edwards' debut.The Mets were lousy. The Knicks were on the decline. The Yankeeswere getting old. It was shaping up to be a long stretch offorgettable road.And then ... And then.***WE ALL have our stories of That Morning. Some are heartbreaking.Some are beyond heartbreaking. Hours later, late in the night,Rudolph Giuliani would describe the losses as "more than any of uscan bear," even before we knew numbers, and figures, and facts, andcasualties. Those of us who bore those losses merely through thenewspapers and the television can't know what it was like to havedone so more directly. But we have stories too.Most begin the way this one does:"Turn on the TV!"My wife. Standing in a ferry boat on the Jersey side, staring atthe first plumes of smoke. Around her, dozens of brokers andlawyers and laborers and financial planners were impatientlymuttering to themselves, and to the men who ran the ferry: "Let'sgo, let's go, let's go! We're going to be late."My wife asked, "Is the TV on yet? What do you see?"We know what we saw that morning, all of us. It's odd; everyyear on the anniversary, there will be channels that choose to runthe news programming of that morning in its entirety - "as ithappened!" they exclaim - and it's never necessary. The newsreel ofthat morning is seared into memory. All of it."Get home," I told my wife. "Hurry."As we watched the world change, all of us, across the next fewdays, it was impossible not to wonder how our worlds would bealtered. The mayor urged us to take back our lives. Slowly, radiostations who had forfeited music for therapeutic talk startedplaying Destiny's Child and Nelly again. Saturday Night Live cameback with good intentions; Lorne Michaels asked Giuliani, in thefirst skit back, if it was OK to be funny again."Why start now?" the mayor famously replied.Still, movie houses were empty. Restaurants were quiet. Saloontalk was mostly filled with angry oaths of retribution. As a sportsfan, and a sports writer, I wondered, as so many of us did, aboutthe worthiness of the games. The first answers were blunt. Thefirst weekend after, I went to six different driving ranges; I sawfour golfers, total. My wife and I went to hit tennis balls at atown court that was always overrun; we were the only onesthere.The other games had vanished entirely: no NFL, no MLB. BarryBonds was chasing Mark McGwire. The Seattle Mariners were chasingthe '06 Cubs. Michael Jordan was coming back to the NBA. Sports insuspended animation: We wondered if we could ever care again, theway we had Before. Would they matter again? Could they?Little did we know.***THIS isn't about the individual bits of selflessness that soonfollowed, among so many of the athletes who called New York home 10years ago. Make no mistake: These were necessary parts of thehealing.The Mets, managed by a Connecticut native (Bobby Valentine),co-owned by a son of Brooklyn (Fred Wilpon) and led by two localboys, John Franco and Al Leiter, stepped up immediately andrelentlessly. The Yankees visited firehouses; Bernie Williams,unsure what to say to the grieving Bravest and their families,worldlessly handed out hugs. Vinny Testaverde, whose laborer fatherhad helped build the World Trade Center, was everywhere; KerryCollins adopted Ladder 5, a Greenwich Village firehouse.These were wonderful gestures. But they are noted, andremembered, mostly because they were famous people doing the simpleacts of kindness that were so common throughout New York in thosedays and weeks after Sept. 11. On every block, in every town, therewere similar stories: meals being delivered, wounds being bound,young people wa l k i n g into army recruiting stations or seekinginformation about the Pe a ce Corps. The athletes were part of alarger picture, a tale of shared giving and shared grieving thecountry hadn't seen since V-J Day.What they did in giving of themselves was special, but it wasn'tunique.What they did in the weeks and months and years after, withtheir supreme gifts, absolutely was.Many believe sports began to weave their way into our lives onSept. 21, the night Liza high-kicked her way through the seventhinning stretch and Mike Piazza hit the most famous and mostmeaningful of his 427 lifetime home runs. I always have believedthat merely was the start; more important was what happened twodays later. I was sitting in the press box at Kansas City'sArrowhead Stadium, watching the end of the Giants' inspiring 13-3win over the Chiefs in which 80,000 Midwesterners couldn'tstopcheering for the visitors from New York City.My very primitive (and absurdly large) cell phone rang. It was afriend of mine, a huge Mets fan, calling from Shea, and he wasjubilant. I figured they had won again, taken a small step forwardin what was becoming a neat little comeback story."Dude, they're booing the crap out of Armando Benitez. And it'sbeautiful." It was true. Benitez had blown a threerun lead in theninth, and 41,168 Mets fans had decided that enough time hadpassed. It was OK to care enough to boo again.It was beautiful.***IT HELPED that we got that f o r e v e r Yankees playoff run inthe weeks ahead, that we got George W. Bush's firstpitch strike andthose back-toback games in the World Series saved by Tino Martinezand Scott Brosius. It helped that, despite the Diamondbacksprevailing, that World Series would take its place among thegreatest ever played.It helped that on the Sunday before Christmas that year,separated by a thousand miles, Collins and Testaverde each wouldlead fourth-quarter touchdown drives against the Seahawks in EastRutherford and the Colts in Indianapolis that would serve asreminders that not only were they good guys, they were pretty goodquarterbacks, too.Mostly, though, it would help that we would all remember thatsports, stripped down from all the attendant nonsense thatsometimes clutters it, is an irreplaceable part of the fabric thatmake us who we are. They exist, primarily, as an escape, as abuffer from the mean streets and the meaner world that surroundsus. Maybe we already knew that on Sept. 10, 2001, and just didn'twant to think about it. After that, we had no choice.During the '01 World Series, I shared an elevator ride with PhilRizzuto, and he was talking excitedly about how much he enjoyed theYankees games that month, more than ever, because the timesreminded him of 1941, his rookie year as a player, a year whenevery day brought an increasing tide of miserable news from everycorner of the world. Sports, then as now, had helped rescue thecountry from a nervous breakdown."You read the sports section a lot," Rizzuto told me, "becauseyou were afraid of what you'd see in the other parts of thepaper."If nothing else, I hope that's been the case for you these last10 years. And will continue to be for as long as we're all here towatch the games, and talk about them, and argue about them. A mostworthwhile debate.VAC'S WHACKS* Somewhere in Football America late Thursday night, I suspectthat Gentleman Jim Fassel chortled at that last play at the goalline Sean Payton sent in that decided the SaintsPackers game.* As we usher in the football season, may I recommend twoterrific football reads for you: first up, "Lombardi & Landry"by Ernie Palladino, which details their Giants years and beyond ofthe greatest coordinator combo in history. And also "Super BowlMonday" by Adam Lazarus, about Super Bowl XXV, a narrative worthyof that classic Bills-Giants game.* If Major League Baseball is going to go to such ridiculouslengths to play all 162 every year, then there should be a specialfund created by the commissioner's office - and paid for by ownerswho do everything to protect their precious gate - to kick in therequired money to put retractable domes on all new stadiums.* Red Barber once got fired for having the gall to tell his Ch.11 audience that there were 413 people at a Yankees-White Sox gamelate in the forgettable season of 1966. I suspect the ol' Redeadwould've had himself a lovely time describing Tuesday night's soggysilliness.WHACK BACK AT VACRichard Siegelman: The only worse pitcher than A.J. Burnett isthe kid who came to New York/New Jersey as part of the MetLifestadium deal - "Good ol' Charlie Brown."VAC: Let's just hope neither of the landlords of that stadiumare desperate enough to pick up C. Brown as a placekicker.Tom Retmanski: I think you should be paying more attention tolocal sporting events on TV rather than watching "Mad Men." DavidCone and Paul O'Neill were born to be in the broadcast booth? Haveyou really listened to these guys? I long for the old days whenthere were just two guys in the booth who didn't test your patiencewith non-stop chatter.VAC: Let's say we just keep Don Draper out of this, OK?Brendan Roberts: My old man, a curmudgeon in every sense of theword, always said, "I could have been worse. I could have raisedyou a Jets/Mets fan."VAC: My old man was a Giants/Yankees fan. I somehow grew up Jets/Mets. I truly believe sometimeshe wished I'd have rather run away and joined a cult.Joe Murray: Dodgers fans are refusing to go to games trying toforce Frank McCourt into selling. I watched the Padres gameWednesday afternoon, there were about 8,000 people in the parkcounting both teams. Mets fans should do the same. Watch on TV ifyou're a masochist.VAC: As depressing as an empty September ballpark is, thatreally is the only way fans can send a message.
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