How Sports Helped Heal New York City In The Wake of 9/11
by Jay Kaplan, OTSL Head Writer & Co-Host
“Are you okay?” “Where were you?” “Is anyone you know hurt…missing…dead?” Questions those of us who were living in New York heard all day and for days after in the wake of the worst day in New York and America’s history.
It’s been 10 years, but on Sunday it will – at least emotionally for those of us who are still living here – seem like yesterday instead of yesteryear. Those questions will again be asked, except in the past tense. “Were you okay?” “Where were you?” “Did you know anyone who was hurt…missing…died?”
And while The Big Apple will have its “official” memorial ceremony at Ground Zero (yes we still call it that and I doubt that will truly change even with a memorial and eventually a new building there), a more personal, more, dare I say more New York ceremony will take place at Citi Field before the Mets play the Cubs and at The Meadowlands before the Jets play the Cowboys. I say that because sports played such a huge part in the healing process for this city in the wake of the tragedy.
I said on this past week’s show that to outsiders, New York City can sometimes come across as a souless metropolis. Glass and steel buildings reaching towards the sky; millions of people constantly in a rush to get wherever they’re going, plugged into their ipods, blue-tooth devices and crackberries seemingly oblivious to the rest of the city around them.
But with all heartfelt respect to such places as New Orleans, Tuscaloosa, Oklahoma City and even Washington DC, which shares this day with us, no city galvanizes and comes together in the wake of disaster quite like this one; and while September 11th may be the worst day in American history, in many ways, it was New York’s finest hour.
And while first responders and construction crews spent those initial hours and subsequent days doing work that no one with their skill sets should ever have to do, decisions were made first to shut sports down and then 10 days later start them up again. Both decisions being the right one at each moment they were made.
While the Jets and Giants did their part when the NFL re-started games, it was our baseball teams that residents of The Big Apple really latched on to, probably because they played every day.
Like every New Yorker, I remember that first game at Shea Stadium against the hated Atlanta Braves. The game was tight and the crowd, the first one at a sporting event in this city since the tragedy, wasn’t sure how to react. With everything that had happened, was STILL happening, was it okay to cheer? Then Mets catcher Mike Piazza, who lived shouting distance from Ground Zero, stepped to the plate in the bottom of the 8th and blasted one into the Queens night to give the Mets a 3-2 lead and the crowd just erupted. At that moment, every New Yorker from Ground Zero to the far edge of Long Island and every where in between started to think that maybe, just maybe we’d be okay. It would take a while, but it was a start.
And then four days later, on September 25th, the Yankees played their first game in the House That Ruth Built. Wearing caps that said “NYPD” and “FDNY” instead of “NY” just as the Mets had, the Yankees brought members of New York’s Finest and Bravest along with other rescue workers onto the field for a pre-game ceremony. The Yankees lost that game, but clinched the AL East because the Red Sox lost to the Orioles.
Call it fate, destiny, whatever, but the Yankees seemed to realize that the City needed them to keep playing. The Yankees run to the World Series gave New York something to talk about other than the dead, the injured, the missing. Something to help them, if only for a few hours, escape what was still going on just a few miles away.
That the Series against Arizona was one of the most dramatic in baseball history, with the Yankees coming back to win multiple games highlighted by Derek Jeter’s home run that gave him the name Mr. November only heightened the focus on the City, it’s people and it’s most famous sports team. Even though the Diamondbacks would win the series in seven games, the Yankees did something for this City that it desperately needed: a reminder of who we were before 9/11 and who we would be again. We got knocked down, but we got up again, you’re never gonna keep us down.
With the entire country watching, New York showed that while it might be battered, bruised and grieving, nothing, not even the worst day EVER would keep New York City from being New York City.
Sporting events in New York are different than sporting events anywhere else. In other places when the stadium fills up it becomes the second or third biggest city in the state. Here it’s the reverse. Here, sporting events are where a city of 8 million becomes a small town. And in the wake of 9/11, being in that small town, whether it was Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium or the Meadowlands, surrounded by fellow New Yorkers all feeling the exact same emotions, all looking for anything that even remotely resembled life as we knew it, sports is what brought us together, what helped a City to begin to heal.
Ten years have passed, but that day of days, it will never be far away from our thoughts. We live with it every day, not just on its 10th anniversary. It’s why EVERY year on this day our teams wear FDNY and NYPD hats instead of their own and take a moment to remember a day we can’t and won’t ever forget. We all went through this together. Cops, Firefighters, Paramedics, EMT’s, rescue workers, construction workers, volunteers, baseball players, football players, basketball players, hockey players, men, women, children, white collar, blue collar, those of us who lived through September 11th, 2001 all have something in common. We are New Yorkers, we live in the concrete jungle where dreams are made of.
And after living through our City’s worst nightmare, sports helped us start to dream again. First of our city getting its “New York-ness” back and then once again of championship parades down the “Canyon of Heroes” of which New York has plenty, both on and especially off the field.
