REMEMBERING 9/11/01
The following is the column that I wrote on Sept 15, 2001. I think it holds up after 10 years.
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Any time scheduled-sports events run into a national disaster or a national crisis, columnists and commentators come out of the woodwork to tell us how meaningless sports have become. I have news for you. Sports always are meaningless. They are no more or less meaningful now because of what happened Tuesday. It’s too bad that it takes something like the incidents Tuesday to put them into the proper perspective. There will be no sports to watch on television this weekend.
- Maybe, today would be a good day for people who can recite the roster of the 1975 Steelers by heart, but can’t name their two United States Senators or their congressman, to get their priorities in order.
- Maybe, today would be a good day for people who always read the sports page, ignore the front page and don’t know how or where to find the editorial page to change their reading habits.
- Maybe, today would be a good day for the people who vote for Brian Giles for the National League All-Star team a few hundred times a summer to think about registering to vote in elections that actually mean something.
- Maybe, today would be a good day for college football fans who have no problem with their alma mater admitting “students” only on the basis of their time in the 40-yard dash to start asking if it wouldn’t be better to use the money to educate future political scientists, engineers or doctors, instead of future NFL players.
- Maybe, today would be a good day to ask how it is that our tax dollars can be used to build stadiums that should be paid for only by the millionaires who profit from them, and why it is that those tax dollars aren’t spent on legitimate government functions like, say, airport security.
- Maybe, today would be a good day for all of us to listen to The Star Spangled Banner, and realize that it is a song that memorializes and celebrates America’s ability and willingness to withstand attack, and wasn’t written to provide our favorite entertainers with an excuse to butcher the song as part of the pregame entertainment.
- Maybe, today would be a good day for all the imbeciles who insist on wearing their hats during the National Anthem to make a mental note to remove them the next time they hear the song.
- Maybe, today would be a good day for Michael Silver to rethink his contribution to a recent issue of Sports Illustrated, in which he called The Star Spangled Banner an old, tired tune, and suggested that the time had come to stop playing it or any other patriotic song before sporting events. (He also suggested that two minutes of silence would be a better tribute.)
- Maybe, today it would be a good idea for the networks to bring out Whitney Houston’s rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at Super Bowl XVI and replay it a few times.
- Maybe today would be a good day to realize that being part of the winning team at the Ryder Cup does not qualify as doing service for your country.
- Maybe, today would be a good time for all of us to talk to someone who lived through World War II, and find out what it was like to face, for several years, the very real possibility that the freedoms we all take for granted, were so close to being taken away.
- Maybe, today we could ask those same people about guys like Ted Williams and Bob Feller who interrupted Hall of Fame baseball careers to enlist in the service.
- Maybe, today we could ask ourselves how many of us or how many of our young, millionaire athletes would be willing to make that kind of sacrifice.
- Maybe, it’s good that Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NCAA, the PGA, LPGA and NASCAR all finally decided that it would be better if Americans didn’t have the diversions that they normally all provide. - Maybe, today is a good day for all of us to be force-fed a good dose of reality.
- Maybe, today is a good day for all of us to shut up and watch the news.
