The Sport Scholar

**See original article on Technorati**
September 11th, 2001 as we all know is a day that will never be forgotten, a day that will live in infamy. Many people draw comparisons of 9/11 to Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy Assassination as days where people remember exactly what they were doing when they first heard the news. I can’t tell you by experience how similar 9/11 was to those events because I wasn’t alive for the latter two but I can tell you this, I distinctly remember 3 things:

1. I was at school and I was walking out of the building to grab lunch when I heard about the planes hitting the twin towers. I didn’t yet grasp the severity of what had just happened. Then I walked a few blocks with my sister to get a view of the planes still stuck in the towers. I’ll take that image to the grave with me.

2. When I got home my mother was crying. My family was lucky enough to have not lost anyone close in this terrible tragedy but my mom did always have a special place in her heart for the Twin Towers because she took her U.S. Citizenship test there.

3. Once baseball and football returned from their respective 5 day and 1 week breaks, it was the first time I thought about something other than the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, Flight 93, Al Qaida, terrorism, or Osama bin Laden.

The first sporting event after 9/11 was a baseball game between the New York Mets and the Atlanta Braves which had serious playoff implications. The two are bitter division rivals but on that day they were united as Americans. As fate would have it, the Mets were down 2-1 in the 8th when Mike Piazza stepped to the plate with a runner on 1st. After the unbelievable tragedy New Yorkers were going through, we looked for something to grab on to for some hope, something to grab on to to help heal the wounds, something to help us begin moving forward, and whether you were Mets fan or not, on that day we all came together as New Yorkers and found that something in Mike Piazza’s game-winning home run.

Then came the weekend the NFL returned. Everyone was shown images of players carrying Old Glory on to the field, players wearing FDNY and NYPD hats, jets flying over head, and servicemen performing the National Anthem before crowds. Football back on Sundays brought that much-needed sense of normalcy to Americans everywhere.

Fast forward to today- NFL owners and players are in a bitter dispute over splitting billions of dollars amongst each other. And on the horizon- the somber 10th Anniversary of 9/11. If the 10th anniversary wasn’t heavy enough for Americans to carry this September 11th, throw in the death of 9/11 planner Osama bin Laden and you have day that Americans see as a landmark event. And in this landmark event, Americans expect to see the usual tradition of baseball and football players honoring America and the armed services. Major League Baseball will hold up their end but could the NFL be so smug and ignorant and actually deprive Americans of this because they can’t figure out how to split billions of dollars? Would the NFL be so smug and ignorant and actually spurn the American people on day of such high magnitude?