Everyone in America knows where they were, what they were doing, who they were with on Sept. 11th, 2001. For me — a 13-year-old in the eighth grade — the day had a different start than most of you.
I had been sick the night before with the Flu and stayed home from school. I awakened at my grandparents house around 10:30 a.m. and walked into the living room to find both grandparents watching footage of rubble with smoke billowing out of it. Those were what was left of World Trade Center towers one and two.
Around that time, news broke of United Flight 93 which had crashed in a field in Somerset County, just over 100 miles from where I was and 80 from Pittsburgh. We all later found out that a group of heroes on that plane might have saved many more.
A child doesn’t take the complexity of something like this the same way as an adult did on that day. Being the giant sports fan that I was at a young age, I turned on ESPN to try and avoid the horrors that were going on only to find ABC’s coverage of the attacks. The bottom line showed that all major sporting events had been postponed as they should have, but to 13-year-old me, that was another indication that the nation had stopped due to this senseless act.
I was befuddled, frightened and angered that something so horrifying could happen to so many innocent lives. All we did in school the following days was talk about it and watch coverage on TV. Everything else was put on hold because no one knew what to do. Was there going to be more attacks? Were we in danger?
As the days went on, we all tried to go back to our lives. For me, it wasn’t until Sept. 21, 2001 that things started returning to normal.
The Mets hosted the Braves at Shea Stadium in the first professional sporting event held in New York City since the attacks. The stadium was filled to capacity with fans holding American flags chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A.” I thought to myself, “How could they be doing this after what had happened only ten days earlier?” What transpired over the course of nine innings showed me why.
With the Mets trailing 2-1 late in the game, Mike Piazza stepped to the plate with a runner on. What happened next changed my view on sports.
What I learned from that game was that a sporting event can be a positive outlet from something so terrible. It allowed a city to take their minds off of a tragedy, even if it’s for only three hours, and just be fans. It allowed them to focus their energy on something positive and erupt when the ball flew over the fence.
“It was this little piece of New York saying to the world symbolically we’re going to be OK,” first basemen Todd Zeile told the Associated Press in a 2011 interview. “You can hit us but you can’t keep us down.”
It’s a funny thing how something like a sporting event can make such an impact on a person, a stadium and a city, but it can.
Guys like Piazza can be called heroes to an extent, but lets not forget who the real heroes are. The ones who ran into the burning towers to try and save as many lives as they could, the ones who took a stand against a group of terrorists on a plane, the ones who raced to the city to help in the rescue efforts, the ones who serve our country to keep it safe.
9/11/01 Never Forget
