Perspective Takes the Day Off

It is Sept. 11 in America again, the first since the worst Sept. 11 in America, and today, there are games to be played.

In Anaheim, where angry fans pelted the field with debris 13 days ago, the Angels continue a four-game series against Oakland that has been described in the media as crucial and vital and critical.

In San Francisco, the Dodgers will face the Giants, often locally referred to as “the enemy,” and the big fan and media concerns are whether the Dodgers can survive this all-important race for the National League wild card with an emergency pitching rotation that must find a way to prevent Barry Bonds from exploding another 491-foot bomb over the Pacific Bell Park fence.

This is three days after the Dallas Cowboys lost to the expansion Houston Texans in what Sports Illustrated branded the “War for Texas” while fans in Cleveland cursed the name of Brown linebacker Dwayne Rudd for giving his helmet a celebratory toss before the game’s final play had ended, drawing an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty that ultimately cost the home team a victory.

Return to normal? That was President Bush’s urgent plea to the nation in the first days after the terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and sports in America, for better or worse, have assertively snapped back into line.

Initially, sports did not know what to do with themselves. Bob Ley, who anchored ESPN’s “SportsCenter” last Sept. 11, remembers how network staffers and officials huddled in the hours after the attacks and engaged in “a long and emotional debate about what we should do that day, if anything.”

While they debated, ESPN shut down its regular programming and turned itself over to ABC’s news signal. It was eventually determined that “SportsCenter” would make an appearance later in the day, but only after dramatically altering its appearance.

Out went the here-we-come theme music. Out too went smirking anchors with their wink-wink ironic asides. Ley, a veteran journalist who hosts the network’s investigative “Outside The Lines” program, moved into the anchor’s chair for one hour of no-frills news reportage and somber reflection.

“In one regard we were lucky in that we had a job to do, we had something we could do that we could focus on,” Ley says. “We didn’t have to sit there and watch the media coverage and just absorb it.

“We were obsessed, absolutely obsessed with maintaining the idea that [sports were] just a very small sliver of this. I think what we wanted to do is just get it down on oxide--that this is what sports were thinking and doing during this time, but the rest of it really doesn’t matter.”

It was a broadcast for the time capsule, capturing the national mood on that horrific day, a mood that long ago dissipated into the mist.

New perspective supposedly gained last September has, for the most part, vanished from the nation’s ballparks and press boxes.

“We were supposed to get back to normal, and to a large extent, we have,” Ley says. “But if you to look at ‘SportsCenter’ in late August of this year prior to the media shadow of the anniversary, or pick up the Los Angeles Times or USA Today or the New York Times or the [Washington] Post or the [Boston] Globe, I mean, you could read it in a vacuum and not realize something had happened.”

In New York, where the wounded Manhattan skyline serves as a perpetual reminder of the attacks, the summer began with Met star catcher Mike Piazza holding impromptu media briefings to deny tabloid insinuation he was gay and ended with baseball’s owners and players meeting on Park Avenue, deep into the 11th hour, to stave off a season-threatening strike.

In between, Met Manager Bobby Valentine groused about how his team’s losing streak was “killing” him and his wife and his family, even his pet dog.

The U.S. Open began every night session with a solemn tribute to the heroes or victims of Sept. 11 and then, as soon as the first new can of balls was opened, the tournament morphed into a farcical circus where the major issues were Serena Williams’ form-fitting catsuit, Tommy Haas’ sleeveless shirt and a fake tennis player invented by Sports Illustrated.

“The perspective that sports provide is that it is meaningfully meaningless,” says radio and television commentator Keith Olbermann. “One of the reasons it had gotten so out of whack is that over the last 20 years, we really haven’t had much bad in our lives to contrast it to--and appreciate its goodness. The players haven’t had that because of the way salaries have gone. And the fans haven’t had that.

“We’re now seeing what the playing of the games meant to our fathers and grandfathers during the second World War. Or what it meant that they played baseball during the Civil War. It is a pastime, in the original sense of the word. It is something to divert the woes and the cares of the day.

“At its most positive aspect, the perspective that sports provide is very basic and the appeal of sports is very basic. Then, on the other hand, it seems as if everybody who has tried to do something to provide perspective or be respectful or somehow pay tribute or bring sports into a new light has failed miserably.”

Exhibits A and B: Two men named Bowden.

In late July, Cincinnati Red General Manager Jim Bowden, flippantly trying to illustrate what a potential players strike would mean to Major League Baseball, told reporters: “If players want to strike, they ought to just pick Sept. 11, because that’s what it’s going to do to the game.... If they do walk out, make sure it’s Sept. 11. Be symbolic. Let Donald Fehr drive the plane right into the building, if that’s what they want to do.”

In editorials for ABC Radio and Salon.com, Olbermann lobbied for Bowden’s immediate resignation, describing his words as “easily as insensitive, as inhuman, a remark as has ever been made in baseball history.... To compare a baseball strike to the terrorist attacks, and union leader Donald Fehr to those who crashed the planes, is to show you do not understand the pain this country went through last September, or even just baseball’s role in helping assuage that pain.”

Bowden responded by issuing a written apology describing his comments as “horrible” and “extremely insensitive” and was permitted to stay on, keeping to the task of running a sub-.500 team.

Lesson learned? Not quite. Barely a week later, Florida State football Coach Bobby Bowden (no relation) announced that his team was adopting the phrase “Let’s roll” as its 2002 season motto, alluding to the words uttered by Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer before he and several others attempted to overtake control of the plane from the hijackers. The plane eventually crashed in a remote field in western Pennsylvania, killing all 44 aboard.

Bowden claimed he was trying to pay tribute to the bravery of those passengers, even if he couldn’t exactly remember Beamer’s name, referring to him as “that guy on that plane.”

Olbermann: “Here we have a two-word phrase from a passenger on one of the flights that is almost--’Let’s roll’ is our Gettysburg Address--and it’s suddenly slapped on the side of Florida State football. Apart from all the initial problems with that, it just lowers the meaningfulness of that.”

A year after Sept. 11, sports in America remain what they were on Sept. 10, 2001: diversions that alternately inspire and infuriate, still populated by the thoughtful and the insensitive, still driven by human nature and all that is good and bad, deep and shallow, about it.

“Things didn’t change for America as a whole,” Dodger outfielder Marquis Grissom says, “and Sept. 11 should have been the biggest wakeup call of all ...

“Baseball is just baseball. You’re going to have a bad week, a bad year, pitchers aren’t always going to pitch the way they’re capable of, hitters aren’t always going to hit the way they’re capable of. But you have to keep things in perspective.”

Sports are games, not war, and a football defeat is a setback, not a tragedy. This the Dallas Cowboys learned Monday morning, the day after their embarrassing 19-10 loss to the Texans. Yes, they discovered, every one of them, in football, there is always a tomorrow.

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Staff Writer Mike DiGiovanna contributed to this story.