If you'll indulge me.....
Like most of us who experienced it, I'll never forget Sept. 11, 2001. For me, it would be unimaginable to do so, since my day began in New York, the epicenter of the attacks, and ended with an unscheduled stop in Atlanta.
As was often the case throughout the spring, summer and fall, I was on the road, covering the Red Sox, then for the Providence Journal. The Red Sox were in New York that weekend for a wraparound series (Friday through Monday) at Yankee Stadium, playing out the string as part of a forgettable season. Weeks earlier, Jimy Williams had been summarily fired by Dan Duquette, replaced on an interim basis by former pitching coach Joe Kerrigan.
Duquette had gambled that replacing Williams with Kerrigan would provide the team with a kickstart over the final six weeks. Instead, the team tanked, chafing at Kerrigan's overreach -- among other things, he publicly commanded them to never swing at the first pitch -- and was in full free-fall that weekend, losing the first three games of the series to fall 13 games in back of the Yankees.
The final game of the series, scheduled for Monday, Sept. 10, was rained out. I had dinner and went to a movie that night in Manhattan, and the following morning, took a cab from my midtown hotel to LaGuardia for an early-morning flight to Tampa, where the Red Sox were to begin a series that night against the Rays.
It was an American Airlines direct flight, and joining me on that flight were four other reporters on the beat: Tony Massarotti and Jeff Horrigan from the Boston Herald, Gordon Edes from the Boston Globe and Bill Ballou from the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.
Our flight departed and I distinctly remember two things about the takeoff: flying over the island of Manhattan on the most picturesque of early fall mornings, and the requisite announcement from the plane's captain. As a regular flier, such remarks were boilerplate: We'll be cruising an altitude of blah blah....flying over such-and-such.....the weather in Tampa is however many degrees...
But I also remember him emphasizing that because this was an early morning flight and some people would be napping, there would be no further announcements from the flight deck until we approached our final destination.
Back then, it wasn't unusual for planes to be only half full, and I was fortunate to have an entire row to myself. Taking the pilot's advice, I stretched out and soon fell asleep.
Maybe an hour or so later, the sound of the captain stirred me awake. I remember immediately thinking: I thought this guy promised to leave us alone until we were close to arriving...
Once he had everyone's attention, he began a preamble which haunts me to this day: "Ladies and gentleman...we have a very serious situation facing our country this morning...''
My thought initially flashed to an assassination attempt or some other evil-doer's deed. I didn't, obviously, know the half of it.
He then proceeded to detail what was then known: that a plane had struck the World Trade Center, and there were reports of a second plane doing the same. He further noted that another plane was "unaccounted'' for in Pennsylvania. I don't remember whether there was mention of the plane hitting the Pentagon. Still somewhat groggy from my abbreviated nap, the news was, naturally, numbing.
I do remember him saying one of the silliest things imaginable: that the "good news'' was that none of the planes involved had been American Airlines jets. This proved to not only be false, but also, highly inappropriate. Was this really the opportunity to be fixated on brand loyalty? (I also long ago forgave that moment of indiscretion. If the passengers were suddenly scared witless to be in the air, what must it have been like to be tasked with flying the plane under such circumstances?)
The captain further mentioned that the FAA had ordered all aircraft out of the sky and revealed that we would be landing in Atlanta, the next closest airport equipped to receive us.
This was at a time when air phones populated planes, nestled in the seat-back immediately in front of you. I picked up mine, entered my credit card info and got a message that I was something like the 27th person "in line,'' as it were, with nearly everyone on the plane desperate to reach loved ones.
In time, I got to the head of the electronic queue and placed an outgoing call to my mother's workplace. She always knew when I was on the road and where I was, and I wanted to let her know I was OK. The switchboard operator answered and I requested my mother's office. The woman asked who was calling. I responded: "Her son.'' She gasped. "Which one?''
As it turns out, my brother, too, was traveling that morning and my mother had passed word that we both could be in the air. I was patched through to my mother, who answered, choked with emotion. I assured her that I was fine and there was nothing to worry about. She then asked me where I was, and without time to give it any thought, blurted the uncomfortable truth: "Still in the air.'' I assured her that we'd be fine, would be landing soon and I would call then.
Among the moments of that flight I'll never forget -- looking across the aisle at a fellow passenger, who hung up his airphone and said, in a disembodied voice, staring straight ahead and to no one in particular: "The Twin Towers both collapsed.''
When we landed in Atlanta, it was maybe 10:30 AM, and Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport, one of the busiest airports in the country, was essentially evacuated. Shops were shuttered, concourses that would been bustling with human traffic were instead desolate. With cell service non-existent, we used payphones to call more family and friends. Divorced at the time, I called my ex-mother-in-law to relay the news to my children, then 13 and 10, that I was fine and would be calling them later when they got home from school.
With that done, our first instinct was to find a rental car so that we could reach Tampa by game-time, insanely believing that games would be played that night. Then again, after decades of traveling across the country, you learned to improvise and adjust through bad weather, flight cancellations and unexpected detours. Call it accountability or just plain naivete, but we thought it was our job to get ourselves to Tropicana Field. We were soon disabused of that notion.
American Airlines soon made arrangements for us to stay in a nearby hotel. I checked into my room, made more calls and then went about writing a column about my morning for the Journal. I managed to locate a car, and the five of us later went to a nearby chain restaurant for dinner, still unable to process what we had transpired in the previous 12 hours, but desperately in need of a few beers to settle our still rattled nerves.
The following day, Massarotti managed to locate a van, since the car I had wouldn't be sufficient for a two-day trip for five men, their suitcases and work bags. It became evident that air travel would be banned for the foreseeable future, and if we were going to get anywhere, it would have to be done by driving. The entire series in Tampa Bay had been canceled, with the Red Sox next scheduled to play in Baltimore that weekend. By driving north, we would either be headed in the direction of the next series, or, at the very least, back home.
On the first night, we stayed for the night in Durham, N.C., but not before Massarotti was pulled over for speeding by a North Carolina state trooper. He was positively apoplectic. As the officer ran his driver's license from his vehicle, Massarotti turned to us and launched into a tirade: "Our country's under attack,'' he fumed, "and this #$%& is busy ticketing people for going 10 mph over the speed limit???'' It had been days since we had allowed ourselves to laugh, but this was unavoidable. The rest of us could barely contain our laughter over the absurdity of it all and Massarotti's reaction to it, and it was all we could do to regain our composure as the officer came back to the van to return the driver's license and a ticket for several hundred dollars.
The next day, we reached Baltimore, still unsure if play would resume Friday night. The NFL and MLB were in a strange pas de deux over the playing of games that weekend. If one canceled, it was assumed that the other would follow. Sure enough, the NFL first called off its slate of games, and MLB quickly followed suit.
But we still had stories we needed to write. We pulled into a downtown Marriott that we often stayed at and asked for the use of a conference room. There, seated around a table, we spoke via conference call with Kerrigan, who was on a train with the Red Sox, traveling back to Boston. We wrote stories, ordered "room'' service and got back in our van.
As we got closer to New York, we were unsure of what we would find. Approaching midnight, we drove past the Manhattan skyline that we had flown over only days earlier. It was difficult to gain any perspective: What were we looking at? Is that where the towers once were? Mostly, we saw the lights of the southern tip of Manhattan where rescue efforts were still underway. That, and smoke. Lots and lots of smoke still, even days later.
Reaching Massachusetts, we made drop-offs, with our traveling party reduced one-by-one until it was just me and Massarotti. We traveled to Logan Airport to drop off the rental van and get my car out of long-term parking, where I had left it a week earlier, before the world -- and we all - had been permanently changed.
Days later, the season resume. The schedule called for the Red Sox to host a 10-day homestand, which was a good way to ease back into a sense of normalcy. Eventually, however, the Sox returned to the road and I recalled the high anxiety I felt before getting on a plane for the first time since the attacks. The flight to Detroit proved -- beyond all the new security measures in place which have since become standard -- mercifully routine.
The regular season ended in Baltimore, with the series that was originally set to be played three days after the attacks. That meant that Red Sox were, by happenstance, thrust into history as the opponents for the final few games of Cal Ripken Jr's career. There was some controversy that weekend because some Baltimore fans had bought tickets for what they expected would be Ripken's finale -- only to have the rescheduled games tacked on to the original series finale. I remember feeling sorry for them - for a few minutes.
Everyone's perspective had changed.
The World Series that fall was memorable, too, especially since it involved the Yankees and included the three middle games hosted at Yankee Stadium. Backdrop aside, the three games in the Bronx were classics, While three of the first six games were blowouts, the three in New York were all full of drama -- on the field and off. The Yankees won all three at Yankee Stadium -- the first by a run and the next two in extra innings. In Game 4, which began on Halloween Night and carried past midnight, Derek Jeter won the game on a wallk-off homer in the bottom of the 10th, immediately earning the nickname Mr. November.
But it was the pre-game ceremony before Game 3 that stuck with everyone, as President George W. Bush, a windbreaker covering a bullet-proof vest, strode to the mound and fired a strike for the first pitch as snipers ringed the Stadium roof. Sadly, the latter element has become a ballpark fixture 20 years later.
The games that October (and first few days of November) provided a distraction for the nation, and I remember some ardent Red Sox fans I knew ardently rooting for the Yankees. Not to be too glib, but that, as much as anything, served to remind us how much had changed.
Two decades later, however, it's not the games or the final scores or the details of that World Series that remain. It's the experience I had -- no, survived-- with four colleagues that bonds us to this day. We were temporarily traumatized, but merely inconvenienced on that horrific day.
But we lived to tell our story. Too many others weren't nearly as fortunate.