Everyone old enough to remember Sept. 11, 2001, has a story.
Mine isn’t special. It’s just mine.
Twenty-five years is a long time. Long enough for some of the details of that Tuesday morning and the days that followed to become fuzzy. Long enough for dates and conversations and the exact sequence of events to fade.
But there are some things I can still see as clearly as if they happened yesterday.
Especially a television that shouldn’t have been on.
At the time, I was living at my grandparents’ two-story house. They were out of town, and I lived downstairs.
That Tuesday morning, I walked upstairs to the ground floor as I was preparing to leave for work and noticed the television was on in the den. That immediately struck me as strange.
I NEVER watched that television. I rarely even used that room.
So my first thought was simple: Why is this TV on?
I walked toward it, a little freaked out, intending to turn it off.
And then I saw the second airplane fly into the World Trade Center.
Live.
Now, I was totally freaked out.
I don’t remember how long I stood there or everything that went through my mind. I just remember knowing something was terribly, terribly wrong.
The World Trade Center was roughly 1,350 miles from me. The Pentagon was roughly 1,100 miles away. Shanksville, Pennsylvania, was more than 1,100 miles away.
Yet on that Tuesday morning, all three somehow felt like they were in my backyard.
I was in my third year working in the Louisiana Tech Athletics Communications office, housed inside the Thomas Assembly Center.
By the time I arrived at work, televisions throughout the TAC were tuned to the news. They stayed that way all day.
So did we.
People walked from office to office in a fog, talking about what we were seeing and hearing. Mostly, we were just trying to comprehend it.
The planes. The towers. The Pentagon. The smoke. The destruction. The loss of life.
It didn’t seem real.
Louisiana Tech was scheduled to play football at Kansas State that Saturday. Tuesday was also our normal weekly press conference with Bulldogs coach Jack Bicknell. Media members would come from Ruston, Shreveport and Monroe to talk football.
We still held it that day. But nobody really talked football.
The questions were about what had happened that morning, whether the game would be played, possible makeup dates and Bicknell’s thoughts on what was unfolding across the country.
It was surreal.
I was a huge sports guy. I worked in sports. Games weren’t just entertainment for me. They were part of the rhythm of my life.
But on that Tuesday, sports didn’t matter.
Eventually, I went home and turned on the television. For the next several days, it seemed impossible to turn it off.
I watched the reports. I watched the footage of the planes striking the towers over and over again. I watched the reports from Ground Zero. I listened as President George W. Bush addressed the nation.
Then I watched some more.
Twenty-five years later, I can’t remember every detail of those days. But I remember how I felt.
Stunned. Angry. Scared.
The terrorists hadn’t simply attacked buildings hundreds of miles away. They had made us feel unsafe in our own country. Even in our own homes. And for a brief period, they brought much of our normal way of life to a halt.
That included sports.
From high school fields to college stadiums to professional ballparks, games were postponed or canceled. For several days, there was no Major League Baseball. No college football. No NFL.
They had stopped the daily rhythm of America.
But they didn’t stop us for long.
Major League Baseball returned Sept. 18, one week after the attacks. College football followed Sept. 20. The NFL returned Sept. 23.
Looking back 25 years later, I don’t believe the return of sports healed America. Nothing could do that. But I do believe it was a sign that we were starting to heal.
VERY slowly.
Thousands of families were grieving. First responders were still searching through the rubble. Americans were still afraid of what might come next.
But the lights came back on at ballparks and stadiums. People walked through the gates and sat beside strangers, who almost instantly became friends. They stood together for the national anthem. And they cheered again.
For a few hours, life felt just a little more normal.
There is something else I remember about the days and weeks following Sept. 11.
This country came together. It was us against them. Not Republican against Democrat. Not this race against that race. Not one part of the country against another.
It was Americans against the terrorists who had attacked our country. For a time, the things that divided us seemed insignificant compared with the thing that united us.
We were Americans. And the American flag was everywhere. On houses. On businesses. On cars. And certainly at sporting events.
The flag had always been a symbol of our country. But after Sept. 11, it seemed different. It was a symbol of freedom. A symbol of strength. A symbol of unity. A symbol that said we had been wounded, but we weren’t defeated.
Twenty-five years have passed. An entire generation of Americans has been born and grown into adulthood without any personal memory of Sept. 11, 2001.
For them, 9/11 is history.
For those of us who lived through it, it’s something else. Everyone has their own story. Mine isn’t special. It’s just mine.
Twenty-five years later, I pray we never experience another day like Sept. 11, 2001. But I wouldn’t mind experiencing a little more of the America I remember in the days that followed it.
