I'll never forget that fateful day nearly six years ago when the world seemed to stop. Who can? Against the looming horror of the 9/11 attacks, nothing else seemed to matter. Not the rest of the day's news, nor the usually distracting coverage of our favorite celebrities, not even sports. Our world simply ground to a halt.
Once past the initial shock of the events of Sept. 11, the very first debate I can recall hearing centered on whether the NFL would play on the Sunday immediately following the attacks. In the course of that debate, an interesting question was raised: do sports even matter anymore?
I thought then, and I still do, that sports matter a great deal to a nation, particularly when it's dealing with far more serious matters. That's when sports matter most.
As the rescue effort in lower Manhattan began to look more like a recovery operation, the talk worked its way around to Major League Baseball; news stories described ballplayers, grounded when the airlines shut down, driving insane numbers of miles to be with their families. Often we look at our athletes as heroes, but in reality; they are more like us than we acknowledge. Like the rest of us in the immediate wake of Sept. 11, our heroes were concerned for their families, and afraid of getting onto planes because of the unknown.
The first important sports story I read following 9/11 was by Bill Simmons. In it, he said that in the aftermath of what had happened, he nearly stopped writing. But then the emails began to pour in from his fans, begging him to continue, in part because it allowed them to escape the horror of the terrorist attacks and served as a reminder that there were better things going on in the world, that violence was the exception, not the rule.
Soon enough, the games began anew. Amid the pomp and circumstance was a glimmer of hope: if there is sport, then everything must be returning to normal.
Sport is ultimately a haven. Long before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, throughout two world wars, through every kind of conflict around the globe, sport has given people a sense of constancy
Sports have also provided opportunities for people who may not have had any other way out of their difficult circumstances: the thousands of student-athletes who were able to attend college because of an athletic scholarship; the athletes who have joined the professional ranks of U.S. sport from the Caribbean, South America, Africa and Asia; athletes who attained a level of economic success they never could have dreamed of in their homelands.
Similarly, the world of sports produces stories that have the power to inspire people to reach for seemingly unattainable goals, to strive for success and even for survival. The story of cyclist Lance Armstrong, for example, has surely inspired thousands of cancer patients.
The inspirational power of sport is something Hollywood has long understood. From a rag-tag bunch of kids on the diamond (The Bad News Bears) to a former hockey player chasing ice-skating gold (The Cutting Edge), from the courts of the inner city (He Got Game) to a minor-league rink in Canada (Youngblood), the tales of those who reach for sports glory are endlessly captivating and almost always deeply moving. Actor Kevin Costner might be a much less well-known actor if he hadn't tapped so deeply into the emotional reservoir of sports, beginning with Field of Dreams and continuing with baseball epics Bull Durham and For Love of the Game, with a tangent into pro golf with Tin Cup.
Sport has been a dependable part of what holds society together through tough moments, both because it is, as Costner knows so well, capable of delivering high drama, but also because it is simple, even mundane, and therefore comforting—a clear signal that things can't be too bad as long as grown men and women continue to go out and play.
