One year ago, everyone’s sentiment was the same - sports don’t really matter.
It was easy to say as fires smoldered and body counts rose after the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history.
But a year later football fans still tailgate, teams still practice twice a day, steroid scandals and strikes dominate headlines and the attention placed on sports seems unchanged.
And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
“College sports is a main fiber of our country,” MSU athletics director Ron Mason said. “People are involved with it at every level. It’s a thread, to me, of our society, and that thread can bring people together.”
At MSU, even athletes who had personal connections to the attacks said there’s nothing wrong with caring about sports in a time of war. They said athletics weren’t just important, but imperative to their own recovery processes.
MSU senior swimmer Kate Duncombe was on her way to the weight room the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when a trainer told her two planes had hit the World Trade Center towers.
At first she didn’t believe him. When the news finally sunk in, she realized her brother Geoff, an investment banker on Wall Street, could be near the toppling buildings. And her sister, Jill, an elementary teacher, had moved to Washington a few days before.
Her story ends happily - Kate Duncombe called home and learned both her siblings also had called their mom to say they were OK. Jill Duncombe’s school was miles from the Pentagon, and Geoff was just stepping into a cab to head to work when he turned his head and saw one tower crumble.
And when Kate Duncombe went to practice that afternoon, the team sat and talked about what had happened. Getting in the pool was optional.
“If you didn’t feel like practicing, you didn’t have to,” Duncombe said. “But after a while we said, ‘We have to keep going with this.’ You can’t stop your life because of terrorism.”
Now she’s back in her routine of swimming up to 10,000 meters a day and practicing at 6 a.m. That normalcy is important and even gives her time to reflect, she said.
“In my sport, you think a lot with your head buried under water,” she said. “Right afterward, I thought about it a lot, and I sometimes still do. And my drive for competition has a different perspective now.
“When this happened everyone said we said should stop things like sports, but that’s what the terrorists want. They want us to close Wall Street to stop the financial world. By America bouncing back and showing we’re not afraid, we’re throwing it in their faces.”
Head football coach Bobby Williams agreed that sports can pull people together after a tragedy. He said he didn’t realize the impact the attacks had on his team until they played at Notre Dame on Sept. 22.
“All 80,000 fans sang the National Anthem and put up flags, and when I looked down, several guys had tears in their eyes,” Williams said. “At that moment, every guy had time to reflect on our country.”
When the moment was over, the Spartans defeated the Irish for the fifth straight year in a 17-10 win. Now his team is 2-0, ranked No. 15, and Williams said it’s OK for his players to care about success on the field.
“I don’t think things will ever be back to normal,” he said. “But I think sports can give people a chance to get away from it and come together, a chance to focus on competition.”
But for some MSU athletes, such as junior tailback Tyrell Dortch or freshman field hockey midfielder Maggie Giddens, the memory of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is more personal and harder to ignore.
Dortch had a second cousin in the World Trade Center who made it out alive. He said he’s just grateful the attack wasn’t any closer to his hometown, Hoboken, N.J., a few miles from the city, and that his family is still intact.
Giddens knew Deeg Sezna as the older brother of a friend. She played little league with Willy and the two belonged to the same country club in Montchanin, Del. Sezna used to drive them to practice.
Giddens guesses Sezna’s office was on the 110th floor of the south tower. He was 24.
Sezna’s funeral hit smack in the middle of field hockey season, and Giddens said that was a blessing.
“For me, field hockey was an outlet,” she said. “When I was on the field, I didn’t have time to think about anything going on. It didn’t affect my game in a negative way and it actually helped me to relax off the field.”
That’s what Mason said he loves about athletics - their ability to bring people together.
“I don’t think anyone is ever going to forget Sept. 11,” he said. “But hey, we’ve also come through World War I, World War II, Vietnam, the Korean War and even the war in Iraq. And that to me is the beauty of the American people, the strength they have together in recovering from these very difficult things.
“We will never forgetting them, but we’re not letting anyone take away what we stand for, and that’s freedom.”
