Column: 20 years after 9/11, sports reveals its limitations

On that sunny morning two decades ago, in the hours and minutes and seconds before everything changed, sports was playing its usual role in the fabric of life.

There was fierce debate over what had been ingested or injected or rubbed into the body of Barry Bonds, whose most recent game had produced three more homers to push him to 63 for the season.

The opening weekend of the NFL season was capped by Denver’s 31-20 victory over the New York Giants on Monday Night Football, in the debut of the Broncos’ sparkling new stadium.

There was still a buzz over Venus Williams beating little sister Serena in prime time for the U.S. Open tennis singles title.

The mighty Miami Hurricanes were the No. 1 college football team in all the land, coming off a 61-0 thrashing of Rutgers.

Martin Truex Jr. remembers being at Dover International Speedway, an up-and-coming racer going through a routine testing session in preparation for his debut in NASCAR’s second-tier stock car series.

Then, word came of an unfathomable tragedy. The ambulance that was standing by at Dover in case anything went wrong during Truex’s practice laps had to get to a far more important task in New York City, about 170 miles away.

The test was over. In some ways, so was life as Truex and the rest of us knew it.

“We’re all wondering what the heck’s going on,” said Truex, who went on to stardom in the NASCAR Cup series and remains one of its top drivers. “This was a long time ago. There wasn’t like social media and all this stuff on your phone. You didn’t know. You had to turn on the news and see what was happening.”

When Truex and his crew located a TV set, they couldn’t believe their eyes.

“It was like we were in some crazy nightmare,” he says now.

In some ways,...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/Column-20-years-after-9-11-sports-reveals-its-16449767.php