Games Can Wait
by Andy Stilp

Isn't sports our great healer?

An interesting sidebar to our national tragedy has been the on-hold status of our sports industry. The decision "to play or not to play" has historical precedence — Commissioner Pete Rozelle's decision to play National Football League games the Sunday after J.F.K.'s assassination. This after a Saturday on which no college football was played, and what Rozelle later admitted was the biggest mistake he ever made.

In 2001, other sports flopped around and came to widely-varying conclusions as the NFL debated. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig postponed games a day, then three days. College football left the decision to individual conferences, which then decided and concurrently deferred to the individual schools, resulting in a checkerboard of postponements and cancellations, but still with some brazen kickoffs on the map. The awkward dance to find the needed level of appropriateness was all played out on ESPN, with sportscasters Bob Lea and Trey Wingo front and center. Viewers got to see professional sports managers and executives teeter embarassingly between trains of thought.

The NFL debate was hot — Chris Berman said a game could be a 65,000-person hug. Mike Lupica asserted that not a single person could be brought back because of the cancellation of the games. Gene Upshaw called it ridiculous to play in Washington while the Pentagon was still on fire, in New York while firefighters still sifted through rubble.

But goddamn, some said, if we could all set aside our sense of loss for a big Brett Favre touchdown pass or watch Jerome Bettis charge through a seam, it might just help the nation move forward. We can't let the terrorists win by derailing most everything normal.

The NFL came through with its decision to not play games on Sunday, September 16, on Thursday. After the word spread, every other major sport followed suit; baseball pushed postponements through Sunday and all college games were postponed or cancelled. The domino effect illustrated that yes, professional football is our nation's sport, and no, it was not appropriate to play while people remained trapped under 23,000 tons of broken building.

The answer, as it turns out, is no, sports is not our catchall cure. We can only heal ourselves, and without a football-dominated weekend or a pennant race for some time, we have the time and the opportunity to do just that.

Games can wait.

E-mail Andy Stilp at info at andystilp dot com.