When Games Really Mattered

By Chris Dabe Beaumont Enterprise September 10, 2006

A United States flag with two large tears along its red and white stripes had been found amid World Trade Center rubble and fluttered high above Yankee Stadium on a mid-autumn evening.

President George Bush wore a sweatshirt emblazoned with "FDNY," a tribute to the New York City Fire Department, as he strode to the pitcher's mound with a baseball in one hand and gave a thumbs-up sign with the other.

Bush threw a ceremonial pitch before the third game of the World Series and walked off the field as a crowd of more than 55,000 chanted "U-S-A, U-S-A."

The president's appearance in Yankee Stadium occurred less than two months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, killed 2,973 people in New York, Arlington, Va., and Pennsylvania.

Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of the attacks. As in other times of national distress, sports helped the nation cope in the weeks and months that followed Sept. 11.

"It certainly was that way immediately after 9/11," said Peter Roby, the director for Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society in Boston. "Sports played an important role in people feeling comfortable with their lives."

Highlights of home runs and touchdown dances on national sports cable stations gave way in the days after the attacks to tales about heroism - the real kind, involving police officers and firefighters, not millionaire athletes.

No Major League Baseball games were played for a week after the attack. All professional and most college football teams took the weekend off. About the only games played during those days were at high schools, on football fields and volleyball courts.

"I felt like it was a unifying thing, to bring everybody together on that Friday night," said West Orange-Stark football coach Dan Hooks, whose team played at Jasper on the Friday after the attacks.

Some people wondered if the professional and college games would still matter when they returned.

They did.

Want proof? Try listening to sports talk radio or visiting an internet message board. Or go to Austin or College Station on a Saturday afternoon in the fall. There are plenty of people at those places who say sports matter.

The U.S. may be divided on the war in Iraq and Bush's handling of terrorism, but it's united on another front, in America's stadiums and arenas.

"It's a place for people to lose themselves," Roby said.

Keeping thousands of spectators safe, however, is a matter that has received more consideration in the years since the attacks, said Michael McCann, a law professor at Mississippi College School of Law.

The National Football League is thought to have the most stringent security policy of all leagues and teams, McCann said. The league required pat-downs of all fans entering a stadium beginning last season.

"I don't think the pat-downs have revealed anyone carrying an illegal weapon," said McCann, a member of the Sports Lawyers Association. "Then again, maybe no one has tried anything because of the pat-downs."

A lawsuit won by high school civics teacher and Tampa Bay Buccaneers season ticket holder Gordon Johnson in January against the Tampa Sports Authority, which operates Raymond James Stadium, determined pat-downs were "suspicionless" and unconstitutional.

Even so, pat-downs will continue at most NFL stadiums, including today in Houston's Reliant Stadium, where the Texans will open their 2006 season against the Philadelphia Eagles.

The league believes that security measure is needed to ensure safety. Civil libertarians say the measure violates individual rights.

"I honestly don't think there's a right or wrong answer with this," McCann said. "Both sides have good arguments."

Security at sporting events varies with each league and venue, McCann said. Most Major League Baseball stadiums and the National Basketball Association arenas call for bags to be inspected and don't allow customers to bring in coolers.

Lynn Jamieson, a professor in the Department of Recreation and Park Administration at Indiana University, said the level of security at sporting venues generally varies within each league. She said the experience patrons have with security at a stadium or arena can be similar to an airport.

"As with anything else, you can have an OK experience with security at one airport and a horrendous experience at another," she said. "There is never not going to be an issue."

Lines that form outside stadiums as spectators go through security ironically "could become a target," McCann said. "You never know."

"There's always a fear that the worldwide visibility of some of the large group gatherings in stadiums and arenas could be a site for an attack," Jamieson said.

McCann said another dynamic of security at sporting events comes from the attentiveness of spectators. He contrasted airline passengers on the lookout for anything suspicious with sports fans who are mainly focused on the game.

"They're not thinking about security or what's around them," McCann said. "When you go to a game, you go to watch the game."

In the end, all sides agree that the most important issue is safety, much like it was that night Bush threw his pitch at Yankee Stadium.

"It's hard to know whether security at sporting events has prevented an attack," McCann said. "Or if we haven't had an attack at a sporting event because it's not a credible threat."