Of all the horrors that befell our nation on the morning of Sept. 11, the one that keeps playing over and over in my mind is the video showing a Boeing 767 banking into a turn and then slamming full-force into Tower Two of the World Trade Center.
Though I didn't know it at the time, Garnett "Ace" Bailey and Mark Bavis, two scouts employed by the National Hockey League's Los Angeles Kings, met their end aboard United Airlines Flight 175 that morning. I knew Ace both as a player and a scout. I didn't know him well, but we spent a few rollicking nights on the road over the years, mostly when he was employed by the Edmonton Oilers during their glorious run to five Stanley Cup championships. Once you met Ace you knew him and you liked him and you never forgot him. He was that kind of a man.
FOX Sports Net cameraman Tom Pecorelli, a young man I had not yet met, also met his end the same way. Tom was onboard American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into America that day. Also killed in the crash with Ace and Mark was Amy King, a young flight attendant from a town very close to where I live. Some 157 people were on those two flights. They all had family, friends and loved ones. Some undoubtedly saw them off at the airport that morning. None of us will ever see them again.
I think a lot about that these days.
Sportswriters, especially sportswriters who cover pro teams, fly a lot. We do it so often that over the years most every one of us has accumulated one or two "scare" stories to tell. Still, seeing the demise of United Airlines Flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11, seeing the two massive jets slam through the towers and sending so many innocent people to their end is almost too much to bear.
Flying, even in the best of times, is usually looked upon as nothing more than a necessary evil in the sports world.
The plane is every bit a part of our profession as the pen, the notebook, the laptop computer (back when I started it was a typewriter and a telefax machine) and the arena. The plane takes us to the places we have to be, but it was seldom a welcome sight.
Many hockey players that I've known, including some of the greatest to ever play the game, have a marked fear of flying. Wayne Gretzky, perhaps the greatest player the game has ever known, never liked to fly. Gilbert Perreault, in many ways Gretzky's equal before The Great One began to dominate the NHL, detested it. Mike Robitaille, a journeyman defenseman for several teams including the Buffalo Sabres, New York Rangers and Vancouver Canucks, had an abnormal fear of even having to drive to the airport.
I once saw Rick Dudley -- now the general manger of the Tampa Bay Lightning but then the head coach of the Buffalo Sabres -- get off a flight in Buffalo and actually bend down and kiss the ground after a particularly difficult passage along the East Coast.
I suppose I would have thought that funny, in the dark sort of way that journalists so often do, had I not still felt the weight of a note on my person. At the height of a vicious storm that literally threw us about the sky, I had scribbled words that indicated that if anyone somehow found this scrap of paper to please tell my wife and children that my last thoughts were of them and that I loved them. I signed my name, added my phone number and tucked against my chest. I kept that note a secret for a very long time.
While I never feared flying, at least not like so many of the athletes I know, I came to despise the airplane. It was the vehicle that always took me away from the ones I hold most dear. Though the flights were most often routine, there were more than a few occasions when I was aboard a plane and thought that this might well be the one that might cause me not to come back.
That's a part of a way of life in professional sports. The airplane has made it possible for the National Hockey League to be not just national but international in scope. Athletes travel; they travel all the time, and so do the sportswriters who follow them. Tuesday night in Buffalo, Thursday night in St. Louis, Sunday night in Los Angeles. The teams travel, and we travel with them. There is always another city, another game, another flight to somewhere and then somewhere else again. The plane is always the vehicle for that.
Occasionally we would joke about it. The words "also killed in the crash" are a bit of dark humor that most every sports writer deals with. Sometimes we would kid each other about a possible crash list, about where we might end up on the list. The joke was that with all the famous names aboard, we might not even be mentioned at all.
I know how that will play in your mind when you read it. It sounds wrong, but it's something we do. A little joke about death is a defense mechanism for dealing with it. There were times along the way when we all felt we had to do that.
Over the years I traveled as a beat reporter for the Buffalo News, even my children came to hate the planes. When they were young, it was the plane that took me away. It was the plane that prevented their father from being there for a birthday, a school function or even one of their life moments that only a family can know. And even though it was the plane that brought me home and to the airport where they so often came to meet me, it came to be the symbol of what we knew to be the one thing that could someday forever come between us.
I thought a lot about that when I saw United Flight 175 disappear into that tower Tuesday. I suspect that over the years that Ace, 53, must have thought about that, too. I suspect that perhaps he and Mike had even talked about it.
I suspect they talked about how Mike, 31 and just getting started in the business, would come to dislike the trips away from his family and friends, about how he would come to see flying as nothing more than a necessary evil. Perhaps Ace might have told him that he had long ago come to grips with the fact that even though statistics claim that you are safer flying than crossing the street, that you can't help but think that the odds shift dramatically each time you step on board an airplane. Given the number of times we do that, perhaps he told him that it was better not to think about it, or that maybe he just should deal with it for a moment and then move on.
It's something I sometimes said to the younger writers who traveled with me.
I still fly (though not as much as used to). I even, occasionally think about those nights with Rick or Mike or Gilbert when things got so scary and we would employ some dark humor to steel ourselves from the fear that this trip might well be out last.
"Also killed in the crash," we would joke and then flash a nervous grin.
I thought about that a lot when I saw the planes hit the towers Tuesday. I think that's why I crie
http://www.foxsports.com/content/view?contentId=166346
God bless the children
