We were midway across Long Island Sound two days ago when the ferry gunned its engines and abruptly altered course, sending hundreds of jittery passengers out onto the decks to see what the problem was. The Coast Guard marshal assigned to the voyage, a sidearm strapped to his waist, quickly assured everyone the boat hadn't been hijacked, but had taken the precautionary manoeuvre to steer clear of a disabled Greek freighter which was making its way up the sound toward New York under a Coast Guard escort.
A week after two airplanes demolished the World Trade Center, black puffs of smoke could still be seen in the drifting clouds, and, to the west, a smog-like thermal inversion hung over Manhattan. As we made our way to Orient Point, I got my first glimpse of one of those spectacular, blood-red sunsets New Yorkers had been describing for days.
The New York Jets were not at their Hempstead training camp when I arrived on Long Island. On Tuesday, which would normally have been the players' day off, they had gathered en masse at the Salvation Army headquarters on 14th Street in Manhattan and were helping to load trucks with boxes of supplies, ranging from food and water to bibles. Along with coach Herman Edwards and millionaire owner Woody Johnson, the players were wearing red T-shirts that read "Emergency Disaster Services" as they joined in with the other volunteers.
A day earlier, members of the New York Giants had visited the World Trade Center site, and Tuesday, in Washington, the Redskins paid their own visit to the Pentagon. Then, yesterday, it was back to work, as 31 NFL coaches began to draw up their own battle plans for Sunday's NFL games, the first to be played since the September 11th outrage.
Major League baseball, which extended its season by pushing last week's cancelled games into October, resumed play this week. The nation's major colleges, some of whom play to even bigger crowds than those attending professional sporting events, will also resume their slates this weekend.
(For their games in Pittsburgh this week, the New York Mets asked and received permission to wear baseball hats of New York City firefighters and policemen. All Major League uniforms have been augmented with miniature American flags.)
Several of the Jets, who play the Patriots in New England Sunday afternoon, have asked that the team travel to Foxboro by chartered coach rather than airplane. (Edwards, while not unsympathetic to the position, doesn't sound as if he's going to go along with it, but at least one NFL team, the Carolina Panthers, will stay on the ground, travelling by bus to Atlanta.) Reflecting on last week's loss of thousands of lives in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, it has occurred to many that the death toll could have been increased tenfold had the terrorists decided to take out a stadium jammed with 60,000 spectators.
On Monday, a Tampa area newspaper played to this sentiment with a front-page, full-colour photo of an empty Raymond James Stadium, where the Buccaneers would have been playing the Philadelphia Eagles the previous afternoon.
Ten years earlier, just across the street, Tampa Stadium had staged Super Bowl XXV literally days after the commencement of our own little jihad called Operation Desert Storm. Security precautions seemed extreme at the time (I remember being "wanded" and having my briefcase searched on my way into a practice session), but it appears we're going to have to get used to it this time around.
I don't pretend to be able to fathom the minds of terrorists, particularly those who could cook up something as insidious as the September 11th game plan, but it strikes me that in many cases players may merely be flattering themselves, and that certain fears currently prevalent in the sporting world may be misplaced.
Clearly, had the hijackers who pulled off last week's assault been bent on inflicting the maximum death toll, they wouldn't have struck on Tuesday but Sunday, and they would have attacked sporting venues instead of what they did. It seems evident that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were chosen largely for their symbolic value and that the attendant loss of life came in what military types like to describe as "collateral damage".
President Bush has promised to wage "war" against the enemy (although it seems clear he has only a vague idea of who that might be), and the nation has been whipped up to a feverish battle pitch unseen in this country since the second World War. Every other American house flies the Stars and Stripes, every other roadside business has a patriotic message lettered on its billboard.
On the first day of deer hunting season each year, zealous American marksmen kill an amazing number of family dogs, so it shouldn't be surprising that in Arizona this week, a vigilante shot and killed a turbaned Sikh from India on the assumption that he was an Arab. Down the street from where I live, some latter-day patriot set ablaze a petrol tank at a station whose owner proved to be a Lebanese Christian.
In this climate, Don King has rescheduled the Felix Trinidad-Bernard Hopkins middleweight championship fight originally scheduled for September 15th for Madison Square Garden a week from Saturday. Although it seems clear they will still be pulling bodies from the rubble of the World Trade Centre then, the September 29th date became available when a wrestling championship was cancelled.
Security has already been beefed up for the sold-out event. Upwards of 19,000 spectators will be obliged to pass through metal detectors, and weapons will be confiscated. The Garden confirmed they had planned to take elaborate precautions even before the bombings, but now the measures will be in place to protect the fighters' supporters from terrorists, real or imagined, rather than from one another. Such has become the landscape of the American sport, now and for the foreseeable future.
