Bill Meltzer Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • RSS
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Twenty years ago today, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a deliberately crashed airplane in Somerset Airplane in Somerset County, PA, that was intended to fly into the Capitol, shocked and horrified the world. It also had the effect, sadly only briefly, of galvanizing and uniting the American people to where political and other differences didn't matter. We were all one nation, united in our grief, comforting one another.
In the attacks, 2,977 people were killed and more than 6,000 others were injured. I refuse to count among the casualties the 19 hijackers/murderers whose fanaticism caused their own deaths. Among those killed were LA Kings scouts Garnett "Ace" Bailey and Mark Bavis, who were heading back to Los Angeles from Boston on hijacked United Airlines Flight 175; one of the two planes that crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
At the time, I was not yet a full-time hockey writer. That would still be another nine years away. I was a freelance hockey writer, still writing with game-by-game arena credentials as the payment or making just enough to cover parking. I'd do a little high school football reporting in Delaware County to pick up a few extra walkaround dollars. My main line of work was as an associate editor at Outpatient Surgery Magazine.
September 11, 2001, was my 31st birthday. It was gorgeous, sunny Tuesday morning; not a cloud in the sky. I lived in an apartment in West Chester, PA. That morning, at around 8:15 a.m., I spoke on the phone to my mom and grandmom. They wished me a happy birthday and we confirmed that we'd meet up with my sister, then living in Wilmington, for dinner out her way that night to celebrate my birthday.
I am going to digress here, but will bring it back to 9-11 and the aftermath shortly.
I was unhappy being a medical writer, much of the time at least. I also didn't find my next job of being the editor-in-chief of a publication for employee benefits managers to be something I particularly enjoyed.
As a hockey writer and editor, people often tell me that I have an excellent work ethic. I do it seven days a week, 365 days a year, starting before the sun rises and often going to bed quite late during hockey season. The latter part is spent catching up on what happened elsewhere beyond Philadelphia, watching game streams, etc. I appreciate the compliment. The truth of the matter, though, is that what I do never FEELS like work. It's fun to me, and eventually I parlayed it into something that I made enough money from to make a living doing.
So that's always my career advice to younger people when they ask me: Do what you love to do, plug away at it, figure out a way to make a little money from it and then try to build on what you earn from it.
Back in 2001, I still dreamed of being a sports writer professionally; NHL hockey if I had my druthers and focused on the Philadelphia Flyers specifically if I really could live out that fantasy. At the time I was credentialed to cover the American Hockey League's Philadelphia Phantoms via Hockey's Future.
I absolutely loved that gig and a host of people who were associated with the original staff from Hockey's Future. Many of us were able to make it our profession, including Mark Fischel, who later worked for the NHL for a number of years before moving over to basketball. I also made a lot of enduring friendships in the Phantoms pressbox during that time period including with Anthony Mingioni, who is still one of my best friends that I met via hockey writing.
I did a little NHL coverage at the time, too. There used to be a site called Pro Hockey Euro Report. As the name suggests, the publication focused on European players who'd come over to play in the NHL. The Flyers used to credential me for a handful of games every season, and I'd write feature stories for Euro Report based on postgame interviews with the player. Among others, I did stories on the Flyers' Valeri Zelepukin and callup Tomas Divisek, ex-Flyers such as Mikael Renberg and Janne Niinimaa and various players who never played for the Flyers but were of story-writing interest including Nicklas Lidström, Tomas Holmström, Jyrki Lumme and Mika Alatalo (who played for the Coyotes a full 10 years after being drafted by the original Winnipeg Jets).
Another old friend of mine, Mike Barr, had a Flyers fan site called O&B that later affiliated with the media-credentialed Rivals Network. That was my first forray into game-day story writing and increased the number of games to which I'd receive credentials from the Flyers. My work for NHL.com, IIHF.com and other higher profile sites wouldn't come around until the 2005-06 season but the roots took hold with Hockey's Future, Euro Report, Rivals, and Kevin Greenstein's Inside Hockey.
Now let's get to 9/11. While I didn't enjoy working for Outpatient Surgery Magazine, I used to enjoy the morning drive from West Chester to the OSM office in Exton, which was located above a Pizza Hut takeout location. Every once in awhile, some confused Pizza Hut customer would go in the wrong door, wander upstairs to our office and ask where their pizza was. Normally, if I was the one to greet the person, I'd just politely direct him or her down the stiars and to the door just around the corner. One day, though, I asked someone if she had a coupon for "our Ovenless Supreme". The person didn't smile.
At any rate, the morning drive to the office was my favorite of the time before leaving the office to go home. It was a chance to turn up the radio -- usually WMMR or WYSP when it was a rock station, but I preferred music to the Howard Stern Show -- and try to ready myself mentally for a day of writing about medical equipment, medical coding and billing, or to do an interview with a surgeon about advances in electrosurgery or outpatient knee procedures. As I was driving in on this beautiful morning, the news broke of the first hijacked plane hitting one of the Twin Towers.
When I got to the office, everyone was gathered around the central common area of the office (we each our our own small personal office along the perimeter). The editor-in-chief, Yasmine Iqbal, was nearly in tears.
"What's happening to our country?" she said softly to no one in particular.
As the American citizen daughter of immigrants from Bangladesh, and a Muslim, the events of that day hit Yasmine to the core of her being; maybe even more profoundly than it did for the rest of us.
Our billing/accounts manager, Linda Moretti, had a small radio in her office and we'd pop in and out or stand largely silent in the central portion as one horrific report after another unfolded. For whatever reason, our publisher, Stan Herrin, at one point went back to his own office and tried to get some work done. I guess it was to try to take his mind off what was happening and feel a semblance of being in control of something for a little while. He didn't ask any work from the rest of us that day, however.
I still met up that night with my mom, grandmom and sister. While many places closed early and sent their employees home, Harry's Savoy in Wilmington stayed open. However, just as with my workplace and thousands of others that did remain open, there was absolute silence. Employees and customers alike watched the news on an overhead television. Afterwards, we went back to my sister's apartment, turned on a news channel and watched for a couple more hours before heading out.
Years later, by the time I was a full-time hockey writer, I talked to some of my colleagues who were in Voorhees for the Flyers training camp. Naturally, players were as horrified and devastated as anyone else, and hockey seemed much less important all of the sudden.
However, there was one Flyers player who didn't seem to grasp the enormity of what was happening. Rookie forward Pavel Brendl asked why everyone, players and media alike, were gathered together.
"Oh, right, the airplane thing," he said, answering his own question.
Nine nights later, on Thurs. Sept. 20, 2001, the Flyers had an exhibition game at the Wells Fargo Center (then called First Union Center) against the New York Rangers. I was credentialed for this preseason game, intending to write a Euro Report story about second-year Phantoms/Flyers forward Vaclav Pletka; who was not in Bill Barber's lineup that night and was cut from the camp roster shortly thereafter, if I recall correctly. It didn't matter, though, as the article never got written and I ended up writing on someone else a few weeks later.
Between the second and third periods, Arenavision showed President Bush's live address to the nation. The original intent was to show the address during intermission and then finish the game. However, the decision was made -- rightly so -- that the speech was much more important and playing to the conclusion of a preseason game was trivial by comparison. The rest of the game was called off. There's an excellent 20-year retrospective article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about that night and the decision to end the game early.
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