America's bloodiest day
Sports agonize over when to resume
By Howard Fendrich
Associated Press
Tiger Woods and other pro golfers put away their clubs. Baseball parks were silent in the thick of pennant races. Colleges canceled football games featuring top-ranked teams.
And the NFL debated what to do, still regretting its decision to play after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.
On a prime page of the sports calendar, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon left leagues struggling yesterday with how to go about their business without offending a nation mourning its dead.
NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue consulted owners, union leaders and the White House about whether the league should play Sunday. The league said it wouldn't make a decision before today.
"From a personal standpoint — not as a coach but as an American — we want to play," said Brian Billick, coach of the Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens. "I don't want cowards to dictate what we do in this country."
But some players were adamant: They didn't want to fly.
"The last thing we want to do is get on a plane to California for a game when all four of those planes that were hijacked were going to California," said Vinny Testaverde, whose New York Jets are scheduled to play the Raiders in Oakland Sunday. "I don't think anyone wants to play."
Woods was in St. Louis with most of the world's top players for the $5 million World Golf Championship that was called off yesterday, along with the PGA Tour's Tampa Bay Classic, a senior event in North Carolina, and a Buy.com tournament in Oregon. The PGA Tour hadn't canceled a tournament in five years.
The LPGA Tour will play its tournament in Oregon, starting tomorrow as scheduled.
In baseball, playoff races and Barry Bonds' pursuit of 70 home runs were put on hold with 2 1/2 weeks left in the regular season. The majors postponed all 45 games scheduled for the past three days, the most called off since 1918, other than for labor stoppages.
"I think many people would hope we'd start Friday," commissioner Bud Selig said. "But I haven't made that judgment yet. I'm not close to making it."
Asked how he'll know when it's right to resume playing, Selig said: "History, instinct, and the knowledge from talking to a lot of people. When the right time to come back is — and the sensitive, decent time is — I think I'll know it."
From No. 1 Miami on down, dozens of major colleges postponed football games. The Southeastern Conference, though, decided to let its schools play, saying games "present a meaningful opportunity to bring our people together in a common expression of sympathy and mourning."
Boxing was affected, too. The middleweight unification title bout between Bernard Hopkins and Felix Trinidad was postponed. It had been scheduled for Saturday at Madison Square Garden, about three miles from the World Trade Center.
The National Hockey League canceled its first day of the preseason, scrapping 12 exhibition games scheduled for Saturday. The league will decide today when to resume playing.
Major League Soccer, which postponed four games yesterday, will announce a decision today on the status of the remainder of the regular season and the playoffs.
On the other side of the Atlantic, games in two major European soccer tournaments were postponed.
Complicating the decisions and logistics in the United States were problems with air travel — getting teams where they're supposed to be seemed daunting. Flights resumed yesterday afternoon only for passengers whose flights were diverted Tuesday.
San Francisco 49ers coach Steve Mariucci was told his team might have to fly Saturday instead of tomorrow to New Orleans for a game against the Saints.
"Those things will be unsettling, but we just have to cooperate and be patient and wait and see what they have to say," Mariucci said. "If the show must go on then, hopefully, we can get in there on time."
