Posted on April 16, 2013
Yesterday, while I was working on today’s CENTAUR SEASONS post to be available here on HoopsU.com, my wife, Noreen, yelled up to me: “Bombs at the Boston Marathon.”
I put aside what was going to be today’s post. Though the irony is worth noting: Today’s post was going to connect the early-Seventies Centaurs of Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales to the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Summer Games where terror first struck a sporting event.
Instead, there’s this:
Ten years after the September 11 terror attacks, I wrote an essay for my old hometown newspaper, the York Sunday News, in Pennsylvania. That 2001 morning at 8:46 a.m. I was at The Wall Street Journal offices, where I then worked, across the street from the World Trade Center.
Here’s why:
Yesterday, safely ensconced in Troy, New York, I went down to Noreen’s home office and watched a bit from Boston on TV. Here we go again.
“We gotta call Katie,” I said. “She could be there, easy”
Katie has been a friend forever and a runner since before that. She lived with her husband, Rene, in New Hampshire. They could be there, easy.
I dialed her cell. Listened to the rings. PickUpPickUpPickUp.
Then, from Katie, pleasantries dispensed: “I’m O.K.”
We talked again last night. “I knew it was you as soon as I heard my phone ring,” she said. She said it felt like 9-11 all over again, when she first heard that news and she immediately called Noreen at her job in Manhattan. “And now here you guys were calling us.”
It is not the story of what happened in Boston yesterday. Or what it was like to be there last night, after. Or what it will be like to be living there a week from now. But it feels like it.
CENTAUR SEASONS can also be found at www.centaurseasons.com. The centerpiece will be the posting in "real time" of the diary that Steve kept of his 1972-1973 junior-year season, beginning on November 30. Prior to that (and after), Steve will be posting regularly about his freshman, sophomore and senior seasons, as well as about what it was like to be there at the beginning to help get a struggling college basketball program off the ground.
Steve was the original writer of The Wall Street Journal's popular sports blog, "The Daily Fix" in 2001-2002, and was even dubbed "The Unwitting Father of the Sports Blog" by Gelf Magazine, the online publication of the "Varsity Letters Reading Series. Steve was the Journal's sports editor for its original Weekend sport section and was involved in all of the Journal's Olympics coverage, Winter and Summer, from 1996 through 2008.
He is the author of three books, most recently "My Father's Heart: A Son's Reckoning With the Legacy of Heart Disease," which he is adapting as a one-man show. For his first book, "The Call of the Game," Steve traveled the country in search of sports events -- including the famous N.C. State Wolfpack victory over "Phi Slamma Jamma" of the University of Houston. For his second book, COACH, among the 150+ coaches Steve interviewed are/were college basketball coaches John Wooden (UCLA), Pat Summitt (Tennessee), Frank Layden (Niagara), Bobby Cremins (Georgia Tech), P.J. Carlesimo (Seton Hall), Bill Guthridge (North Carolina), Abe Lemons (Texas), Stan Morrison (USC), Kathy Rush (Immaculata), Jim Satalin (Duquesne), Charlie Thomas (San Francisco State), Butch Van Bredda Koff (Princeton), Bill Whitmore (Vermont) and LaDonna Wilson (Austin Peay).
For more, you can click on www.steve-mckee.com, where you can find a TODAY show appearance and an NPR interview.
- CENTAUR SEASONS: A new Inductee to the DeSales University Hall of Fame recognizes the contributions of the school’s orginal athletes … - September 18, 2013
- CENTAUR (OFF) SEASONS: A dozen ways to read the 97 posts in the scorebook thus far — until a new roster begins taking the floor in the fall - June 13, 2013
- CENTAUR SEASONS: In a ‘Carnival of Opportunity,’ One of Our Own Shines in an All-Star Game - May 14, 2013
You need to login or register to bookmark/favorite this content.
Leave a Reply