TWENTY YEARS AGO: 9/11 AND MY FRIEND & TEAMMATE MOLE

Twenty years ago, I was writing a Friday NFL column for a British magazine, and, with the Sunday schedule of games cancelled by the 9/11 attacks, I was tempted to write about terrorism. Like many with roots in the New York area, I knew people affected by the September 11 tragedy. The woman who became my wife and mother of our son was living only a few blocks from the World Trade Towers; when I wrote the original version of this piece, her flat was still off-limits, inside the exclusion zone. The Lee Hanson whose son called him from a doomed plane was a close friend of my brother’s. The morning of September 11, my sister, a public transport consultant, met in Queens with people from the Metro Transportation Council, whose office was on the 82nd floor of the North Tower. Emerging from the meeting, they discovered their offices, and colleagues, had disappeared. So I began my weekly column for First Down saying I was tempted to write about terrorism.

But since the column was about football, I told them a football story, and I’ll tell it to you again,two decades on. It begins the night before the 2001 NFL season began, when I returned from the States to discover thieves had been in my flat, looking for money and jewellery. Since I had little of either, all they took was a lovely pocket watch, which had been a gift from a woman I loved. I’d attached a watch chain, and a small medal, gold with a red enamelled W, which I’d received at Wesleyan when we won the Little Three football championship in our undefeated 1969 season.