Jeff Whitten

Local Columnist

My mother says I have a terrible memory. “You don’t remember half your life,” she told me the other day.

That’s probably closer to being true than I’d care to admit. But I do remember where I was a quarter century ago on 9/11. Most of us do.

I was sports editor at the Coastal Courier, then a three-day-a-week paper based out of Liberty County. Sept. 11, 2001 was on a Tuesday. We had a Wednesday paper to put out. And, me being me, I felt compelled to get something down on paper.

I don’t know why, mind you, because it had nothing to do with my beat. But I did, and I’m going to tack part of it on to this column in a paragraph or two. Please keep in mind I am a hack now and I was a hack then, but at least I’ve always been earnest about it.

Oh, and I was probably a little preachier then. I hadn’t gotten to be an editor yet and found out I’m dumber than a box of rocks.

The column ran Sept. 12, 2001 in the Coastal Courier under the headline “Life’s games not important today,” accompanied by a mugshot of a much more youthful looking me: If I could fly this sports page at half-staff and go home, I’d do it – because all of a sudden sports doesn’t seem so important.

Not in the wake of Tuesday’s collective and almost unbelievable tragedy, an apparent series of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and targets in Washington, DC, including the Pentagon.

Buildings are crumpled, a lot of people are dead – though as of Tuesday afternoon nobody really knows how many.

We just know they’re moms, dads, sisters, brothers, wives, husbands – people who were in the wrong place at the wrongest time possible.

If there’s justice then those responsible for the attacks will be hunted down and held accountable.

I don’t know if that will happen.

All I know is that for obvious reasons life’s games – at times so important to so many people for so many different reasons – are for the moment nothing more than games.

Of course, in time we’ll get over the shock, because we always do.

And along the way, games will again be a highly important part of people’s lives.

And they should be. Sports are important for a lot of different reasons – not least of which is that they help us forget day-today troubles.

In the meantime, maybe a little self examination on a national scale might be in order.

Maybe now sports will be seen for what it is – and for what it isn’t. Because if you take the time to weigh winning or losing a game with what happened yesterday, there’s simply no comparison.

So maybe we’ll all come to understand that in the great scheme of things, it isn’t that important whether Michael Jordan decides to play basketball again or Jeff Gordon wins a NASCAR championship.

Perhaps we’ll also learn it doesn’t matter much which team you pull for or how much money you give to a booster club.

And just maybe we’ll learn that Vince Lombardi was wrong. Winning isn’t everything, and it isn’t the only thing.

Perhaps the me-first, win-at-all-cost mentality too often found in American sports will be tempered by the realization that what we’re dealing with are games, nothing more, nothing less.

Maybe we’ll stop being so quick to second- guess coaches or complain about referees, and perhaps hack sportswriters like me will stop using words like ‘battle’ and ‘war’ when describing games that are supposed to be fun.

In short, maybe we’ll all grow up a little.

Alas. In retrospect, I don’t think we grew up at all. I wrote about this in 2020 and I’m going back to the same well again now.

Because it doesn’t seem we’ve grown up much, despite decades of “forever war” – the brunt of which has been borne by about 1 percent of our population, if that. God bless them.

The truth is, we are a more divided, coarser society, bereft of understanding and patience, and too many people shout instead of talk and talk instead of listen, and nobody is ever wrong because the other guy is always to blame.

Five years ago I was optimistic we’d eventually get past this childish petty tribalism infecting our world, and referred to the motto of my home state of South Carolina, dum spiro spero: While I breathe, I hope.

I’m not so hopeful anymore.

In one of my favorite books, “The Once and Future King,” author T.H. White has Merlin talking to the future King Arthur about man’s destiny.

“The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.”

Is that where we’re headed?

Jeff Whitten is a former editor of the Bryan County News.