The subject matter of this week’s column may seem a bit strange
for a sports section. But sometimes it seems pretty silly to write
about sports.
September 11, 2001 was a time like that. When upwards of 55,000
people perish in a matter of hours is another.
The subject matter of this week’s column may seem a bit strange for a sports section. But sometimes it seems pretty silly to write about sports.
September 11, 2001 was a time like that. When upwards of 55,000 people perish in a matter of hours is another.
That’s not to say that sports are silly. None of our day-to-day passions are. It’s just that orphaned children and childless parents go beyond the day-to-day, bring our comfortable, remote-clicking world to a screeching halt and demand more than another round of banter about wins, losses and transactions.
My wife is from Thailand, a country hit hard by the tsunamis that struck the day after Christmas. Thankfully, her family all live on the Gulf of Thailand side of the country, away from the devastation.
Another friend, a reporter for Agence France-Presse, was vacationing in Sri Lanka when the waves hit. No one knew her whereabouts until her byline appeared on an AFP story out of Colombo.
I’m not sure about other friends and acquaintances. There’s Peter, the die-hard Boston Red Sox fan who runs a restaurant in Krabi, directly in the path of the destruction. I never got a chance to congratulate him on the World Series. I hope I’ll get to.
There’s the guy who took a group of us out for a day of exploring islands near Phuket in his long-tail boat a few years ago. I hope he was too sick to work on Sunday.
I was angry when news of the disaster first emerged. On Monday morning, the radio was full of stories about lost luggage in St. Louis instead of the tragedy of thousands of lost lives and counting. I worried that we were so self-absorbed as a nation that we would disregard sudden, massive death in a part of the world with which we are mostly unfamiliar.
But now it seems to have hit us all. The unimaginable scope of this tragedy – in mere hours the death count of our men and women in Iraq was multiplied by 50.
Now we see the news and hear the story of a mother in Malaysia who watched helplessly as her four-year-old son was washed away.
Life will go on, and there will be plenty of time for sports again. For now, though, I’m thinking of my own four-year-old and mourning another parent’s lost one.
