On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, then-Chiefs coach Dick Vermeil stepped out of his office at Arrowhead Stadium and glanced up at the television in the staff room. He was puzzled to see what he initially thought was a disaster film.
“‘Coach, that’s not a movie,’” his administrative assistant, Suzette Cox, said. “This is happening right now. It’s real.’ ”
Surreal, it seemed at first. As paralyzed as so many of us were in the moment, he kept watching and said Wednesday that he felt “almost like your blood is draining out of your body. You’re just going limp. I don’t think in my life I ever experienced that feeling, ever.”
Around that time, then-New York Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi knew a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center Towers but assumed it was an accident. Since the Manhattan skyline could be seen from the team’s practice facility adjacent to Giants Stadium, according to multiple media reports, Accorsi and a colleague went outside carrying the binoculars Accorsi had packed for the game in Denver the night before — a game from which the team returned to Newark International Airport shortly before United Flight 93 was boarding nearby that morning.
They saw a jet turning toward the skyline but couldn’t see what happened next. Until they went back into the office and saw the catastrophe on television. The Giants wouldn’t need binoculars to see the smoke from the monstrous attack be visible for weeks from there.
With the nation convulsed, then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue set up a working group to chart the way forward for the league that included the conference presidents: Giants owner Wellington Mara and Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt — whom Tagliabue had known well since representing him in connection with World Championship Tennis and first met in 1969 at a meeting of the North American Soccer League.
In a phone interview Saturday, Tagliabue said the group had to build a consensus out of divided feelings among owners. Some felt postponing games would look like weakness. Others understood the stark reality that everything had changed and this couldn’t be treated as business as usual.
Perhaps sealed by a visit to a firehouse near the NFL offices, speaking to men who’d lost their brothers, Tagliabue came to feel this was worse than Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination (when the NFL played on) and understood, “You just couldn’t go on.”
The postponements meant that the next games would be Sept. 23 and include the Chiefs and Giants converging in Kansas City, merging the Giants and their intimate acquaintance with the unspeakable and the Chiefs (and their fans) reflecting the shattered feelings that consumed us all even at a distance.
The game would strikingly symbolize a country mourning together, seeking to take care of its own and trying to find diversion, even solace, through a mere game that’s also part of our cultural fabric.
With the Giants returning to play at Arrowhead on Monday night, the poignant images of that game still reverberate — both in terms of how the Chiefs organization and Kansas City lent comfort and enabled some small steps forward and also in the sense of a question we might all ask ourselves today:
Why is it that a nation could unite, albeit for a relatively brief time, after a deadly attack that killed nearly 3,000 people (and traumatized countless other lives) … but can’t come together over a once-in-a-century pandemic that has killed more than 740,000 Americans?
Tagliabue said he was overcome emotionally for months, but on that day he felt a surge of optimism.
“As tragic as it was, as hellacious as it was, there was resilience in the public. But more than resilience, there was unity,” said Tagliabue, who was here for the game along with then-NFLPA president Gene Upshaw. “People felt for others they never knew and never would meet, which is something we seem to be lacking in America today.”
There’s no simple answer to solving how “politics are affecting and infecting the public,” as Tagliabue put it.
Then again, he thinks that day and Hunt’s way of leadership should be held up as part of the solution.
“You need people like Lamar,” he said. “He was a conservative Texan. But he understood that not everyone was a conservative Texan and that you had to respect everyone for who they were and what their experiences were. He led on that basis, and he was a unifier.”
Maybe there was no finer example of that than Sept. 23, 2001, a day that should always remind us of the power of a shared loving spirit.
Never mind that the Chiefs lost 13-3; this was only tangentially about the game itself, one Vermeil described as the most intense and real one he ever coached in for that very reason.
And the moving scene, then-team president Carl Peterson suggested on Friday, perhaps was uniquely forged between Kansas City culture and the vision of Hunt.
The then-69-year-old Hunt, Peterson recalled, had been in Columbus, Ohio, during the attacks. With flights grounded, he decided to drive home to Dallas. On the way, he was struck by what he observed: a solemn resolve and abiding patriotism.
Between that and Hunt’s affection for Mara and grief for New York, Hunt had an idea that would underscore everything else that happened that day, including hundreds of indelible images:
A moment of true silence; Mayor Kay Barnes declaring it New York City Day before the game; signs all over proclaiming Kansas City’s love for New York; Chiefs fans singing “home of the brave” instead of the adapted “home of the Chiefs;” and thunderous applause for the Giants, who led by coach Jim Fassel and other team officials had made a number of trips to Ground Zero and visited with families and first responders.
“We’re football players, and (Chiefs fans) saw us as an extension of those 3,000 New Yorkers who lost their lives,” former Giants running back Tiki Barber told NFL.com. “It was odd. It was cathartic. Until then, I didn’t think sports played that kind of role. That was the first time I think I realized that.”
To his dying day in June 2021, Fassel would speak of how the Giants were treated. After the game, Giants lineman Glenn Parker, a former Chief, told reporters, “That was perfect Kansas City. It was beautiful.”
And former Chiefs running back Tony Richardson said then that “they deserved that applause. It was in their back yard. They actually saw it. They’ve been down to the site. Some of those people were their neighbors, their friends.”
No wonder you could see the pain etched on player’s faces from both teams during the anthem, beautifully sung by Kansas City rhythm and blues singer Hal Wakes and ending with TV cameras capturing the stirring sight of Giants’ receiver Thabiti Davis saluting.
There are countless more images to remember from that day, of course, from the small U.S. flags seemingly being waved by each of the 77,666 fans to the austere new security measures to the flyover that made Vermeil’s heart “about jump out of my body” as he burst into tears.
Shortly before the game began, Hunt’s idea was engaged:
Driving through the heartland back to Texas, Peterson recalled, it had come to Hunt that the Chiefs should pass firemen’s boots through the crowd to collect money for the rescue workers and families of victims. And Hunt would match whatever was raised.
Peterson wondered how it could be executed, exactly, and some within the organization were skeptical of how it could be pulled off properly. But Hunt was adamant. And, then again, this was Kansas City: It would strike a chord.
So they secured some 500 boots from local fire companies, Peterson said. And by day’s end, they were filled with more than $200,000.
“Checks, cash, change,” Peterson said, laughing and adding, “I think some people put their credit card number in there.”
The Chiefs soon sent a check for double the amount raised, making for yet another way the day had broader meaning. And part of the reason the Giants were so grateful that they took out a paid ad in The Star thanking the Chiefs, their fans and citizens of Kansas City “For Their Heartfelt Kindness, Hospitality and Generosity.”
In the weeks to come, Peterson remembers receiving hundreds of letters of gratitude. One of them was from a rescue worker who had found a small wooden football with a Chiefs logo on it in the rubble at Ground Zero, a ball believed to have been that of a Chiefs fan who died there.
Peterson sighed deeply as he remembered that and remembered putting the scarred ball in the locker room for some time afterward.
The ball and a boot from that day still are in the possession of the franchise, Chiefs historian Bob Moore said Friday.
They are artifacts of an important story in franchise history … and an example we maybe could learn from yet.
