The Right Time with Bomani Jones - Howard Bryant on How 9/11 Changed Sports Forever | 09.11

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Bomani Jones is joined by Howard Bryant to discuss 9/11’s impact on the sports world nearly 25 years after one of the most impactful days in American history.  First,  they discuss the aftermath of 9/11 in baseball and the real reason they still play “God Bless America” in stadiums.  Later, they discuss how the NFL figured out how to market patriotism to its fans & how that directly led to the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick.  Finally, they discuss the uniting moment after George W. Bush’s first pitch at Yankee Stadium and how modern sports doesn’t make us feel the same way.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the right time. My name is Beaumani Jones. Thanks for listening wherever you get your podcast. Thanks for watching us on YouTube.

Subscribe, like, rate us, review us, give us five stars. You only give us four stars. I'm inclined to believe you are a hater. I will introduce this with a little more sombatones. I don't try to come in like real big on it, but we're talking about 25 years since 9-11, so I don't exactly feel like it's time to be like, it's coming up next.

So coming up next, we have our good friend joining us here live and direct from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Howard Bryant was going on. Oh, man, how are you doing? Hey, man. I think it's a smart move, by the way, Bo, to not be all enthusiastic about it.

I mean, you even want to call it an anniversary? Just mark the time, right? Yo, it's exactly it. Yeah, anniversary. Like, woo, it's kind of like I talk about the internet has made it a thing. Like, people don't remember Biggie's birthday, but they remember the day he died. So it's a party every year on the day he died. I'm like, nah, let's learn his birthday, baby.

Like, these are not, right. This is not a celebratory time. I guarantee you this, his mama wouldn't throw in no party on the knife. That was like when we were doing, when we were doing NPR, you'd have these horrible stories above death and, you know, famine and the rest of it. And now it's time for sports. I'm like, can we transition this a little differently? Yes, yes. But I wanted to have you on to talk about like 25 years since 9-11,

particularly in sports. In part, and this will be something we get to a little later, I'm not exactly sure how the rest of our industry will have handled this. I know how they would have handled this 25 years ago, where we had a little bit more of a concern for kind of looking back at these historical moments and putting them in context. Boomers love that. And by the way, makes great content.

People generally enjoy it. We don't really do it anymore. But this is a topic that you, honestly, for these 25 years, have written a lot about that people can check on in your books, which is kind of how things changed in and around sports with 9-11. And you were covering the Yankees that year. It was. Which is interesting for me because I always say that 9-11 hits me a little differently because

I was in California. And so this didn't happen at 9, 12 in the morning or whatever. at 612 and I had nowhere near a television. I was in a place with no telecommunications whatsoever. And somebody came in and told me what happened. And I honestly thought he was lying because it sounded like science fiction, like war to worlds. And I went on about my day. And then it was like, oh, wow, this is a really big thing that's been going on all day long that I've been too wrapped up in my own shit to get to. You, on the other hand, are around New York City. Oh, I was in New York City. I was living on 49th and 10th. And I remember at 8,

45 in the morning when the first tower got hit. I was just waking up. It was a Tuesday morning. And I remember what was sort of wild about that was the speed of the calamity. Right. I mean, within a half an hour, no cell phones are working. Like, it was hard to get through to anybody. And, you know, you saw, like, disaster.

I mean, it was really incredible for all kinds of different reasons. Like, you just saw life in real time just act out in, you know, on a block by block basis. You know, like all of a sudden the cab driver's like, oh, you want to go over the bridge? $300. Like, that was that element of it. And then on the other hand of it, you had all the first responders just everybody just racing down downtown. It was chaos. It was.

And then, of course, here I am covering baseball feeling. completely insignificant. Who cares about baseball at that moment? You couldn't, back then they actually had pay phones. Payphone wasn't going to work. Pay phones always work. Couldn't get through to anybody. Yeah.

And like I feel like with major moments, they're the kinds that are the where were you win, dot, dot, dot, dot moments. But then there is the whole next level of it and you just don't get that many of those, which is everything changed at this moment. Well, this one's both. Yes.

Yeah, this one is 100%. both and the thing about 9-11 and sports, there is probably, I mean, off the top of my head, I'd have to really sort of parse it down, but off the top of my head, there are three moments that change the trajectory of sports in the 20th century into the 21st century. One is integration. Two is television, and three is 9-11. And obviously, if you want to extend that out, you could probably go into the pandemic, but to this, up to that point, this is the moment. Whenever I think about 9-11, I always think about it from the standpoint of each generation has its seismic moment that shifts the whole culture that changes everything.

With my parents' generation, it was World War II. With my generation, it was a Cold War. And with this generation, it's 9-11. It looks, looks, feel, sold. Everything was different from that day forward. Yeah. And it's interesting where you say the sports feels so insignificant in that moment. And of course, that was a message that we spilled.

And then give it a week, right? Or however long it was before sports got back on the road. And then it was the complete opposite, right? It was the most important thing. Right. Not just is it important. To me, people immediately tapped into the entire, of the reason that sports are allowed to exist on the plane that they do with the support they do

with the attention they do with the funding they do everything else which is sports have always served the interest of whatever the dominant regime is of the time whether it be government on whatever level right like it's part of the appeal of college sports in this country is the affirmation of pride and region or whatever that institution happens to be but the whole point and the reason of it becomes a celebration of certain parts of our society. And it feels like when 9-11 hit across the board and also specifically as it related to New York City, sports now became a celebration of the nation itself, of the symbols of the nation itself. Yeah, sports, it was tribal before and then it was tribal.

And then it became completely tribal, like where you, could feel. I was afraid, to be honest. I remember, ooh, we were out a week. 9-11 hit on a Tuesday, and the Yankees, we ended up driving. That was the other thing, too. What was kind of funny was how easy you recognized the things you take for granted were not to be taken for granted, which was, okay, season's going to open up in, it's going to reopen in Chicago a week from today. I'm not getting on a plane. How are we getting to Chicago? How are we getting to Chicago. And so all of that infrastructure suddenly came into question because no one wanted to get on an airplane. And what was fascinating to me about that whole, that whole period that, I mean,

it was a period. It was, it was at least a month or two because the second piece of this was now we got to find Osama bin Laden, right? So everybody was on high alert that any, that there was the next shoe going. And let's not also forget during that same time period, you had the anthrax scare happening too. So there was this real feeling that the entire country was under attack because it was. But the piece of it to me that was really that changed it all was the injection of politics into sports permanently. And I don't think anybody knew that was going to happen at the time. World War II athletes wore patches to recognize the fact that the country was at war. Vietnam, same thing, but to a lesser extent. But there was recognition that American

soldiers were fighting around the world. 9-11 was all of that times a thousand, that the entire approach of sports, which was to avoid politics, because everybody was under the same umbrella, we're all Yankee fans or we're all Cowboys fans or Patriots fans or whatever. That all went away, and it was replaced by a real, angry, dangerous sort of sense that, now we're going to go back to sports and we're going to put 40,000 people in one place who are enraged right now, that there's an enemy out there that we can't see. And where is that fervor going to release? It's going to release at ballparks. And the sports industry itself recognized, even as you were talking about moment versus change. From that day to 25 years later,

the entire business of sports, how sports was sold to you, which changed cosmetically. And it's never gone back. After the Gulf War, we saw Whitney Houston out there singing and then the, you know, Duke and whoever they were in Vegas, you know, in UNLV, they had their U.S. patches on during the Gulf War. But once that war ended, those patches disappeared. Those Americans flags after 9-11 showed up and they haven't gone away. Yeah, and it's funny because there is a book called Brand NFL by Michael Loria that I recommend that people check out. It just really just talks about how the NFL has been promoted and marketed throughout

its time. And one point that it makes is that what the NFL really caught on to in the way the other leagues did not is that it wedded its product to symbols like the American flag in a different way. And once they made it a red, white, and blue league that always popped. right like for that league for that league that always worked as a mechanism of sale for baseball like you would see the red white and blue like bunting around the field for like game one of the world series during the postseason yeah yeah for the all-star game yeah but it was never in all the time thing

they started breaking out god bless america it's never gone away i still don't know the words to god bless america like god bless america was not a at least to me that wasn't like a song everybody knows, right? And why did they do that, Bo? Why did they do that? They did that because after the towers went down, Bobby Valentine was the manager of the Mets. John Franco, you know, New York dude was a closer on the Mets. And the Mets went to Shea Stadium and they opened up a relief center in the parking lot. And in very, very fast time, the Mets were being associated as New York. team. The Yankees were like, no, let's let the authorities handle everything. And we're the Yankees and we're going to take a step back. And by the way, let's not forget, both Roger

Clemens, Andy Pettett, high-tailed it out of there in their private planes. The minute those towers hit, we're getting out of here and they bolted. But the New York guys, the Mets were, they stayed. And the idea that the Mets were more patriotic than the Yankees, that they were more New York than the Yankees enraged George Steinbrenner. And he was like, well, we got to do something. So they went out and got one of the great Irish tenors, Ronan Tynin, to sing God bless America in the seventh inning. And then the Yankees went to the armory.

Then they went to the firehouses. And suddenly nobody likes to admit this. And of course, Joe Torrey, New Yorker, Brooklyn guy, his sister is a nun. All of a sudden, you know, the Yankees and the Mets were sort of battling for the hearts and minds of grieving New Yorkers. And George was like, this is going to be like this is our staple. So suddenly you've got Ronan Tinen out there singing, God bless America, after, you know, during the seventh inning of all the games. And then, of course, because baseball also saw football out there with all the mini American flags out there and Joe Andrewsie running out

with two flags with the Patriots against the Jets and the whole thing. Then baseball made God bless America mandatory for all the teams. So now you're starting to see all of the sports trying to tap into the red, white, and blueness of the business of the game. And now each sport is trying to, in baseball especially, in addition, let's not forget, you had, you know, 1,800 firefighters killed in the, you know, in whatever that number is, it's not that number. but, you know, over a thousand, and then the police as well. So now you also, in addition to the red, white and blue of America fighting Osama bin Laden, now in Al-Qaeda, now you also have the police and first responders, but especially police as heroes and military as heroes.

So now this sport, where sport was unimportant to your point, now this is the staging ground for where, you know, for America's emotions. And this was the place where everybody was like, we can't have sports. We can't have politics involved here. And so now you've got the cop singing the national anthem. You've got you've got the flags and the flyovers and each sport is now using this place. And by the way, when I was speaking to some of the military guys when I was working on my book, The Heritage, they were saying like, hey, they recognized opportunity. Where else are we going to get this kind of recruitment opportunity? We're at war right now. And if this is a moment where people come together, there are going to be people watching these games. that are going to want to serve their country too. So suddenly sports became the land grab for patriotism, you know, both commercially, emotionally, and then of course militarily.

All right. I want to start with the God bless America part because I did not know that story about the back and forth between the teams. This was the result of like economic competition in the market of patriotism. That's right. I don't know if anybody else ever feels this way.

But I was at the Yankees game a couple weeks ago, and God bless America. And I was like, are you supposed to stand for this? Because it's a song. It is not the national anthem. It is not a like prescribed him. It's a song. And I was like, wait, I got to stand up for this too.

Because I ain't standing up for Lee Greenwood. You understand what I'm saying? Like, I would not do that under those circumstances. And I was like, oh, man, this is all just kind of. Not only the Yankees may get mandatory, but the Yankees threw fans out who didn't stand. You get ejected from the ballpark if you didn't stand. and some usher could come by and toss you out of the ballpark.

It is a, wow, that is great. It is amazing how instant this all was too, right? Like, I don't know if you could have convinced me in the year 2000 that this almost like Orwellian response would have been the result just a year later. It wasn't even a year. It didn't even take a year. Right. I mean, I think it's really important to remember the timetable.

And everybody is talking about this is a really important conversation. though, from a lot of, you know, when you're thinking about where we are today and in the amnesia of Americans, because they're all talking about Donald Trump and when you're using the words like authoritarianism and fascism and this and that this surveillance state started back then. I mean, you weren't in New York. I was in New York. And that's where if you see something, say something. Here we go. All in the name of patriotism. And Rudy Giuliani was the mayor and America's mayor. And every single. basic civil liberty was now a threat. What do you want the terrorist to win? Of course we have to search your bag. But you have a reason to search my bag. We have to search your bag. And going through the airports.

Remember, you could go through the airports. You'd be able to hang out at the airport. You'd be able to go hang out at the gate. You couldn't do that anymore. You couldn't, you know, this is where, at first, you had to take a sip of water if you brought water to the gate. I'm sorry, when you're going through security. If you had liquids with you, you had to drink some of it.

So everyone knew that it wasn't like nitroglycerin or something, right? Then they just got rid of all that. Now, no liquids at all. Then they had to start coming back because people were like, well, what about my saline? You had to pack all of that stuff. And now you've got the travel sizes where you have to, you know, it's got to be a certain amount. You know, all the lotions of mine that have been confiscated.

I lament that, right? I mean, all of that stuff. And so the speed of the sports really did help that too, because you're at this place and anybody, anybody who's ever been around a mob, whether your team won the championship and y'all are flipping cars over or whether you want to beat somebody up, like the power of the mob and people, 40,000 people chant in USA. I mean, that stuff gets scary. And it was a release.

and a lot of people called it something else. They used to call it healing. But on the other side of healing, there was revenge. You know, that's when you started seeing a lot of American flags and a lot of ethnic restaurants up on 8th Avenue and 9th Avenue. Be like, hey, hey, hey, it was like, do the right thing, right? You know, we black too, right? I mean, it was definitely that.

And all of the things that we talk about today in terms of fascism and the rest of these things, certainly there's an extra legal sense of what's happening in the White House now. But this idea that your civil liberties had to be sacrificed in the name of patriotism, in the name of your country and the things that we stood, a lot of that comes out of 9-11. And that hasn't gone away. It's only intensified no matter who the president was.

Now, the other thing that you mentioned there that I think was important, that you've written about extensively also is the police became the military. after 9-11. In terms of the same thing. Yeah, right, in terms of like the level of reference that's expected. And to a degree, it's understandable because taking what happened, you know, in D.C. out of it and just looking strictly at the New York part,

those were that, normally the heroes of war is the military, and that wasn't the case in this one. This was a, and it was an attack on an urban area, right, on a municipality. The heroes became police, they became fire department and the likes. And so they became elevated in a very, very

important way. Now, like, the elevation of the fire department, you know, nobody's really got a problem with that, right? Yeah, nobody did. And I mean, like, fire departments probably have the highest Q ratings of just about any of these things, right? They run into burning buildings and stuff.

Okay, and they'll be beating people up. They don't run in and set your shit on fire because they mad at you. No, they go in and they put out fires. They try to save your life. Yes, the police occasionally do those things. And also occasionally, tune you up, give you that wood shampoo, everything else.

But they became capital T, capital P, the police. Not the band, but they became something that everybody, at least for a short term, you treated them like they were the flag, basically. It became a gigantic change, I think, in terms of the way the – I mean, there had always been an expectation of how to deal with the police or what the police represented, but not quite like 9-11. And sports and arenas never treated them like this. No. And also, you have to make this link. And by the way, before we continue on, my number was way up. It was 343 firefighters were killed. And then so it's about 400 first responders total.

The 1800 number I was thinking about was the number. of unclaimed, you know, that went missing, that bodies were never discovered after the 3,300 people were killed in the towers. But yes, I mean, that was the idea now that we are going to conflate police and military puts us a lot of where we are today and also with some of our previous conversations. think the arc of Colin Kaepernick is totally different without 9-11, because Colin Kaepernick is essentially the heir to the protest for Rodney King that never really happened in sports.

But now you're doing it 15 years after 9-11, where the police are heroes. I mean, they are undisputed heroes. that you are now, you've incorporated them into the selling of your sport. Without 9-11, perhaps he's treated very differently because sports doesn't now have that layer of the hero worship of police, military, etc., where the two are the same, where criticizing the police, a domestic institution questioned your patriotism.

The link between patriotism and police was virtually non-existent pre-9-11. Right. I mean, this changed, it changed everything. Well, I think that raises a question. Would he have positioned his protest in the way that he did prior to 9-11, right? Also a great question. Because part of it is the response. I was going to say it's how is it that one could so seamlessly make the transition from a protest against the police to being a protest against the military?

and the answer is he chose to protest the police as an affront to the national anthem, as an extension of the flag. Yeah, that's right. Because they're on the field because of 9-11. Right, right. So like how connected do all those things become? Because that also leads to the other part, which is,

and I wonder if there's prior to 9-11, did the flag belong to the military before 9-11 and all of its adjacent wars? Because that's another, obviously the big social thing about 9-11 is, this country was at war for 20-something years just with people. Some of the warring, you know, like what we do during war

just stuck around and became permanent fixtures in part because if you felt like we need to do God bless America because we had war, we were at war for 20 years straight after that. Well, that's right. And on top of that, the question, we used to ask George, you know, you used to ask Steinbrenner, when are you going to stop playing this song?

And the question had been, well, when the wars are over? Well, the wars are over now. We're not fighting, you know, We're fighting in Iran now, but back then it was Iraq and Afghanistan. And those wars are over, but God bless America is still there. It has now become, it's embedded now. Now there's no reason to do it except that that's what we do. And you're 100% right. When you're thinking about how the cosmetics of the sport shifted, I mean, 9-11 is 100% the epicenter of all of this. And what I found fascinating about it, you know, when you're starting to look at this perfect storm, is that you did have a perfect storm, literally a perfect storm. You had, you know,

you had a terrorist attack, which created and aroused the nationalism of Americans. While at the same time, you were, you know, getting more and more and more of a, you had a new generation of athlete who was paying attention and a new generation of citizen who was paying attention because of the virality of social media. So now people are seeing things and it's all happening at the same time. And now the moment you've got the flags and the flyover and the cops and the singing of the national anthem and the surprise homecomings at halftime and the the American flag, the size of the entire football field pregame is happening at the exact same time that the athlete

is becoming a little bit more politically aware. And all of this falls under the umbrella of 9-11. To answer your question, yes, the flag has always belonged to the military. And the NFL and the military have been essentially partner since the 1960s. But the way that they ramped this up, the way that they connected it, and normally you would get the Super Bowl, like you were talking about the bunting at the All-Star Game in the World Series in baseball. Well, you would get the, you would get the remote shot of our, of our, you know, naval stations or our military bases around the world. You'd only get that

on the Super Bowl, just for the NFL to show the globalness of the sport, to say, see, everybody's watching this. Now it was weekly. Every week, there was some shot of a military base in Iraq or Afghanistan then or somewhere. And so the embedding of this is happening at the exact same time, you have fans saying, we don't want politics in our sports. And what they're really saying is we don't want black politics in our sports. We don't want. So at the exact same time that you're ramping up the politics as a sign of patriotism, you're also tamping down the voice of the guys who were playing these games. And these two things obviously blew up, you know, in the, in the teens with, you know, obviously Trayvon Martin and Ferguson and then later Kaepernick. I was thinking about the fact

that God bless America stuck around because I was thinking about post 2020. Yeah, I guess it's around there. Remembering them boys had Roger Goodell Hill hostage in his own basement. Remember that? He sat down. He made that video. He talked about systemic racism and everything else looking like he ain't slept in three days. But what they did after that was they put a lot of stuff on the field. It takes all of us, the end racism, you know, all those symbols on the field.

And then I think it was last season, was the first one where they decided to take end racism off of the field. And of course, that raised a bit of a social media stink. But as I've been thought about it, and it was like, no, A, I'm surprised they kept it out there as long as they did. I think it probably

served the purpose for a period of time. But then I said, myself, I don't think anybody even sees it anymore, right? Like, after a while, it just kind of blends into the background. Like, I noticed that when they had all the symbols during the bubble in the NBA in 2020, and they had Black Lives Matter on the floor and all of that. And then after a while, it was like, oh, this is a decision that was made to get through this week, but, like, that's gone now. Like, I get, I get it, right? Obviously, we have gotten the point about God bless America and all of those things. They never stopped. But I wonder, like, when you're at a stadium and they play,

God bless America, or even the national anthem, it's not like it swells up the whole stadium. And everybody's like, hell yeah, America. Well, people are numb to it now. It's just something we do. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, everyone's numb to it. Well, and I think that's sort of the interesting part of this conversation is that by the time you get to 25 years, it's a generational thing now. No one knows any different. If you're the core demographic of who the NFL is trying to sell this sport to, they don't know any different. They probably don't even know why they're singing it. They don't know why it's there because they don't, there's no before to the before and after where there is for us. We remember it not being there. So it is jarring to us and normal for them.

and and I think that when you look at it from the standpoint of the messaging, sooner or later the messaging doesn't even need a message. It's just there. I mean, like, for example, one thing that we were talking about, we were talking about the American flag. 9-11 was also the beginning of the flag lapel, the little mini lapel, you know, the lapel flag. And if you notice, there's not a politician that walks around without one of those now. It just becomes embedded. These are the things that are part of the selling of a politician.

And if you don't have one of them on, it's a news cycle. You're un-American. You're not patriotic. I mean, it's become part of the uniform. And you're right. I mean, the speed of all of this, and it'll be very, very interesting to see how history treats these things. because, yes, 9-11 is the, it's the watershed event. But, you know, 2020 is not just pandemic, but it's also George Floyd.

It's all of these things happening all at the same time. And now you were looking at how are we selling this sport. Roger Goodell is scrambling in 2020, running for his life in 2020. And it wasn't because, oh, well, people are just desensitized to 9-11. and it was because of the George Floyd stuff and because of all the stuff that had been percolating at the exact same time. So now what you've got

in terms of your signaling and your messaging, I used to laugh at it. You and I used to talk about this, right? I mean, it takes all of us in the end zone. To do what? I mean, so everyone is sort of tiptoeing around all of this symbolizing. And I think what makes it really interesting

as a conversation is that if you were born, in 2004. You're 22, 23 years old, right? 2000, whatever, how old you're 2002 a year after 9-11. You're 24 now. It doesn't have the same punched, it doesn't have the same value. It doesn't mean the same thing in terms of symbolizing because the symbol doesn't need any value anymore because it's all you know. Yeah. Imagine trying to explain freedom fries to those people. Right? Like, I was actually thinking about this when not too long ago, the whole

woke one thing was going around. The ALC saying that woke one was crazy. And you know, sometimes it was, but they were crazy times. But if you thought woke one was crazy, baby, if you had been here in 2001, the immediate 9-11 response, and for those of you who might be too young

to know freedom fries, we got mad at France. I forget what France did that made people mad and in the cafeteria in Congress, they stopped calling them French fries, they started calling them Freedom fries. Freedom fries. That really happened. That really happened.

And while you're at it, just go Google the Dixie Chicks and Phil Donahue and Ashley Banfield and anybody who questioned anything that went against whatever the United States government company line was at the time. I mean, I was having this conversation with a friend of mine not to get too far off topic the other day about, you know, the great Colin Powell and where this was going in terms of foreign policy and how this man disgraced himself. He's a hero, is a legend. And that time period

changed how we view everything. And the things that just became embedded, that just became, that have never gone away. That's the piece of this that I find most interesting, is that the pressure that was placed on anybody who said, wait a minute, this doesn't seem right. Or maybe it's all gone a little too far. Maybe we can pull this back. I remember listening to people in baseball and they were saying the same thing you were saying, why do we still play God bless America? Why? It's been 15 years, right? And it's been a while. And the reason is because nobody wanted to be the one to stop doing it. No, ain't anybody going to go be the person to get in there and make the suggestion. I ain't going to be no. I ain't going to be

news cycle. They didn't want, they didn't need that, right? And so, so what you're really talking about, you're not talking about patriotism, you're talking about fear. You know, like, really, let's start instead of giving it these labels, let's actually parse what we're really talking. Are you talking about patriotism? No, we're talking about conformity. We're talking about fear. We're talking about stepping out of line. We're talking about the price of stepping out of line. None of this has anything to do with patriotism. In fact, it's the antithesis of patriotism. Yeah. Like, imagine being the person in the meeting. They're like, hey, man. So we need to do something to, like,

shorten up the time of the games. What do you think we should do? And somebody raised their hand. I think we should stop singing, God bless America. All right, cool, so what do you think we should do? You're immediately moving off that idea. And they look at that dude and they said, pack you shit. Yeah, yeah. They're like, huh.

Huh. So now we know who you are. Yeah. That's all it is. Enemy camp stuff. I mean, and it's true. All of those things, when you think about where the culture went and what became standard, it wasn't just the sipping of the water going in through security with the fact that active military can go, you know, go cut the line first. And all of these things sort of shifted our viewpoint to the point now where when you think about what's

sports looks like. It broke down so quickly across, you know, the racial lines because you had the labor protesting and you had management trying to profit, but you also had business underneath it, which was the fans were being manipulated by all of these symbols because the military was charging the sports teams. and it wasn't even partisan. It was Jeff, two Republicans, the late John McCain and Jeff Flake, who were like, wait a minute,

you guys are making money off of this? The Milwaukee Brewers, you guys are charging the National Guard, $80,000 to sing the national anthem at a Brewers game? And yet, the power of those symbols was so great that even when it had been exposed as a fraud,

that all this flag flyover patriotism, go USA stuff, was a fraud. Even then the public didn't care because to your point it was comforting. And that the symbol mattered more than the meeting behind the symbol. Symbol didn't have to have any meaning anymore. And the government barely thinks it's a fraud because they firmly believe that the next great American warrior is watching these games and watching these signals. I mean these symbols and will then sign up. That's why you get all this advertisement

for enlisting in the military during these games. Now, I have to be honest with you, it ain't been very many times in my life that I've been watching football with somebody and thought to myself, yo, man, this motherfucker might be Rambo. It's not, you know, like that's just not. I don't, I don't forget Pat Tillman, right?

Yeah, and see, Tillman to me is a fascinating case because while I made discus agree with where Tillman was coming from, it's hard not to respect it, right? Fine, then I'll just go over there myself. How about that? Dies, we find out that he was killed by friendly fire. His family and everybody else was lied to about this and they stand anywhere they can to get somebody to hear how things didn't go like it was presented to the world that they went and we still don't care. And still don't care.

And he is, look, they retired his number in Arizona. I went to the Hoover Dam, my last trip in Vegas, and I think it's the Pat Tillman Bridge, right? Like, he's the one guy. There's a statue out there. Right. He's got a statue. It's really hard to say anything bad about him

because strictly on principle and the willingness to lay it out there, you can make no argument against it. And he was used, and he was manipulated. And that still didn't make people mad. No, 100%. And that's why when you go back and look at that time period, and it's going to be very interesting to see how it survives, how it gets, you know, the further away you get from history, the less accurate it gets, right? So it will be very interesting to see how that time period is reflected upon and how it's interpreted and reinterpreted and reinterpreted again for future generations. But if you were there, if you were there, as I was absolutely there, as a professional as a grown-up, you felt the sea change.

A lot of the stuff that we're talking about now was foundational then. And the speed in which you could see how quickly people would get in line, I mean, the fact that Pat Tillman went from. American hero to American hero. But this time American hero because he was a dissident, because his family were dissidents. And he was the dissident going, things over here are messed up. Like the stuff that he was saying about what was happening over there.

I mean, that is its own story. And I just, like I said, I remember anybody who spoke up. I mean, you were in major trouble. if you spoke your mind in this country during that time period. And let's not forget, I was going to say, and let's not forget, that didn't go away because then you had other things happening. 2013, you had the Boston Marathon bombing and everyone just doubled back down on it.

It was like, back, here we go again. And all of these things are very much significant and contributors to where we are now. I think 9-11 once again. And you brought up, you know, that next moment. I've always felt that COVID might, you know, is probably that next moment for that next generation of their defining moment. But I'm still, when I think about it, I'm not even sure if COVID measures to what 9-11 was. But it probably does in terms of that seismic. What was the next seismic thing that changed the way your entire world operated?

is absolutely sort of right after 9-11. Yeah, I think the million people dying, right? Like that makes it all- And the denial of the science and, you know, to politicizing, it just continued to spiral. And 9-11 had a lot to do with that because of the inability for anyone to question it. Right.

And the fact that 9-11 was immediately spun into the Iraq justification. well that's 100% right yeah like as soon as this happened people were like hey so you think we can go to iraq now now now we can go to war and i think the other piece of it to be on topic with you know with sports is the real shift here is the industry of sports recognizing and the people who are watching the industry of sports recognizing the power of it it's like there are raw numbers here that we can exploit. I mean, I remember talking to the great three-star general Russell Honor, who was legend in, you know, during the Katrina disaster, you know, when he was like, look, we have recruitment problems. We can't get this type of audience in any other advertising.

You know, I remember when we were kids, oh, the U.S. Army, it does more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day. That was a hundred times, hundredfold in the 9-11. 11 years because people weren't signing up. So you needed sports to be political. You needed sports to be to be a factor. You didn't have any soldiers. They weren't trying to be all they could be. You know, I mean, seriously. And, and and they didn't hide that. This was a real major recruiting tool. And sports played into it. And I think it's, I think it's instructive to recognize that sports is playing this role. At the same time, sports people are like, we don't want politics in our sports. Yes, you do. Right. Well, it led to the question of what people defined as being politics.

Like somehow the symbolism is not seen as politics because based on the very political assertion that we all, this is, at once, this is all ours, right? That's right. I would also, I think many people would also argue one of the things that happened as a result of 9-11 and exacerbation of something that was present, which is the idea that the American flag belongs to white people, right? That's right. People would waive the American flag while they said bigoted things the way people once waved the Confederate flag when they would say those things.

The Confederate flag, we got that. That's all y'all, baby. Y'all can have that. You do that to the American flag. We over here like, well, shit, what we got. Well, exactly. Where's our flag, right? Right.

Well, and don't, I mean, I remember during those years, whenever I would go speak at universities, I'd talk to these kids and I'd be in these lecture halls, you know, 200 students and I would ask them, is the American flag a political symbol? How many of you believe that? Nobody's hand would go up. And I would say, well, what is it a symbol of? And then the hands would go up. Patriotism. And I'm like, what's a difference? What's the difference when you're at war? And you could see, the gears kind of turning, but they didn't know where they were turning to. I was like, all right, this is interesting, but, and then you just shut it down. It's like, okay, I don't, I don't know if I want to think about this, because to them, politics is Democrat, Republican.

It's not foreign policy. It's very, very narrow. And just as protest is identified with something that is considered anti-American, whereas we know that there have been plenty of protests coming from our government right now. They're protesting all the time. So what I found really interesting was it was the, you know, 9-11 made people think about what all of this meant,

and then they sort of concluded, I don't really want to think about this after all. Yeah, that is the one. When you get to and you're like, ugh, how about we talk about something else? How about we talk about something else? And what's really, really key about all of that is that it's happening in sports where we're not supposed to be talking about any of it. And it's a reminder that the people who do understand this

understand just how valuable this property is for non-sports subjects. because once again, where can you get this type of audience, especially in a post-cable streaming world where nobody's watching the same thing anymore, except sports? Like, where are those big audiences? Where can we go? Everyone's not watching all in the family at the same time anymore. It's all sports when you want to try to get that critical mass audience.

And that's the thing. Everybody's coming together for largely, same reason. Right? Like, it's a vibe. Like, the idea we're going to the game. That's right. And you can see it when something, you know, that's the power of sports.

Suddenly, everybody's a Knicks fan because now it's hot. Like, it's the, you know, when it becomes the thing to do, that happens in sports faster than virtually anything else. You know, it becomes that vibe because it, you know, when there's success, it sort of sweeps up the momentum. And it's entertaining and it's lucrative. And there's an opportunity there. And believe me, um, the conversations I had had with commissioners and executives and union members during these years, they all knew. They just couldn't buck the tide. They were like, look, I don't really think it should be in here either, but who's going to be the one to say no? Who's going to rip the

bandaid off? The bandaid still hasn't been ripped off. Last question I'll ask on this. no matter your politics, your views on the world or anything else, it is kind of undeniable that when the sports did come back, there was a certain feeling of unity and a bit of a euphoria that you saw go over those crowds. Like when you see George Bush throw out their first pitch, I think it was at Shea Stadium. I was there.

Yeah, it comes out and does it. It's a thing, right? Like, it was a moment. It was a movie as somebody would say. Well, I think it's important to remember, Beau. People were scared. Like, they were scared. You know, Americans, you know, it's, I've spent a lot of time watching a lot of the Italian

New Wave Cinema. And one of the beauties of those films, whether it's Rossellini or Felini or Visconti or any of those directors, they're actually filming in post-war Europe. That place is bombed to shit, right? I mean, those aren't movie sets, right? That's actually what it looked like. And when people go to ground zero, not anymore, but when they were, going to Ground Zero, this is what it looked like. When you go look at the Capitol, this is what it

looked like or not the Capitol when you look at the Pentagon, it looked like. And when we walked into Yankee Stadium, they told us that there were snipers on the roof, that there were snipers in the, you know, in the lights, there were snipers in the buildings across the street, and that George Bush was going to walk across there, you felt it because you were scared And you were rightfully scared because nobody knew what was going to happen next. I remember when we were walking into the bodega, two hours after the towers collapsed, that was surrounded by a whole bunch of first responders all caked up and debris and everything, and they were all, you know, doing their shifts.

And they were talking about how there was a fear that the gas mains were going to go up and that now that the city was vulnerable enough right now that there could be secondary attacks. people didn't know. And you found out what mattered to you during that time. I was at all those games. And believe me, when Ronan Tining came out and said it singing the long version to God bless America, absolutely you felt it. You discovered that this really mattered, like that who you were actually mattered.

And I don't think there are very many moments in anybody's life where you have to question who you are and what you stand for. And I remember we drove to, we drove to Chicago for that first series. And I'm sitting there because nobody wanted to get on an airplane. And we're at a truck stop in Indiana. Go and use a bathroom sitting there in a urinal. Dude, redneck dude is standing next to me. In Indiana. And he looks at me and he goes, you doing okay? That man would have never said a word to me. Today, before, there's one moment in the history of my life where that would have happened, and he actually meant it. We're on the same side today. This was six days after the towers, you know? Now, do you think there's anything that could happen now that could do

that again, where we are so partitioned now, I think in large part as a result of the effect that all this internet has had on us. Could it happen again? I don't know. Like, could sports be even viewed as that unifying force again? Is it possible? Well, it's possible because we don't know what's coming. You know, I mean, if somebody blows up the White House tomorrow, you know, from some, you know, from some missile site in Europe or the Middle East or wherever, yeah, we'll see how people respond. but the discourse, the way that we treat each other right now makes it very, very unlikely because of the exploitation of it. There is no, not only it doesn't feel like there's commonality. It feels like it's just, you know, that everything that happened is another step in the

manipulation. That's all. And the reason why I say that is because we had a global pandemic where people were dying daily. Everybody knows someone who died from COVID and still couldn't come together on that. Like, were you new people? I mean, I know a couple of people who died in the towers. Everybody knows somebody who died of COVID. You know, and that didn't bring people together. Sports didn't bring COVID together. You know, sports didn't bring people together during COVID. You know, and I've always wondered if there was a way when people came back or sports came back, but it was with no crowd, right? So there's no associated visual.

There was nothing that allowed for like a sharing of energy, right, or anything that, like, made. You mean empty stadiums with cardboard cutouts? Yeah, oh, wow, man. I forgot about the cardboard cutouts. Or like in Japan, where they ordered all the sex dolls or it's Korea, I can't remember which,

but they ordered all the sex dolls. And I'm surprised there was any of those left. I thought them things would have been flew off the shells. There's somebody bad than the motherfucker. You was wasting all that good, all that good freak on that. goddamn camera on the stadium that ain't nobody is. Yeah, but I think it's also important to remember that, you know,

there was a moment at Yankee Stadium when President Bush threw out that first pitch because people were scared. They were, I mean, literally scared for their lives. Let's not forget that in addition to 9-11, in addition to 9-11, you had the anthrax scare where anthrax was going through the mail. People opened up their mail, shaking their mail at arm's length. And then you had the DC sniper happening at the same time, randomly killing people. And no one knew if those things were connected or not. Try, you know, people were afraid to go get gas thinking you're

going to be randomly assassinated at the same time you saw the towers fall. America hadn't dealt with anything like that. This is, this was a Pearl Harbor level event where for the first time Americans were like, wait a minute, I'm in danger in my own home, in my own community. You never saw anything like that. Hey, man, D.C. snick for the wildest shit in all time. Wildest thing that ever happened. And biggest surprise of my lifetime, boy. I was like, hey, man, white folks can't blame this on us. There was somebody. They can't blame this on us. No, sir. Right? No way. I know. There was somebody with. the military-grade weapon shooting people out the trunk of his car.

But we ain't even know it was the trunk of the car at the time. Didn't even, exactly, didn't even know how. They didn't know where it was coming from. This dude was just smoking people, pumping gas. And every day they sent that same black man out there, moose. They sent moose out there every day to tell us that he ain't know nothing that we didn't know. Every day. And he had to sit him out there every day because people were shook, man.

Look. Yeah. Yeah. It was real. And the point is, is that nobody knew if this stuff was related or not. Right. So that's why you got, you know, so George Bush walking out there trying to do the presidential thing of saying, I'm not afraid. Of course, then he went and told everyone to go shopping. But at that moment, at that moment, everybody felt that because everyone needed. That's what leadership was all about. Everybody, even though it was completely symbolic or whatever, but at that moment, at that moment, everybody needed. That's what leadership was all about. Everybody, even though it was completely symbolic or whatever, but at that, but at that moment, that moment in that moment, it was like, okay, could somebody tell us we're going to be all right? And sports did that. Howard Bryant, check them out. Check out Kings and Ponds, which does not exactly talk about these themes, but you can get a full dissident, which I'm sure is available. We find books that sold that will talk about a lot of things that we have talked about here in this show.

The Kings and Ponds is also a beast. But man, I appreciate you. No, thank you. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us here on the right time. We do this four days a week. Ryan Brumley, handle things behind the scenes. Thank you, sir. Hit the voicemail line 3-2-3-5-9-6-7-67-67.

Remember, follow the right time. Subscribe, like, rate us, review us, give us five stars. You only give us four stars. I'm inclined to believe you are a hater. We'll talk to you guys in a couple of days. Take it easy.