Fans of the Kansas City Chiefs acknowledge the terrorist attacks 4 years ago during a game against the New York Jets on Sept. 11, 2005 in Kansas City, Missouri. (Brian Bahr/Getty Images)

"The only two things that got my mind off it at any period of time in the fall of 2001 were baseball and my son's football games."
– former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani in the HBO documentary "Nine Innings From Ground Zero."

As we mourned the unfathomable and heart-wrenching events of Sept. 11, 2001, it seemed that life would never be the same. Questions were asked about New York’s ability to recover, about what the attacks would do to the open society of the West. Would this be the end of irony and comedy?

But sports soldiered on, hardly missing a beat. Both from a hard, schedule- and money-driven point of view, and from the perspective of where sports fits in our collective mindset, leagues were resumed, interest returned and the rhythm of the game was maintained.

The Sept. 11 attacks have changed plenty of things, maybe forever. But it didn’t change sports.

While fires still raged at Ground Zero in New York, sports leagues were faced with the difficult decision of whether to cancel play. After some debate, the National Football League decided to postpone its 15 scheduled games on Sunday and Monday, while Major League Baseball followed suit by postponing its full slate of games through Sunday, Sept. 16.

Major-league teams that had been playing on the road took buses home because every airport was closed. Some athletes, like then-Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens, returned to their respective hometowns to be with their families, while others toured Ground Zero and local hospitals to offer support to rescue workers and victims' families. Sports venues were also used in the rescue efforts. Giants Stadium, for instance, was used as a staging ground for volunteers and supplies for rescue workers at Ground Zero.

Return to normalcy

Just as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill chose not to close movie theatres as England was being pummelled by German bombs during the Second World War, U.S. President George Bush encouraged Americans to return to doing the things they loved: shopping, travelling, even watching baseball.

One month after 9/11, the World Series that year featured the Arizona Diamondbacks and New York Yankees in New York. Many people felt the event was cathartic.

In the HBO documentary Nine Innings From Ground Zero, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said: "The only two things that got my mind off it at any period of time in the fall of 2001 were baseball and my son's football games.

"There was something about baseball, which is the American sport. And it's outdoors, and it's in the fall, and it was right in the city that had been brutally attacked. It had a wonderful impact on the morale of the city. It was exactly what they needed to get their eyes up off the ground and looking into the future."

After Sept. 11, sports gave the world an outlet from the pain, death, destruction and debate of the attacks. There were home runs, there were strikeouts, there were tackles, there were touchdowns. There were wins and losses on an inconsequential level. There was entertainment. Something that allowed people to feel again, even if it was just for a short time.

Conventional wisdom would indicate that sports would be a way to escape the horrors and reminders of such events as Sept. 11. It's a chance to escape into a fantasy world. A world where rules are followed, where fans cheer on their familiar tribes — it's the ultimate form of escapism.

Josh Santimaw, a native of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who now lives in Halifax, was living in Westchester in White Plains when the planes struck the World Trade Center. He could see the smoke from his office, a half-hour by train from the twin towers.

He was one of the many who heeded Bush’s call to get back to normal.

"When baseball came back … I didn't feel they needed to cancel as much as they did, but I felt good when it was back. It gave everyone an outlet," Santimaw told CBC Sports Online. "There was no outlet for a time. It gave everyone something different to talk about, especially with the Yankees in the playoff race and football just starting. It was something to shut your mind off it."

Sept. 18 marked the Yankees' first game after Sept. 11, an American League contest against the White Sox in Chicago. Santimaw joined his dad and uncles to watch the game on television.

"It was great. It gave us something else to talk about," he said.

But Peter Donnelly, a professor in the Faculty of Physical Education and Health at the University of Toronto, argues it's not as deep as that.

"I don't get that sense. People were going [to games] anyway," said Donnelly, who is also the Director of the Centre for Sport Policy Studies at U of T. "I think if there was really hardship in the society like during the Second World War and the Depression, there is an escapism that took place through sports and the movies. That kind of hardship isn't in place. There are no effects of being at war in either Canada or the United States apart from losing some of our citizens. There is no rationing, there are no real codes of security apart from against our brown population."

Jay Coakley, a professor with the Sociology Department at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, said that sports took on a more practical role after Sept. 11. Watching Monday Night Football or cheering on your favourite team on Hockey Night in Canada each Saturday was a way to regulate or bring back some kind of structure to the week.

"People had been glued to their televisions for a few days, and there was all sorts of uncertainty about what kind of reaction would occur from the United States on this, and their lives were disrupted for at least a week regardless of where you were," he said.

"Sports, on a more sociological level, provided a way for people to regularize and resume their normal lives," said Coakley, author of the book Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies. "People wanted to restore some normalcy to their lives even though they knew their lives had changed in a global sense. People were seeking for ways to restore that structure and sport was one of the ways.

"There was that debate [about whether it was callous to play professional sports again], but from a popular culture perspective we needed to get re-oriented and be able to think in some organized ways," he added. "The only way you're going to do that is to get some structure and patterns back into your life. I'm not saying sport was anything magical there, but it was one of those things that helped."

Sports the ultimate outlet

Coakley said the weeks after Sept. 11 reminded him of the days in the 1950s and '60s and the Vietnam War in the '70s when there were flyovers and the Colour Guard.

"That was really an integral part of football, then it all kind of went away and then it came back. In some cases the flyovers were connected with security issues, but they were a show of military presence and they were associated with the game and they occurred at a halftime or a break in action, and so all of a sudden we had a remerging of government, military and sport."

Santimaw was witness to that, though in way that wasn’t quite so martial: "It was moving when the Yankees wore the FDNY and NYPD and NYPA hats and the team was getting standing ovations. You saw all the signs in the stands like 'We're with you New York.' We weren't hated for a change. We weren't the Evil Empire."

Measuring the economics

In the weeks and months after Sept. 11, the sports world, like the travel and tourism industry, took a while to get back on its feet. Sports recovered more quickly than most other walks of life, though.

"In terms of the financial impact, I don't believe it had a great financial impact in terms of people going to games," says Howard Bloom, publisher of sportsbusinessnews.com.

Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani give fans a thumbs up during Mets' game at Shea Stadium in Flushing, N.Y. on Sept. 21, 2001. It was the first major sporting event in the New York area since the World Trade Center disaster. (Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

Bloom says it's hard to peg an exact dollar figure for how the events of Sept. 11 financially affected the sports world, but offered up an anecdote about the Super Bowl in February 2002.

"The Super Bowl has always been considered the toughest ticket other than the Masters in sports. You go to a ticket broker or whatever and tickets are going to cost you $2,000 to get in the door," he said.

"[But that year] tickets could be had for as low as $50 for that game. It was unheard of. But in February of 2002, people weren't yet ready to travel and the Super Bowl got postponed by a week, so people couldn't necessarily change their travel plans even if they planned on going. That certainly was the economic barometer of the time.

"But now, everything has gone back to the way it was before 9/11. Tickets are again impossible to find. People are paying a king's ransom to get in the building."

Five years later, Bloom says, the sports world is virtually the same as the day before Sept. 11.

"Attendance at sports events? Never been stronger than it is now. Sponsorship of sports events? Never been stronger. In terms of broadcast rights, every economic indicator is that the sports industry is bigger and better than it's ever been," he said. "Would things change if the unthinkable happened and a sports event was a target, maybe, but I don't like talking in those hypotheticals."

Security is the new consciousness

One thing that hasn't returned to normal is security.

"Five years later, security is greater than ever," Bloom noted. "… And yes, there's certainly an increased cost of that, but the misnomer is that [security] existed before 9/11 and it should always be a part of going to a concert or going to a sports event."

The sports world was much different eight days after Sept. 11. Stadiums turned into fortresses. Bags, IDs, cars were checked. The beeping of metal detectors became a familiar tune to ears. Heads of stadium security co-ordinated with local law enforcement, and for bigger events, created in-depth surveillance plans with the FBI.

In the professional sports world, security figures vary from team to team, but according to a Street & Smith report in the Sports Business Journal in October 2001, it was estimated teams would spend more than $30 million over the course of the next year to beef up security. A survey of sports executives in the same report estimated the cost per team would be $235,000.

These numbers pale in comparison to the hundreds of billions spent by the U.S. government on homeland security, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the “special ops” war on terror, or the hundreds of millions spent every two years on security at the Olympics. The Olympics, in fact, are the bellwether of Sept. 11's impact on sports.

With the Salt Lake City Winter Games scheduled just five months after the attacks on New York and Washington, there was immediate debate from both government and sport officials about whether a sporting event of global magnitude could be held such a short time after. There was talk of relocating or even cancelling, as the Olympics were in 1916 because of the First World War and again in 1940 and 1944 because of the Second World War.

Security concerns were nothing new to the Olympics. At the 1972 Munich Olympics, 11 Israeli athletes were killed after being taken hostage by PLO militants. That event changed security at the Olympics forever, with each set of Games taking surveillance to a higher level.

But after Sept. 11, security at the Olympics was more stringent than ever.

As the first Olympics after Sept. 11, Salt Lake City set a new standard. Security personnel outnumbered the 2,500 athletes by nearly 2 to 1, causing many people to muse that Salt Lake City was "the safest place on earth."

Measures varied from an 84-kilometre radius restricted flight zone over Salt Lake City and its nine Olympic venues, to fortress-like walls surrounding the Olympic Village, to thousands of security cameras at every perch and point of the city, to checking ventilation systems for anthrax.

Nothing was overlooked. At the cross-country skiing venue at Soldier's Hollow, athletes got more than they bargained for during training sessions for their races. Police snipers, dressed in white snowsuits for camouflage, hid in the trails armed with high-powered rifles.

The cost of security at the Winter Games was $310 million US.

Two years later, the Athens Games put Salt Lake City to shame, running up a security tab of a staggering $1.8 billion — four times more than was spent on the previous Summer Games in Sydney and far outstripping the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, which cost the security equivalent of pocket change: $150 million.

This year, the biggest sporting event in the world — soccer’s World Cup, hosted in Germany — demonstrated Sept. 11’s security legacy in both subtle and in-your-face ways.

Toronto lawyer Josée Guibord and her boyfriend were invited to see the Iran-Portugal game while on a business trip to Frankfurt.

Before the pair departed Canada, they were asked for their passport numbers to co-ordinate with their game tickets, and told to bring their passports when they attended the game at the Waldstadion.

"I was a little concerned before we left and then when we got to Germany, we realized we were in the same hotel as one of the teams," she said. "There was a ton of security, guys walking around with ear pieces. It was a little intimidating."

On game day, Guibord, her boyfriend and some colleagues took a minivan to the game and parked underneath the stadium. Before they could park, everyone was asked to step out of the vehicle. Tickets were checked, the van was searched and scanned with a detector and security dogs were standing by.

Once they parked, they all went into the stadium through another metal detector and had their bags checked through an airport security conveyor belt. They had to wear their ID passes at all times in case security stopped them at the several checkpoints throughout the stadium.

Despite all the security measures, Guibord enjoyed her experience.

"It took a while to get in," she said. "Once we got in there, I felt really safe."

Plus ca change…

In times of trouble, government has the role of protecting public safety and ensuring its citizens have the basic necessities of life. The media are looked upon to give the who, what, where, when, why and how of what is going on in the world.

For many, the arts world, on the other hand, has assumed the role of interpreter of horrific, revolutionary, hard-to-grasp events.

From Picasso’s Guernica to the photography of Robert Capa to books like Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, to Eric Fishcl’s interpretation of Sept. 11, Tumbling Woman, art has tried to divine meaning and sense from cataclysmic events.

"This was the event that would require art to make it understandable," Fischl told the CBC’s Brian Stewart in last week’s TV documentary Shadows of September.

But sports? Well, sports has never been about that. There are no Guernicas of sports (though Cubs fans may disagree). Just the opposite, in fact. For most, sports is an escape, a self-contained world with its own rules, culture, codes and characters.

And it does its best to shelter itself from the outside world. Most sports are inherently conservative, slow to change even while the society around them is in the throes of revolution. Battling that conservatism made people like Jackie Robinson legends.

That insularity may be a big reason why the sports world today bears an uncanny resemblance to the sports world of Sept. 10, 2001.

And most sports fans would tell you, that’s not such a bad thing.