From the Managing Editor: Remembering 9/11, 25 Years Later

This essay is recalls one person’s relationship with the events of September 11, but reflects a commonality shared by millions, even for those who did not have direct connections to the terrorist attacks of the day. From their birth in 1973 to their death 28 years later, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City were landmarks, tourist attractions, office buildings. Now they exist only in memory. For SportsTravel managing editor Ted Keith, there are many ways in which sports and community and even travel — the bedrocks of this industry — are reflected in his experience of that day and all the years that have followed.

They would appear on the horizon like apparitions, lodestars beckoning me northward. While driving up the New Jersey Turnpike the would slowly came into better view, until I would reach the Verrazano Bridge and see them in all their splendor: the mighty Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, dominating the landscape at the southern tip of Manhattan. A couple dozen miles to the east lay my destination, the village of Garden City, N.Y., on Long Island. The towers were the first sign that roughly eight hours of traveling, I was almost home.

From 1998-2002, I lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, while attending UNC. In August 2001, I was back in New York and interning in Manhattan when my girlfriend (now wife) and some of her family members came to visit from North Carolina. We went to the city one day and made tentative plans to have dinner with a friend of mine at Windows on the World, the famed restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower. But the day got away from us, so we settled for simply ducking in the lobby of the North Tower and walking around the plaza where the buildings stood, craning our necks in an unsuccessful attempt to photograph the top of the what had once been the tallest buildings in the world.

When that failed, I bought a picture prominently featuring both the towers and told my guests we’d try going to the restaurant another time.

That picture was waiting for me on Sunday, September 9, 2001, when I flew back to North Carolina with some friends the day after attending the Tar Heels’ 44-14 drubbing at the hands of the No. 4-ranked Texas Longhorns in Austin. A day later, I was up late watching “Monday Night Football” featuring my team, the New York Giants, and attending a social event. I didn’t have class until 11 a.m. on Tuesday, so I slept in. When I woke up sometime around 9:30 and stepped into the hallway, I was greeted by my housemate shouting a curious message: “They bombed the World Trade Center.”

What did that mean? Having been raised in the nearly literal shadow of New York City, my first thought was that this must be a replay of the day in February 1993, when terrorists used a bomb in a parking garage to try to destroy the Towers. They had failed. This time, I would soon learn, they had used passenger airplanes as missiles — and succeeded.

Beyond my initial confusion was an escalating sense of concern: my father had commuted to work in Manhattan that morning. Was he OK? And when I learned that the nation’s capital had also been attacked, the fear grew: my sister had just started her freshman year in college in Washington D.C. Was she OK?

I called home from my house’s landline (remarkably, I didn’t have a cell phone) and learned from my mother that my sister was fine. There was no word yet on my father. It would be several anxious hours before I heard that he was safe; he later said that at one point that afternoon he stepped out onto Sixth Avenue to watch the smoke pouring into the sky.

For some reason my first class that morning was held as usual. With my next class in the same building scheduled for 12:30 p.m., I tried to use the 15 minutes in between to learn more about what was going on. The computer lobby was largely empty, but getting additional information was nearly impossible because of the painfully slow-loading internet backed by overwhelmed servers. I made it as far as the homepage of CNN.com, which displayed the ominous and unforgettable headline “U.S. Under Attack,” featuring a picture of a jetliner headed for the side of the North Tower — the building my guests and I had set foot in just a month earlier.

Our philosophy professor greeted us at the door in tears, telling everyone to go home. Like the rest of the world I spent most of the day watching television, but by late afternoon I needed a break. I went down to the rec fields to see some friends play a flag football game that had, impossibly, not been canceled. Their protests at the referee’s calls seemed inappropriate, to put it mildly.

That evening I heard of my first personal connection to the events unfolding 500 miles away. Ryan Kohart, a UNC lacrosse alum who had grown up in my hometown, was missing and, we would later learn, had been killed in the attacks. I knew his younger brother.

Back in my hometown, my youngest brother, at the time a high school freshman, had seen classmates picked up that day by their parents because their family members were feared to be dead. In some cases, those fears were realized.

The devastation in Garden City was so pronounced that People magazine did a piece on it that fall. In March 2002, Newsday, Long Island’s biggest newspaper, marked the six-month anniversary of what not yet being called 9/11 — the story contained 22 references to “Sept. 11” but none to the now-familiar “9/11” shorthand — by publishing an 11,000-word story on that day and its aftermath in the village.

In October, I went back to New York for the first time since the attack, driving home for fall break. The skyline was noticeably empty. One night I went to a church vigil and found a list with the names of the 23 residents of our community who had died, the most per capita of any suburb in the metro area. My finger stopped on one name in particular: a young man whom I had frequently played pick-up basketball with named Jonathan Cappello. He had worked on the 104^th floor of the North Tower for Cantor Fitzgerald and was just 23 years old.

The next day I went to Ground Zero for the first time. There was still light-colored smoke wafting from the rubble.

Life

Seven months later, I graduated from Carolina, and within a year I was living in Manhattan. Some UNC alums and I began playing in a flag football league from a new recreational organization called ZogSports. Its founder was Robert Herzog, who was inspired to do something meaningful with his life after September 11. That morning he had showed up a few minutes late to his first day of work at Marsh McLennan insurance company. Instead of being at his desk he was out on the street watching the collapse of the buildings that would kill 358 of his would-be colleagues.

I lived in New York City and the surrounding area for the next 15 years. All of them were colored by the events of 9/11, and not just because armed military personnel were a common sight on the subway or because Irish tenor Ronan Tynan would sing a full version of “God Bless America” during playoff games at Yankee Stadium. When a blackout occurred in August 2003 that left the city coated in darkness, my immediate thought the instant our office computers and lights blinked off was that it must be another terrorist attack. In 2006 the FBI announced it had disrupted a plot by terrorists to blow up train tunnels connecting New York and New Jersey, one of more than a dozen such plans that were foiled in the first 10 years after the attacks. In the summer of 2011, an earthquake that struck near Richmond, Va., was powerful enough to reach Manhattan, where I sat on the 32nd floor of the Time & Life Building and felt the 48-story building sway from side to side. I stayed put, but a friend who worked elsewhere at the time but had been near Ground Zero on 9/11 said later he simply got up and went home, telling bemused colleagues, “I’m not taking any more chances.”

Most days, of course, were normal, but reminders of 9/11 could come from out of nowhere. I once went to a small bar in Manhattan and was surprised to see a framed No. 77 Garden City High School football jersey hanging up. It was there in honor of Paul Eckna, a fellow Trojans alum who died in the attack at age 28.

Other reminders were more deliberate, and more frequent. In 2014, I commemorated the 13th anniversary by doing a Q&A with Bill Colson, the managing editor of Sports Illustrated in 2001, on how SI had scrapped its usual plans that week and created a 100-page issue completely devoted to sports through the lens of what had taken place just days earlier, a monumental feat of journalistic excellence. He described his first duty that week: confirming that all of his staffers were still alive.

In December 2015, Time Inc. moved its offices to Brookfield Place across the street from Ground Zero. Each day I would walk past the 9/11 Memorial and the footprint of the original towers, where I would sometimes go find the names of Ryan Kohart and Jonathan Cappello. On the 16th anniversary of the attacks, before going to the subway station located next to the 9/11 Museum, I stopped to gaze at the Tower of Light, the beam that served as an annual tribute to the day’s events. For a few years, I had office space in the new World Trade Center, the 1,776-foot building known as the Freedom Tower. It is an impressive place. It’s just a shame it ever had to be built.

Stories

Over the years, I’ve learned other people’s stories. A few stood out. A friend of my older brother once provided a detailed saga of escaping (calmly, he said) from the 70th floor of the North Tower and walking several miles home amid survivors covered in ash.

A young woman my sister knew had a close call of a different sort. On Sept. 10, 2001, she was laid off by Cantor Fitzgerald, so she was not in the office the next day when 658 of that company’s employees perished.

A woman who worked with my wife was at the time an employee of Aon Corporation in the South Tower, but she was not in the office on the day 176 of her colleagues died.

The stories are endless, and anyone with ties to the area has them. Thankfully 9/11 was not more personal — but it was relatable. I’ve been on the spot where a half-mile worth of steel and concrete crashed down from the sky. I’ve walked the exact streets people fled while an enormous smoke cloud chased after them. I’ve worked in skyscrapers and had to consider how I’d get to safe ground in an emergency, mostly because of the annual training sessions delivered by New York City firefighters, each of whom would share their own stories of 9/11 as a means of convincing us to heed their advice.

I know what it’s like to say goodbye to a parent while they go catch a train to Manhattan, as sure you’ll see them that night as you are that the sun would come up that morning. And I know what it’s like to be that parent, kissing a child goodbye to go work among the clouds in the greatest city in the world, telling them you’ll see them before they go to sleep.

It has now been a quarter century, and time has been a blessing. The world, the country and even the city have moved forward. I have too. I live in Chapel Hill again.

On this 25th anniversary I will start the day in the darkness by once again doing the pre-dawn 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb in Kenan Stadium, home of the football team I went to watch on my last plane ride before the world changed. I will be joined by first responders and military personnel, many in full gear. I will trudge up 2,071 steps, the same number as in each of the Twin Towers. I’ll be joined by my older son, who, like his brother, was born in Manhattan.

And I’ll wear my usual outfit: a Yankees cap with the interlocking NY and a maroon shirt bearing two words:

“Garden City.”

Ted Keith spent 15 years at Sports Illustrated and seven at Sports Business Journal before joining SportsTravel as its managing editor in January 2026.