MINNEAPOLIS -- Mike Sherels' cell phone rang. The University of Minnesota linebacker's girlfriend needed to know something.
Was he on the bridge?
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Vehicles rest on a collapsed section of the I-35 bridge, less than a mile from the Metrodome where the Twins were playing the Royals.
Twins catcher Mike Redmond, readying for a game at the Metrodome, was worried. His wife, Michele, wasn't answering her cell phone. He kept retreating from the dugout to the clubhouse to try to reach her.
Was she on the bridge?
It was a question that every Minnesotan asked Wednesday night and into Thursday about a loved one, a neighbor, a co-worker, a distant cousin who couldn't be found.
Were they on the bridge?
Were they sitting in their cars at 6:05 on Wednesday night, at the height of a scorching summer's rush hour, a Twins game set to begin about eight city blocks away, when the 1,907-foot span that connects various parts of the University of Minnesota's campus, inexplicably and horrifically, collapsed 64 feet into the Mississippi River below?
Sherels was safe. Thankfully, his flight from a Big Ten preseason media confab in Chicago was delayed. Or, he could have been on the bridge.
"We were fortunate," he told ESPN.com. "It made me kind of shaky."
Michele Redmond was OK, too. She was nowhere near downtown and the bridge. But her ball-playing husband was anxious just the same, about her, about others.
AP Photo/Paul Battaglia
The Kansas City-Minnesota game was played Wednesday night, and the Twins observed a moment of silence.
"How many of those people were coming to the Twins game?" Mike Redmond asked Thursday, an unexpected off day because the Royals-Twins game was postponed to allow the recovery effort -- three-quarters of a mile away -- to continue without the crush of ballpark traffic. "How many? Who knows? As a player, we're playing a game we all love. But it's not life and death. In this tragedy, people lost their lives. It puts baseball in perspective. It does."
All in all, it's been a brutal, lose-all-perspective, sports-is-out-of-control week in the Twin Cities. This is perhaps the most cluttered of all American sports markets. It's a midsized metropolis, but it's home to four major professional teams; a multifaceted Division I athletics program with high-profile football, basketball and hockey teams; two struggling newspapers with competing sports sections; an active all sports-talk radio station; and a megareserve of cynicism. Championships, shall we say, are not common among Minnesota teams.
The Twins, struggling to stay in the American League's wild-card race, traded second baseman Luis Castillo to the Mets on Monday, and a sort of civic sports depression set in. Fans said that general manager Terry Ryan was giving up too soon, that owner Carl Pohlad is too cheap, and that, even though the Twins are finally going to get a new stadium in three years, the franchise won't commit to excellence. In the days that followed, ace pitcher Johan Santana popped off, accusing team executives of not caring. Santana had backing from his teammates.
Bruce Kluckhohn/US Presswire
Catcher Mike Redmond frantically tried to reach his wife during the Twins' game against Kansas City.
The city's angst got worse when the NBA Timberwolves unloaded their one and only superstar, Kevin Garnett, a day later in exchange for a bunch of no-names -- or so it seems here -- from the Boston Celtics. The transaction was splashed across the front pages of the local papers as though peace had been achieved in Iraq. The deal filled the sports pages with world-class hand-wringing about poor management and ownership of that team, too.
Meanwhile, there were grim faces in Mankato, Minn., where the NFL's Vikings began training camp. Local Web sites broke this news breathlessly: Running back Chester Taylor left practice with a bruised arm. "He winced as he walked off the field," the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported.
It was a rough sports week in Lake Wobegon, to be sure.
But laughable -- if it were appropriate to laugh -- compared to the bridge collapse.
"I think sports is a great diversion for all of us from the mundane things in our day-in and day-out life," said Twins president Dave St. Peter. "But our priorities get out of whack. As a team, we're focused on, 'We gotta win or we're five games out of the wild card.' Then events like this tragedy have a way of reshuffling the deck."
On Wednesday night, St. Peter made the decision that the Royals-Twins game, scheduled for 7:10 that evening, should be played, even though the rescue effort was still going on just a long fly ball away from the Metrodome, even though everyone outside the cocoon of the Dome was in a state of shock.
"An incredibly difficult decision," he said.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Television pictures, said the University of Minnesota's Mike Sherels, couldn't do justice to the destruction he saw from the banks of the Mississippi River.
But public safety officials agreed. There were already 25,000 people at the Dome. To send them home as the state's emergency response teams blanketed the area around downtown Minneapolis would have placed thousands of cars -- and even more gawkers -- onto the city's streets.
"In a strange way, we tried to provide a service by playing the game," St. Peter said.
But not on Thursday. St. Peter knew the series finale against Kansas City should not go on. The Twins and Royals will play that game Friday afternoon as part of a split doubleheader, with the weekend home series against Cleveland being played as scheduled, starting Friday night.
"It's important for sports to take a step back sometimes," he said. "We have to be cognizant of the real life-and-death situations that confront a community."
Sherels, a senior business and marketing education major, saw the real life-and-death situation up close. Winding his way through traffic on his way home from the Twin Cities airport, he finally arrived at his off-campus house, which is about six blocks from I-35W and the site of the bridge failure.
The linebacker couldn't believe his eyes.
"It's something that the TV can't do justice to," he said Thursday, recalling what he saw on Wednesday night as he stood on the banks of the Mississippi while cars dangled, bent steel wrapped around broken cement and helicopters whirred overhead. "On TV, it seems so small-scale."
Mark J. Rebilas/US Presswire
Gophers' linebacker Mike Sherels was on his way home when he saw the devastation.
He saw civilians and uniformed rescue workers dive into the river's murky water to try to save people trapped in cars. He heard a story of a father who recognized his daughter's car, broke through police barriers and tried to save her. He called teammates and teammates called him, making sure everyone was accounted for.
"At times like this, you cease to be an athlete," Sherels said. "Humanity kicks in. It doesn't matter that training camp is three days away. It puts everything into perspective. You realize how lucky you are, especially us as athletes, to get a college education for playing a game -- to stand there and watch that in the river and realize that I play a game for my college tuition. That means I don't have to work everyday. I don't have to commute to campus. I don't have to drive over that bridge."
It's always this way.
Sept. 11 happens, and games are called off. Things are put in perspective -- for a day or two -- and then sports push back to the forefront for so many of us.
Hurricane Katrina happens, and stadiums are demolished. Residents evacuate, teams leave, sports are pushed into their rightful corner … and then they always pop back out.
Bruce Kluckhohn/MLB Photos/Getty Images
Jerry Bell, president of Twins Sports Inc., was supposed to break ground on the new baseball stadium Thursday night. He can wait.
But Jerry Bell can wait. He's waited for a dozen years, already. For 12 years, Bell was Twins owner Carl Pohlad's personal stadium emissary. Bell lobbied tirelessly for a new baseball stadium for the Twins. Minnesota, for all its sports teams, has been a bastion of anti-tax, anti-public-funding sentiment. Every day, Bell's drive from downtown Minneapolis and the Metrodome to his suburban home took him over the Mississippi on I-35. Over the bridge.
"Sometimes three, four times a day," he said.
Finally now, after countless run-ins with the legislature and numerous architectural plans, a new ballpark is about to be built. Bell, ready to retire once the stadium opens in 2010, was really looking forward to Thursday night.
Gov. Tim Pawlenty, MLB commissioner Bud Selig, Twins Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew -- they were all going to assemble at a cleared parking lot about two miles from the bridge to watch Bell, the worker bee for the new $522 million outdoor baseball palace, put a shovel into the ground and get construction ceremoniously under way.
But the groundbreaking, Bell's big moment, was canceled.
"Here they are, so close to the site, looking for bodies in the river, and what we were talking about was a celebration," Bell said. "The two don't mix. Sure, this puts sports in perspective.
"But, you know what? Sports should
always be in perspective."
Jay Weiner is a sports reporter in Minnesota. He can be reached at jay@jayweiner.com
Source: ESPN.com
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