September 11. It’s a sneaky motherf**ker of an anniversary. It’s a date that hides down the alley, around the corner with an overcoat heavy with inner linings of memories and emotions. No fake Rolexes here, folks, just recollections of an impossible day of fear, fury and chaotic disorientation.
Every year it is a date for myself and others to remember Craig Gibson, who was in the first tower of the World Trade Centre that was hit at 8.46am on that Tuesday in 2001. Many of us were at Rhodes University with Gibbo, some of us played football with him and all of us enjoyed a beer with him. Every year on September 11 I mean to write about something other than Gibbo, but then the day comes upon me and, well, it comes upon me, for some reason, harder than it did in 2001.
Perhaps I’m of that age when death is no longer a distant date but a constant with friends, family and pets shuffling off to wherever it is we shuffle off to, but in 2001 that distant date was very far away.
“It was the day when the unreal became the unimaginable,” wrote the New York Times. “September 11 2001, the crystalline morning when planes dropped from the skies and toppled the World Trade Centre and punctured a hole in the Pentagon, was a demarcation point that shattered the security of the country and introduced a nebulous and virulent enemy previously unfamiliar to most citizens.
“Nearly 3,000 people died that morning, the vast majority of them in the gnarled rubble of the Lower Manhattan towers, others at the Pentagon and in a rural Pennsylvania field. A numbed country with red-rimmed eyes came to understand the ugly menace of terrorism.”
That understanding is harder 24 years later. The line between terrorism and state-sanctioned war and attacks is blurred. The menace remains ugly, the news cycle is a maelstrom of the unbelievable, a playlist of missiles, assassinations, lies, starvation, poverty, theft, corruption and hubris. “Front pages” are now the gasping pages, where we go to shake our heads at the inhumanity of humanity.
And then there is sport. There is always sport. Gibbo was a huge sports fan, a Liverpool fan as I recall, so a man of rare taste and knowledge. I wonder what he would have made of the stories on today’s back pages, where sport sits far away from reality. The local news sites are full of rugby and football, and the shambles of a T20 cricket and the money paid for players at the SA20.
SA’s victory over England in the first T20 on Wednesday night was, according to The Times, “all rather farcical, of course it was. But it was a bit of fun, the very definition of cricket’s hit-and-giggle, and certainly better than nothing, though that was not the opinion of England’s captain, Harry Brook, who said afterwards: ‘It was a bit of a shambles of a night.’”
The Times led with Ben Proud, the 30-year-old swimmer who won silver in the 50m freestyle at the Paris Olympics last year. He has become the first Brit to sign up for the Enhanced Games, where “athletes are permitted to take performance-enhancing substances, is scheduled for May 2026 and is set to be the subject of a documentary by Rob McElhenney, the Hollywood actor and Wrexham co-owner”.
Drugs are one thing, but then we also have booze. English golfer Tyrrell Hatton “has revealed how his joy at qualifying automatically for the European Ryder Cup team resulted in him lying face down in a pool of his own vomit”.
That was brought about by “six glasses of wine at dinner before moving on to double gin and tonics and Disaronno sours. ‘They go down very easily,’ Hatton said. ‘And then I started the chants of getting someone to ‘down it’. Then every cocktail that followed was like a shot.’”
Drugs, vomit and a farce are the succour we need from a world out of control and slipping into madness. We cannot and must not forget September 11. It is a necessary if sneaky motherf**ker of an anniversary, but we will always have sport to hit and make us giggle.
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