The Road Not Taken

By Michael Thier | STAFF WRITER

September 16, 2001

Joel Barone made a promise to himself when he signed his letter of intent to play football at Brown. "I said, 'I better travel by the first game of my junior year,'" the former All-State and All-Long Island player from Floyd recalled.

The 6-1, 225-pound linebacker made the travel roster as a sophomore but saw little action. So he pointed toward this season's opener at San Diego (2-0), originally scheduled for yesterday.

"We've been looking forward to this trip for a long time and it hurts to have it taken away from us," Barone said of the team's first scheduled flight since 1992. "But it's all miniscule right now."

Only seven hours after the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, Brown became one of the first programs to react to the atrocities. While most athletic departments debated whether to postpone games, Brown outright canceled.

"To me, it was a no-brainer," Brown coach Phil Estes said. "I was not going to put our athletes in jeopardy. No one knew how long this was going to last. We'll go with a nine-game schedule."

Estes interrupted positional meetings for a team prayer and told each player to call his family. During a subsequent meeting, Estes polled his players.

"Our captains stood up and said no one would feel comfortable getting on a plane," Estes said.

Although the issue that divided so many programs was settled, at least in Providence, there were more pressing concerns to be addressed. No one at Brown had heard from scores of alumni who worked in the World Trade Center or the surrounding area.

Initially, Savyille's Eric Webber, who set a single-season record for touchdown passes (30) last season and was an employee at nearby Goldman Sachs, was nowhere to be found when most high-rise buildings in the financial district were evacuated. But as order became somewhat restored and communication improved, Webber and most others got word to Brown that they were all right. Two former players, whose names have not been made public, are still among the missing and feared dead. "It's a heartache right now," Estes said earlier in the week. "All our emotions are tied up with this thing that happened. I don't think we'd be ready to play Saturday anyway. There's always somebody who knows somebody."

Athletic director David Roach said the game was canceled "out of respect and feelings for people at Brown and the nation that have been touched by this tragedy" and because the Ivy League's late start and stiff no-postseason policy rendered rescheduling an impossibility. Brown postponed all other events through the weekend.

"While I believe in normalcy, I also believe in time to reflect," said Roach, who also is the president of the I-AA Athletic Directors Association. "Sports are insignificant compared to what happened to New York City and the Pentagon."

"I would have loved to see the Ivy League take a stand and cancel all games," Estes said.

With a cross-country flight, Brown's situation was more precarious than other Ivy teams such as next Saturday's opponent, Harvard, which kept its scheduled game against Holy Cross.

"It's hard because we already start so late," Barone said. "For the game's sake, we want to play. We always want to play. But it's not worth it to put a whole team on a plane to California, considering all the hijacked planes were California-bound."

The team's flight would have been from T.F. Green Airport in Warwick, R.I., only 45 minutes from Boston's Logan Airport, from which the two planes that rammed the World Trade Center took off. Said Estes, "It struck a lot of fear in me that this could have been us a couple of days from now."