The Associated Press

Whoever imagined 2001 would be an odyssey must have known something about sports.

Wednesday, January 02, 2002

Whoever imagined 2001 would be an odyssey must have known something about sports. What a journey it turned out to be.

There were familiar dramas that inflamed familiar passions: wins and losses, comebacks and retirements, sportsmanship and scandals. Then terrorists struck on Sept. 11, and suddenly the games didn’t seem quite so important.

Every sport cleared its schedule swiftly, then spent days wrestling with the question of when it was safe – and appropriate – to resume playing. There were no easy answers. Especially in New York and Washington, D.C., and especially while thick plumes of smoke still billowed across an uncertain horizon.

”The last thing we want to do is get on a plane and go to California for a game when all four of those planes that were hijacked were going to California,” New York Jets quarterback Vinny Testaverde said. ”My suggestion is if they want to play these games, each owner has to travel with his team to the game.”

The year began and ended with debate over whether the Bowl Championship Series rankings had picked the right college football teams to play for its national championship. But those were hardly the sharpest or most painful questions sports faced.

January closed with the Super Bowl trophy held aloft by the Baltimore Ravens and game MVP Ray Lewis, who a year earlier wore handcuffs and an orange prison jumpsuit as he faced murder charges.

February had barely reached its midpoint when racing great Dale Earnhardt was killed in a crash on the final turn of the Daytona 500. That left NASCAR to start its new TV contract worried by questions about safety – and without its biggest star.

”Dale Earnhardt is to Winston Cup what Elvis Presley was to rock ‘n’ roll,” said Larry McReynolds, the former crew chief for the fabled black No. 3 Chevy. ”When Elvis died, the music didn’t stop but it definitely changed.”

The XFL flashed too much skin and not enough good football, thankfully disappearing before the spring snows had melted. Summer brought stifling heat and figured in the deaths of two young men, Minnesota Vikings tackle Korey Stringer and Northwestern safety Rashidi Wheeler. People began asking questions about a sports culture that makes the risks so great by making the rewards even greater.

Struggling for answers, Minnesota owner Red McCombs could only shake his head.

”God needed the number 77 more than the Vikings,” he said.

But 2001 wasn’t just about loss.

Cancer survivor Lance Armstrong zoomed down the wide boulevard of the Champs-Elysees in Paris as Tour de France champion for the third straight year.

Tiger Woods won the Masters to claim his fourth consecutive major championship, raising questions about what to call golf’s Grand(est) Slam. The upstart Arizona Diamondbacks, around for all of four seasons, humbled the most storied, most successful franchise in all sports. They stared down the New York Yankees in the bottom of the ninth in Game 7 of the World Series with Mariano Rivera on the mound.

On the whole, though, it wasn’t a bad year for dynasties.

The emerging one in Los Angeles won its second straight NBA championship as Zenmaster-coach Phil Jackson soothed the on-again, off-again duo of Shaq and Kobe in plenty of time to beat Allen Iverson and the Philadelphia 76ers in the finals. And Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski won his third national championship in 10 years, reminding us that for all the things that have changed in college basketball, virtues like patience and preparation never go out of style.

Not that getting old was a bad thing. Michael Jordan came back to the game he loved in the NBA and grudgingly adjusted to the shortcomings of age at 38.

The best story in tennis was one-time prodigy Jennifer Capriati, who rediscovered her love for the game and won the Australian and French Opens. Annika Sorenstam won four LPGA events in a row and became the first woman to shoot 59 in a tournament. Then, after teaming with Woods to beat Karrie Webb and David Duval in the made-for-TV ”Battle of Bighorn,” she threw down the gauntlet for a real battle of the sexes.

”It’s fun to play with the guys,” Sorenstam said, ”but I wouldn’t mind playing against them, either.”

After a messy divorce from Indiana, Bob Knight landed on his feet at Texas Tech. Boston Bruins stalwart Ray Bourque struggled to keep his skates underneath him, but he finally got to take an emotional victory lap with the Stanley Cup – as a member of the Colorado Avalanche.

And talk about ambivalence: The warm memories of the best World Series in at least 10 years were quickly chilled when commissioner Bud Selig emerged from an owners meeting days later and threatened to wipe two franchises off the major league map.

Mercurial slugger Barry Bonds went where no batter had ever gone before and hit 73 homers. But soon after, several of the game’s steadiest and most beloved figures – Cal Ripken, Mark McGwire and Tony Gwynn – exited stage left.

Even the sweet tale of the Bronx Baby Bombers turned sour. Days after their inspirational charge at the Little League World Series, 14-year-old pitcher Danny Almonte got caught fudging his age.

Setting the record straight wasn’t just for kids, either. Fifty years after Bobby Thomson’s ”Shot Heard ‘Round The World,” members of the New York Giants admitted to stealing signs during the tail end of the baseball season.

”To me, it was a forbidden subject,” said Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca, now 75.

He served up the fateful pitch and lived with whispers of the Giants’ chicanery for years, yet kept his mouth shut.

”I didn’t want to demean Bobby,” Branca said, ”or seem like I was a crybaby.”

If only everybody else in 2001 had behaved so nobly.

George O’Leary was forced to resign five days after becoming head football coach at Notre Dame because he lied about his background. A month earlier, Loveland, Colo., high school coach John Poovey was suspended after his players smeared their jerseys with nonstick cooking spray so tacklers would slip off.

Salt Lake City officials fended off bribery charges in the buildup to the most expensive Winter Games ever, $1.91 billion by the time security costs and pork-barrel projects were folded in. In a sign of things to come, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2008 Summer Games to emerging economic power China, despite criticism over that country’s human rights records.

And yet there was no denying the restorative powers of our games, the simple joy of playing or watching somebody else do it.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, baseball fans in Boston paid tribute to their rivals, the Yankees, with an unscripted serenade of Frank Sinatra’s ”New York, New York.”

At an exhibition hockey game in Philadelphia, fans chanted, ”Leave it on!’ when President Bush’s speech to Congress was shown on the video screen before the third period. The speech was put back on, the game was suspended with the score 2-2 and the players shook hands afterward.

Across the country, American flags covered football fields from end zone to end zone in pregame ceremonies while cheers cascaded down from the stands in waves and washed over the police officers, firefighters and rescue workers being honored as real heroes.

”God Bless America” filled ballparks nationwide and made the seventh-inning stretch feel more like a revival meeting than a pause between at-bats.

And nowhere was that power more evident than on the streets of New York in early November.

Just before the start of the New York City Marathon, Ralph Maerz, of Lansdale, Pa., paused. Alongside him was his son, Noell, a father-to-be who was running his first marathon in his adopted city.

Maerz’ other son, Erich, was going to run, too, but he was killed in the World Trade Center attacks.

”It’s a way of doing something my son was going to do and this way all three of us can compete together,” Ralph Maerz said softly. ”The three of us.”