Twenty-five years ago this week, I walked into the studio for my first day on morning radio in Columbus. Brian was the morning show host, and I was hired as the sports guy — the one who reads scores, previews games, maybe cracks a joke between the Foo Fighters and Snow Patrol.
It was a Tuesday. September 11, 2001. I had no idea it would be the last ordinary morning any of us would have for a long time.
The show wrapped the way mornings do. I did my sports report — mostly Ohio State football, with a little soccer mixed in, because near the end of the hour I was scheduled for a phone interview with Brandi Chastain of the U.S. women's national soccer team.
The Americans were set to play China that night at Crew Stadium. I'd interviewed her before; she was a pro who understood she was a role model to millions of young girls. All I had to do was let her talk.
Then, mid-sentence, she lost her train of thought and drifted. So did I. It turned out she had a TV on too. She was watching the same thing we were.
We ended the interview without a goodbye, without even promoting the game.
We'd had the Today Show up in the background, and Matt Lauer was telling America that a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. We threw to the top-of-the-hour commercials, and Brian and I stayed in the studio, staring at the screen. The camera atop NBC's studios at Rockefeller Center was locked on a distant shot of lower Manhattan, smoke trailing from the North Tower.
At first, we assumed it was a commuter plane — a terrible accident. But it didn't look like a commuter plane. It looked bigger. We stayed in the studio just long enough to watch the second plane hit the South Tower. It was just after 9 a.m.
As an NBC-owned-and-operated station, we had an intercom system wired directly to the network's bureau in New York — a line meant for news alerts, breaking national stories, programming changes. That day, it turned into something else entirely.
It almost sounded like play-by-play, one horror after another.
A plane had hit the Pentagon. Another had gone down in Pennsylvania. There were reports of car bombs. More planes unaccounted for. Nobody knew what was true and what was rumor, and for a few hours, it didn't matter — it was all treated as possible, because literally anything seemed possible.
Every news outlet in the country had its cameras locked on the same image: two towers burning against a blue sky. We watched it happen and rewatched it, over and over, like enough repeats might make it make sense.
As the day wore on, the country came to a stop. Every plane in American airspace was ordered to land. I remember hearing that the Columbus Crew, flying to a match in Colorado, got grounded in Alabama, stuck on a tarmac somewhere they never expected to be. All over the country, planes were setting down wherever they could — highways, small airports, wherever there was runway.
Then, by afternoon, something strange happened. If you were around that day, you'll never forget it. The sky went quiet. Truly quiet. No contrails, no distant engine hum, none of the background noise you don't notice until it isn't there anymore.
I started that morning as a guy on his first day of radio. I spent the rest of it in a newsroom, watching the horror unfold in front of the world. At the end of the day, the voice from the New York bureau told all the stations down the line that he was leaving, going to try to get home.
"Maybe I'll talk to you again tomorrow," he said.
By then, I knew something that a lot of people my age discovered that day: the world we knew yesterday was gone for good.