Hour 2: Al Leiter

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This is The Michael Kay Show podcast.

**Michael Kay** (0:19)
I gotta get more Kay.

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**Michael Kay** (0:26)
Welcome back to the show everybody, as we remember 25 years ago today, the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and also the plane crash in Pennsylvania. Also, we're talking sports, trying to take you away from some of the bad memories. So much of it is going on today with the remembrance down at Ground Zero, beautifully, beautifully done and the reading of all the names of the people that that perished.
I remember I was like Howie.
I didn't know sports place after 9-11, 25 years ago. I was kind of lost. Obviously, like most people, frightened what was our world going to become. And we all at that time were wondering what was next. We didn't figure that it was going to be a one-off, that there were other things that were going to come. And I didn't, I didn't feel that sports fit. I didn't feel that our little reindeer games, um, fit in the world view of what was happening.
But President Bush told, um, baseball, you got to get back on the field. People need this. So it was about a week later, Yankee Charter flew to Chicago, and the Yankees played the White Sox. And I was doing radio at the time with John Sterling, and I just remember in that booth, I was empty. I didn't feel any excitement whatsoever. And, you know, you all know the story. This is my lifelong dream to be the Yankee announcer. I've never had a day previous to that where I didn't feel like being there. But on that day in Chicago, I didn't feel like being there and I didn't feel like I belonged there. And I remember calling the game with John with no enthusiasm whatsoever. And I was behind the mic in my three innings of work. And, you know, over that day, in the next couple of days, got to call a couple of home runs. And you all know my silly home run call is see ya. And I didn't say it.
I didn't have the energy nor the desire to get excited about a home run. I just didn't. I felt how inconsequential this is with what we're going through right now. As a country, as the human race, what we're going through. And I couldn't sum it up. I didn't. I didn't want to insult the people that were still looking for the remains of loved ones down at Ground Zero. I just felt, wow, how inappropriate. Well, after that short road trip, we got back to the stadium. And waiting at the stadium was a whole mess of envelopes, mail.
You know, this would be for social media. And so that was the way people communicated with you. And I'm sitting in the booth at Yankee Stadium, the old Yankee Stadium, and I'm reading the letters.
And people were saying, you can't do this. You can't not be enthusiastic. You can't just flatline your way through these games. These games, they are our respite. They take us away from the things that you feel that you're being disrespectful to. We want to feel normal again. We want to hear you and John get excited. That's what we want. By you being different, then we know it's different.
You can't be different, because then we really know we'll never get back to normal. And for some reason, those letters and people I ran into publicly, that would say the same thing, it resonated with me. And I also got a feeling at that time what it meant and what sports means in our worldview.
Because despite what goes on outside of our little candy store or a toy store, sports brings us back to our innocence. Sports takes us away from the tough points of the day. Now, if you're a 9-to-5 worker, you want to sit down and you want to watch the game, and you want the game to be a distraction from something that might be bad in your life. For those 2.5 to 3 hours, or back in those days, 3.5 hours, that was your respite. And there was a place for sports. And I remember going down to Ground Zero with a couple of my co-workers at MSG. I was with the late Al Troutwick, and we were handing out baseball caps or whatnot. And to see how tired all the workers were, as they were digging in the rubble. And they looked at us, and when they saw us, there was some spark. There was life back in their eyes. And they told us those stories about what the games mean to them, and that they've got radios down there when they're working late into the night to listen to the Yankee game, to listen to the Met game, and that it did mean something.