Flashback: You remember the day???

[ICEMAN JOHN SCULLY]

Ohio State Fair Epilogue: Heading home in the middle of the night with a van full of kids on our way back from the Ohio State Fair boxing tournament one year, we start seeing signs for NYC and I ask the kids how many of them have ever been to the City. I've got several kids including Moises Brigantti, Matt Remillard, Brandon Perez, Derek Warner, Jonathon Diaz, Brian Macy, Carlos Rosario and Marty Wilson (R.I.P.) with me and I find out that only one or two of them had even been there and none of them had been up close to sites like The Empire State Building, Madison Square Garden or the Twin Towers. It is a warm night out and there is no hurry to get home. The kids are all still up and unwinding from the excitement of the boxing tournament they just finished participating in the day before. So I head off of the George Washington Bridge and down the West Side Highway into Manhattan. You can see the World Trade Center towering above the rest of the city and, at night, it looks spectacular. All the kids are in awe. When I drove to lower Manhattan and pull up on the street we all get out and everybody cranes their neck skyward, letting out "Oooh's" and "Ahhhh's." A couple of the kids call their houses on their cell phones telling and tell their families "We're standing right outside the world trade center. It's big!!!" We talk about how old the buildings are, what it's like to stand outside on the tower roof (I did that a couple times. You used to be able to look down and see planes and helicopters that were flying below you), and then out of nowhere the recently crowned OSF light heavyweight champion Brian Macy says "You know it's crazy. These buildings are so tall and everything. It's like a plane could just fly right into it so easy. I'm surprised it never happened yet." I then tell them how, years earlier in 1933, a plane once flew right into the Empire State Building by accident. All the kid's begin to contemplate Brian's observation and wonder aloud if such a thing could ever happen again.

Three weeks later, on September 11, it did.