The forgotten 9/11 flight.
Or, at least, it has seemed that way.
United Flight 93 didn’t bring down the Twin Towers in New York. It didn’t leave the centre of the U.S. military empire in flames.
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Flight 93 crashed in an otherwise unremarkable field in Pennsylvania near a patch of hemlock trees, its hijackers unsuccessful – or foiled – in their attempt to fly the passenger jet into either the White House or The Capitol.
In some ways, however, Flight 93 has become the most crucial piece of evidence from that day of infamy because so much information has been gleaned from the crash site and from communications from the plane before it flew upside-down into the ground in Stonycreek Township at 563 miles per hour.
The world was shocked by 9/11, still is in many ways, and the world of hockey wasn’t insulated from personal grief that day. Garnet (Ace) Bailey and Mark Bavis, both Los Angeles Kings employees, were on United Flight 175, which was flown into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Bruce Boudreau, now the head coach of the Anaheim Ducks and then the coach of L.A.’s top minor league affiliate, was scheduled to be on that flight as well, but at the last minute his flight was changed.
For Tom McMillan, Flight 93 hit close to home. Literally.
Stonycreek Township is about 100 miles from Pittsburgh, the place where McMillan became a well-regarded hockey reporter and commentator when the Penguins first became great with Mario Lemieux. He covered the club from 1987 until 1992, when a nasty, nine-month newspaper strike changed the Pittsburgh media landscape, and then worked as a broadcaster and writer covering hockey until 1996, when he was hired by the Penguins as the team’s vice-president of communications.
McMillan’s also a Civil War buff and history nut in general. He has traced 31 relations to the Civil War, five to the Revolutionary War, several to ships that crossed the Atlantic to the New World in the 17th century. He’d written two books on the Penguins, but when the notion of writing a book on Flight 93 was presented to him, he simply saw himself as unqualified.
“Those other books were like high school book reports compared to this,” he laughs. “I knew I had absolutely no credentials. But I think some of us who work in sports always wonder if we could have done something more important.
“I was frustrated there wasn’t more to read about Flight 93, and really, not that much written about 9/11 in general. Nobody else was going to do it, so I figured I might as well try.”
The coroner of Stonycreek Township, a man named Wally Miller, was left in charge of dealing with the remains of those who died on Flight 93. He happened to also be a Penguins season ticket holder, and he was honoured by the club during the 2011-2012 season. Miller invited McMillan to come out and visit the Flight 93 crash site.
“I was trembling,” says McMillan, 58. “Just the sense of history. It’s a feeling I get when I walk at Gettysburg.”
Soon, he was hooked on the idea of a book. This fall, “Flight 93: The Story, The Aftermath and The Legacy of American Courage on 9/11” was published, and it’s a spectacularly detailed, compelling account of Flight 93, down to the seats passengers were sitting in when they decided to storm the cockpit, personal histories of the four hijackers and emotional transcripts of phone calls made to loved ones before the plane exploded in a giant fireball in that field.
“I found that so much of this story is out there, but it was in a thousand pieces,” said McMillan. “Somebody had to pull it all together.”
For someone who claims to have “no credentials,” it’s an impressive achievement. Then again, the sports journalism world is filled with writers who are not only gifted, but can cross lines between sports and the real world with a deft touch.
In Canada, writers like Stephen Brunt, Gare Joyce, Rosie DiManno, Cathal Kelly and Roy McGregor have done this time and time again and still do. Sportswriters love to tell stories, sometimes tragic, bittersweet ones, and sometimes that makes them uniquely qualified to deal with subject matter that requires a special care and consideration.
McMillan portrays the passengers who refused to quietly go to their graves as “citizen soldiers” on the frontline of a new war.
“It does go back to the same spirit as those who were at Lexington and Concord, staring down the British. It’s part of the heritage of America. People always wonder if modern people have that. Clearly these people did,” he says.
“For those of us who love history there’s always a mystery. In this case I think I took all the tools available of the things we know that happened, put them together sequentially, to know as much as much we’re ever going to know. Did they get into the cockpit? We’ll never know.”
Today, McMillan still works for the Penguins and is a volunteer at the Flight 93 Memorial near Shanksville, Pa., and will donate all his profits from the book to the memorial. His book is available on amazon.com.
“My whole motivation was to get the story and get it published. If it sells one or one million, I don’t really care,” he says.
“I never imagined I could get it published. I was going to do it just to do it. It was personal. I wanted to find out what happened.
“I told myself you have to do it because the story has to be written, before people die. While I was writing, the wife of the Flight 93 pilot, Jason Dahl, died. I definitely felt the weight of history writing it. I wrote the kind of history I like to read.”
Actually, he told the kind of multi-dimensional story the best sportswriters are often really good at telling. In a world of tweets, some worry this has been lost, or obscured. Clearly, it has not.