Deeply moved by 9/11, football coach Fassel takes action
Jim Fassel thinks back on it now and remembers all the eerie feelings after the world changed forever.
The United Airlines plane waiting to depart as one he was traveling on landed in Newark early that September day.
United Flight 93. Sitting at the next terminal. Loading passengers, all of whom would be dead within a few hours. Just waiting to depart.
The fact a high school classmate was a pilot for another of the doomed aircraft .
The 50 or so cars Fassel spotted at the Park-N-Ride at 5:30 a.m. the following day, when he didn’t understand at first why what was usually an empty lot at that hour was so busy with commuters heading into Manhattan from the Jersey side.
Then the next day came.
And the next.
And the blue car never moved.
And the black car never moved.
And the Mercedes never moved.
And this one and that one and this one and that one never moved.
“And after a while,” Fassel said, “I realized they belonged to people who had been in the World Trade Center. I’ve got a million of those eerie feelings.”
Fassel took a deep breath when reminded that today marks the ninth anniversary of Sept. 11 . He’s a man whose foundation has given more than
$1 million to families of police and fire and port authority officials who perished in the terrorist attacks, a man who walked through the rubble and ash and mounds of body parts shortly after those towers fell and vowed to never forget.
He hasn’t.
He took a deep breath and his eyes began to water.
Fassel is preparing the Las Vegas Locomotives to defend their United Football League championship but was head coach of the New York Giants in 2001, a season removed from a Super Bowl XXXV loss to Baltimore and beloved by those from Brooklyn to his home in Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J., and all boroughs in between.
The Giants had returned from a Monday Night Football loss at Denver early Sept. 11 and Fassel had bused back to his office to watch film when the first plane hit at 8:45.
He and others ran to the roof of Giants Stadium, where they saw the thick black cloud of smoke. As they watched, the towers collapsed.
He would be invited to tour ground zero four days later as a way to help encourage those searching for survivors, which really meant discovering and bagging the dead.
He remembers the first time he saw a bucket line, where dogs would aid firefighters and police in the search for evidence, which would be placed in a bucket and passed on.
He remembers the credit card and driver’s license, the face of a young man not 20 years old. Part of a finger being tossed in a bucket. Firemen pointing to buildings across the way. Roofs where bodies from the towers were blown upon impact from both planes.
“Our practice field was in a direct flight path to Newark Airport,” Fassel said. “Each time a flight went over us the rest of that season, everyone looked up just to see. Five minutes didn’t go by when I didn’t think about it.
“We all get caught up in our own busy lives — what we have, what we don’t have, what we want more of. We feel sorry for ourselves. I can get so upset over a loss, but there will be another one. The losses those people had they’re not coming back.”
He began helping and never stopped.
Frank Palombo was a fireman who died in the attacks and left a wife and 10 children under the age of 15. Fassel and a friend vowed to pay Palombo’s annual salary until the last child has graduated high school.
The coach helped purchase vans for the fire department and helped fund a Wall of Remembrance in Brooklyn, where each of 116 firefighters’ faces are engraved on black granite, along with their names, ranks and firehouses.
A few years ago, Fassel’s foundation made the single largest donation ($250,000) to first responder groups of Sept. 11 .
Fassel has a flag encased in glass that flew at ground zero . He has one of a few beautiful plaques made of metal scraps from the towers. Then President George W. Bush, then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and then New York Gov. George Pataki also own one.
There is also the commemorative fire helmet presented to Fassel upon receiving the Fire Commissioner’s Humanitarian Award, of which there are few higher honors bestowed in New York.
But mostly, Fassel has a million eerie feelings and a passion to continue raising funds, which he hopes will include staging his golf tournament in Las Vegas next year.
“We’re all here for just a certain period of time and you never know when it’s all going to end,” he said. “That day changed my life.”
His eyes watered and he stared into the distance.
Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618.
