by Tom Rinaldi
“When I heard the children sing,” she said, “I started coming apart.” She listened, trying to breathe deeply, to clear her mind, to focus on the short speech she’d written with Jeff, playing it through her memory. She was also deeply aware of Ling’s nerves and apprehension, not only at being back here but at playing a role, coping with the weight of attention placed on her. Speaking in her second language, Ling was going to introduce Alison, her face and voice projected on the screen. They sat together, waiting to be called. They listened as an honor guard made its march down the center aisle, toward the stage, turning to face the assembly as the choir then sang the national anthem.
Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, was the first to speak, and after brief remarks, he introduced Barack Obama to the stage. On the run of the program, the president was given three minutes—an extraordinarily short time, given the moment’s import and solemnity. Alison sensed he would speak longer than that, and knew her son would be included somewhere in the body of his remarks; to what extent, she had little idea.
Obama took long strides up the steps and moved behind the presidential lectern. He addressed the mayor, the governor, the guests, and the families of the fallen. Immediately after, he began to describe the scene on the 78th floor of the South Tower, mentioning the fire, the smoke, the darkness, the despair in the sky lobby’s sudden wreckage. He paused, allowing the image to linger across the room.
“And then there came a voice,” the president said. “Clear, calm, saying he had found the stairs. A young man in his twenties, strong, emerged from the smoke, and over his nose and his mouth he wore a red handkerchief.”
Alison, behind the screen, felt the breath inside her seize. The president continued.
“He called for fire extinguishers to fight back the flames. He tended to the wounded. He led those survivors down the stairs to safety, and carried a woman on his shoulders down seventeen flights. Then he went back. Back up all those flights . . . bringing more wounded to safety. Until that moment when the tower fell.
“They didn’t know his name. They didn’t know where he came from. But they knew their lives had been saved by the man in the red bandanna.”
The president spoke of the loss of nearly three thousand souls, saying the museum would forever provide a place “to touch their names, and hear their voices and glimpse the small items that speak to the beauty of their lives.”
But he singled out one life, and uttered one name, and described one man to the room, to the world.
“Welles was just twenty-four years old, with a broad smile and a bright future,” the president said, as images of Welles flashed across the large screen behind him, the colors spilling into the space where Alison and Ling sat, waiting.
“He had a big laugh, a joy of life, and dreams of seeing the world. He worked in finance, but he had also been a volunteer firefighter. And after the planes hit, he put on that bandanna and spent his final moments saving others.”
The speech lasted nine minutes, and at its conclusion, Obama called for the two guests waiting backstage to come forward.
“It is my honor to introduce two women forever bound by that day,” the president said, “united in their determination to keep alive the true spirit of 9/11—Welles Crowther’s mother, Alison, and one of those he saved, Ling Young.”
As they emerged into view, holding hands as they climbed the tall steps toward the podium, the president turned toward them and began to clap, along with the rest of the audience. He greeted them, kissing Ling on the cheek, and then bending forward with a full reach to embrace Alison, her arms wrapping around him. Walking toward their separate lectern, Alison tried to remain composed, to keep her mind clear, with one goal, when she spoke.
“I wanted to show strength, not weakness,” she said.
Ling began. “I’m here today because of Welles,” she said, her voice strong and clear. “It was very hard for me to come here today, but I wanted to do so, so I could say thank you to his parents and my new friends, Jeff and Alison.”
Alison looked at Ling, thanked her, and exhaled as she turned to the microphone. She spoke of her son in the present tense, not the past.
“My husband, Jefferson, and I could not be more proud of our son,” she said. “For us, he lives on in the people he helped and in the memory of what he chose to do that Tuesday in September. Welles believes that we are all connected as one human family, that we are here to look out for and to care for one another.”
From his seat in the second row, Jeff looked up at Alison and mouthed the words as his wife spoke them. Each had committed the speech to memory. As Alison continued, Jeff recited the lines silently, with tears in his eyes.
“It is our greatest hope,” she said, her voice ringing through the hall, “that when people come here and see Welles’s red bandanna, they will remember how people helped each other that day. And we hope that they will be inspired to do the same, in ways both big and small. This is the true legacy of September 11.”
Her voice carried north to Midtown, into the offices of Sandler O’Neill, sixty-six of whose employees came to work on the 104th floor that September day and never returned. Thirteen years later, survivors like Mark Fitzgibbon, Karen Fishman, and John Kline would hear her, as would the firm’s leader, Jimmy Dunne. In the years since the attacks, Dunne had rebuilt the company from the ashes of its mourning, more than doubling its ranks and strengthening its place on Wall Street. The firm had done more than endure. It prevailed, and was thriving. Dunne looked upon Welles with immense pride.
Her words reached west to Ohio, where Natalie McIver could hear them. In the days that followed 9/11, after she saw the first plane hit the tower from the deck of a Hudson ferry, after she slept in rather than coming in early, she worked in Sandler’s call center, reaching out to the families. The calls were crushing with the tonnage of grief, and she fought against the weight, trying to help. She went to Welles’s memorial at Grace Episcopal, among the dozens of other services, before eventually leaving New York City. But she kept a journal in the days after the attacks, and in it, Welles and other colleagues’ memories endured.
Alison’s speech echoed through the sunken ground where John Ryan, commander of the Port Authority Police Department’s rescue and recovery operation at ground zero, who’d spent months at work on the pile, might hear about one man’s sacrifice among so many. Like others familiar with the dimensions of the lobby and the location of its command center, he knew how close Welles was to making it out. As the former acting chief of the department, and a detective lieutenant of its joint terrorism task force, he worked to make sure no one would face such a sacrifice in the city again.
Alison’s remarks lasted exactly sixty seconds. When she was done, she paused for the slightest moment, looking out into the gathering. She looked down, and exhaled. With Ling by her side, she turned and left the stage.
• • •
It was September 13, 2014, a Saturday night in Chestnut Hill, and the Boston College Eagles football team was already down 17–6 before the end of the first quarter. They were facing another beating at the hands of a perennial college football powerhouse.
The game against USC was just following script as an obvious mismatch. The Trojans were ranked ninth in the country, a preseason pick by many to win the Pac-12 conference and a strong candidate for the first ever college football playoff at season’s end. Pundits from ESPN to Sports Illustrated had tabbed the Trojans as a national championship contender. Already notching a big win over Stanford on the road the week prior, they had little to fear coming east to Chestnut Hill and Alumni Stadium. USC had crushed the Eagles 35–7 a season earlier, and were thought to be a better and deeper team now. BC was a program trying to recapture its past football glory, trying to rebuild itself into a consistent team in the Atlantic Coast Conference, but the Eagles were just two years removed from a two-win season, and they came into
the USC game off a 10-point loss to Pittsburgh the week before. They had not beaten a top-10 team in ten years. By the betting line pregame, BC was viewed as a patsy. The Eagles were a 20-point underdog, at home.
But Coach Steve Addazio believed his team had one edge coming into the game—not in speed, strength, or talent, but in emotion. He’d spent the week trying to highlight this game as a great opportunity, not only to beat a top-10 team but to earn a foundational win for a program. He started by giving his players a story to think about.
After two years in his first head-coaching job, at Temple in Philadelphia, Addazio had arrived at BC before the 2013 season and started to build success quickly, lifting the team’s record from two wins to seven, and leading the Eagles to a bowl appearance that year. A football lifer who played at Central Connecticut and had tryouts with different pro leagues including the NFL, he became a high school coach close to his alma mater in Cheshire, Connecticut, leading the team to three straight state titles and, at one point, a thirty-four-game winning streak. In 1995, he made the move to college as an assistant coach, with stops at Syracuse, Indiana, and Notre Dame. During his time with the Fighting Irish, he met another assistant, Urban Meyer, who was on his way to his first head-coaching job, at Bowling Green, before going to Utah, and from there to Florida.
Addazio spent six seasons on Meyer’s staff in Florida, and was in Gainesville for two national championship teams, in 2006 and 2008. As an assistant, he learned many things from Meyer. Beyond the explosive production and inventiveness of his spread offense, where the field was stretched through the placement and use of the team’s fastest athletes, the coaches around Meyer understood another plank of his philosophy: the power of inspiration, a tireless drive to motivate players beyond their own performances and limits. It was an endless passion for Meyer, who was a driven personality bordering on obsessed, always in search of voices, methods, and messages to ratchet up his players’ willingness to push themselves, peaking when the ball was kicked off on Saturday. The assistant coaches were expected to carry those messages to their respective position groups through game weeks, and to craft their own. Addazio, a driven and dynamic personality himself, loved the emotional part of the game, tapping into it and mining its force. He created his own messages, and delivered them with fervor.
For Addazio, a huge enemy to team success in a sport as violent and demanding as football was selfishness. One of the many ways he learned to promote the importance of team was in stressing who the team should be playing for: not just themselves or their program but their university. Addazio wanted players to appreciate the ethos of Boston College, its mission, beyond its football goals and standings. He wanted his players to feel a true and deep pride in playing for their school, and to care about its legacy.
“When I was at Florida,” Addazio said, “sometimes I used to feel like kids were passing through to get to the [NFL]. I don’t want the feeling that you’re passing through to get to the league. This is the destination. To me, that’s what makes college so great and unique, as opposed to the pros. This is your alma mater. This is a part of you.”
To develop that feeling, Addazio installed some new traditions when he arrived. For one, his players were required to learn the words to the college fight song, “For Boston,” and after every victory, the team would sing it in the locker room. The coach stressed the importance of the school’s motto, “Ever to excel,” and he often emphasized the mission of the Jesuit ideal, the core principle the school was founded upon: “Men and Women, for Others.”
Addazio found the man around whom he wanted to build a message for the USC game in a BC alumnus, class of 1999. He knew vaguely about Welles Crowther and his death on 9/11 when he arrived on campus in late December 2012. But in the coming months, he found himself compelled by it, and wondered how best to use it, and when.
He found out that some of his players knew the story well, others had a passing familiarity, and some knew nothing about it. The Boston College athletic department, well aware of Welles’s time as a varsity lacrosse player, his love for BC, and his actions in the South Tower, had considered how to celebrate his legacy on a broader scale, on the school’s biggest competitive stage—at a home football game. USC’s visit fit the bill perfectly, a marquee opponent, a date close to the anniversary of September 11, and the game on national television, in prime time. The event was dubbed the first annual Red Bandanna Game, with the hope that it would become a tradition.
Addazio first mentioned the tribute to his players at the start of game week by explaining Crowther’s story in very simple terms. At the first team meeting, on Sunday, September 7, he told his team why Welles would be their focus.
“Here’s a guy that came here,” Addazio said. “He was a guy that kidded around, went to class, worked hard. Loved BC, loved lacrosse, loved his teammates. He was all about service for others, which is what we talk about here. He was an athlete, like them, who did something extraordinary. I just think that kids connected with that.
“We want to be a team, a team that cares for each other. The guy on your right and left is counting on you. We talk about how important the team is. Here’s a story about a team guy, a guy that cares more about other people than himself, and lived it, and he was one of them. They could taste it, feel it, and touch it. It became real in front of them.”
• • •
Jeff and Alison were thrilled about the tribute game for Welles as soon as BC told them, and excited that it was one of the week’s marquee matchups. There would be a lot of attention and a lot of people. Right away, they knew they needed a lot of bandannas. With an aggressive campaign using local and social media, the school had encouraged all fans to bring a bandanna of their own to the game. Jeff and Alison’s goal was to fill any gap—to have a bandanna for any fans who didn’t bring one of their own. They’d given out bandannas before, at many events honoring Welles. This was different. This was a stadium.
Working with student groups and officials at BC, they had roughly six thousand ready to be distributed.
• • •
After his team’s walk-through at the stadium, Steve Addazio had them gather in its meeting room. The game plan was already installed. The position groups already understood their assignments. There was only one more element to the preparation.
After talking about Welles’s significance all week, Addazio ended by showing the team the ESPN piece about Welles’s life, death, and legacy. Many of the players hadn’t seen it. The room was silent. When it ended, the room remained that way. Addazio looked at his team and had one thought. They got it.
• • •
By the time Jeff and Alison were introduced to the crowd during a break in the game, the scene inside Alumni Stadium was a swaying, waving frenzy of color—not the traditional maroon and gold of the Eagles’ uniforms, but red, white, and black. There were bandannas everywhere, many thousands of them throughout the stands. The handkerchiefs were tied around students’ heads, flapping in their hands, swirling through the air. The patterns were flashing across the field too, accenting the players’ uniforms, striping their helmets, lining their gloves, and marking their cleats. The teardrop designs were stitched into the coaches’ sweatshirts and sticking out of their pockets. It wasn’t a quaint gesture. This was a powerful homage for the millions tuning in across the country to see.
And then, in the second quarter, the game shifted, not on a mistake by the Trojans, but on a daring strike by the Eagles. Behind 17–13, BC called a gadget play. Quarterback Tyler Murphy took the ball and, with the entire offense rolling right, suddenly flipped a quick pitch to true freshman Sherman Alston, running the opposite way. An end-around reverse. The play worked to perfection. With almost every USC defender following Murphy, the defense tried to shift course back, only to find Alston flying away down the field. Fifty-four yards. Touchdown.
Just like that, BC had the lead. It never again trailed. In every
phase of the game, the Eagles rose up. USC ran the ball 29 times for just 20 yards, and gave up 5 sacks. Meanwhile, BC was unstoppable on the ground, running for an astounding 452 yards. Trojan quarterback Cody Kessler threw for 4 touchdowns, kept the Trojans close, but with just three and a half minutes to go, Murphy took the ball, made yet another ball fake, broke beyond the line of scrimmage, and ran 66 yards for the touchdown that sealed the game. USC had never lost to BC. They had now.
Eagles, 37–31.
When the game clock hit zero, students stormed the field, a brigade of bandannas swarming the turf at Alumni Stadium, swallowing the players and coaches. Even the athletic director was seen helping students climb down safely over the walls to join the bedlam. This was the first time an unranked Boston College team had beaten a top-10 opponent since 2002. But the celebration wasn’t over.
• • •
A football locker room in victory is one of the great spaces in all of sports. Even the musky, sweat-tinged air tastes sweet, as spent players and coaches let themselves go, back inside their cave. The release is pure and giddy, the displays of joy childlike, and often incongruous coming from hulking men sporting bruises and eye black.
As the players took a knee and gathered around the Boston College logo in the center of their locker room late Saturday night, there were still thousands of fans on the stadium field, and hundreds of well-wishers waiting outside the door. The team, thrilled and exhausted, looked up at its head coach, awaiting his message. After Steve Addazio praised the team’s toughness and unity, its effort and selflessness, he paused. He wanted to explain what it all meant to one family. Holding a football in his hands, he looked at the young men before him and began to speak again.
“We celebrated this game,” Addazio said, “because we celebrated Welles. As a BC man. We celebrated his ability to put other people ahead of himself. Service to others, it’s what our university stands for. Someone who had the opportunity to do something for other people, and he paid the ultimate sacrifice to do that.”