ABC News gathered athletes, musicians and entertainers who lived through Sept. 11, 2001, for a new special reflecting on how sports and music helped a grieving country stand back up.
Michael Strahan, the former New York Giant who watched the first tower burn from his own window, led the conversation.
“What were we gonna do? Sit at home?” Strahan said of his push to still gather with teammates that weekend. “No, we wanted to collectively get together and offer whatever kind of assistance that we could at Ground Zero.”
9/11: UNITED WE STAND — 25 YEARS LATER aired Tuesday, Sept. 1, at 9 p.m. ET on ABC and streamed the next day on Disney+ and Hulu, arriving as the nation marks a quarter century since the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. Strahan, who spent 15 seasons with the Giants before moving to the GOOD MORNING AMERICA anchor desk, watched the World Trade Center burn from his Montclair, New Jersey window that morning.
“I’d never seen the level of unity that we had during that time,” Strahan said, recalling the weeks that followed.
Former New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter remembers a similar calling. His team reached the World Series barely a month after the towers fell, and Jeter has long described that run less as a competition than a civic duty.
“Our job was to bring joy, especially to New York at that time,” Jeter said.
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Music carried its own weight. Singer Jon Bon Jovi, who performed at The Concert for New York City that October alongside Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Billy Joel, said one of his band’s own songs took on a meaning nobody wrote it for.
“We got each other and that’s a lot,” Bon Jovi said of “Livin’ on a Prayer.” “That’s what it is, right? In that moment in time, when you felt helpless, to have a lyric that is about just simple unity and faith.”
CBS late-night host David Letterman, the first host to return to the air after the attacks, framed his own reappearance as a matter of duty rather than comedy.
“There’s only one requirement of all of us, and that is to be courageous,” Letterman said.
Former New York Times sports columnist Selena Roberts sees that instinct as something the sports world had never fully reckoned with before that fall.
“After Sept. 11, players and coaches absolutely knew that they had a platform and a responsibility to be there for the public,” Roberts said.
Author and music critic Anthony DeCurtis, who has written extensively on rock and American culture, makes the case that this wasn’t sentiment for its own sake. Songs and games gave people something concrete to hold onto when words alone couldn’t reach the fear underneath.
There’s a familiar biblical instinct running under all of it, whether the special says so or not. Grief looks for company before it looks for explanations, and a packed stadium or a crowded arena did for a wounded city something like what a church does for a wounded soul: it said nobody has to sit with this alone. Scripture calls believers to “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep,” and the athletes and musicians in this special stumbled into exactly that ministry without ever calling it one.
Twenty-five years on, the special argues those gestures still mattered more than the box scores or chart positions ever did. Movieguide® has long tracked how Hollywood and the sports world respond to national tragedy, and this latest look at Sept. 11 is a reminder that entertainment, at its best, doesn’t distract people from grief so much as walk through it with them.
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