EUGENE ― As he has for each of the last 19 years, Joe Moorhead will call Thomas Szocik on Saturday.
Oregon’s offensive coordinator and the father of one of his former teammates at Fordham, Kevin Szocik, will be particularly reflective this year, the 20th anniversary of Kevin and 2,976 others being killed during the 9/11 attacks.
“I hosted him on his recruiting visit,” Moorhead said. “He was in one of the towers and didn’t make it out. A couple of other people I went to Fordham with didn’t make it out.”
Moorhead was the quarterbacks coach at Georgetown 20 years ago and drove past the Pentagon each day on his way to work. He and Georgetown’s coaching staff were preparing to play Wagner that Tuesday morning when word spread of a plane flying into one of the World Trade Center towers, then the second and later they’d be able to see the carnage at the Pentagon from outside their offices.
“The best that I can describe it as surreal,” Moorhead said. “We canceled practice, the game was canceled and I’m driving home that day and there’s ash falling from the sky, looked like it’s dang snowing out. It’s an indescribable feeling.”
The Hoyas played their next game at Fordham in the Bronx, N.Y. 18 days after the attacks. The Rams won 48-13 in a game Moorhead can’t even recall against his alma mater, where he later returned at head coach from 2012-15.
Moorhead’s experience on that tragic day 20 years ago is not unique among Oregon’s coaches.
Defensive coordinator Tim DeRuyter was the defensive backs coach at Navy on 9/11, preparing to play Northwestern, which was also canceled.
The Naval Academy locked down and employees were sent home.
“We came back the next day and at the entrance to the Naval Academy, the front entrance had a barricade with a Marine with a trained M60 on everybody coming through that front gate coming into work. We had some type of cruiser right off of our practice field, because we’re right there off the Chesapeake (Bay), with surface-to-air missiles ready to shoot something down if they were going to land it in the academy.
“It became real for us there and then you’re coaching young men that are going to go defend our country. To be in that environment was surreal.”
UO offensive line coach Alex Mirabal was the offensive coordinator and offensive line coach at Braddock High School in Miami 20 years ago. His wife, Berta, was pregnant and due to deliver two weeks later.
“I had a cell phone for one reason: if my wife went into labor she’d call me,” Mirabal said. “Other than that, social media wasn’t what it is today.”
Mirabal was teaching American history with two other teachers in the school auditorium with over 180 kids when word of the attacks began to spread in the school.
“All of a sudden it was exodus coming from the school, parents showing up to the school to take the kids out,” Mirabal said. “I didn’t really see any video footage until I was able to get home. We’re at school and we’re basically teaching nobody now because all the parents have come to pick up the kids. Once I got home my wife and I sat down and you start watching the news and the tragedy that happened, that our country is under attack but you don’t know who you’re under attack from.
“There was grief, frustration, panic because of what was happening but at the same time the response of the country, a tremendous amount of patriotism.”
Mario Cristobal had just begun his first full-time assistant coaching job as offensive tackles and tight ends coach at Rutgers, less than 40 miles from downtown Manhattan.
“We had so many players whose families work in the city that that was the first item; priority is to make sure our families that are in the city (are OK) because a lot of them, they take the train into Penn Station and they go to work downtown,” Cristobal said. “Then getting a hold of friends and family that live in or near the city. (My) head was spinning like, ‘what is this, what really is going on?’”
Moorhead, DeRuyter, Mirabal and Cristobal remain not only coaches but teachers at heart. Now part of the same staff of a team composed largely of players who weren’t even born 20 years ago, they intended to address the somber history of Saturday with the Ducks this week.
Oregon quarterback Anthony Brown Jr., a native of Central New Jersey, had friends who lost family members on 9/11. While at Boston College, Brown and the Eagles played an annual Red Bandana game in remembrance of Welles Crowther, a BC grad of ‘99, equities trader and volunteer firefighter who wore as the handkerchief while saving as many as 18 lives in the World Trade Center’s South Tower before it collapsed.
“He was a special person to a lot of people outside of that day,” Brown said. “That day is showing you that people are men and women for others, being there for somebody else and that’s really important.”
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