Dark weekend

Chris Sheridan

Friday, Sept. 14, 2001 | 9:37 a.m.

For now, the sports debate is over. The distractions and diversions provided by football, baseball, golf or hockey just didn't fit it with the serious mood of the country.

The news came in one dispatch after another Thursday from the NFL, major league baseball, major college football conferences and virtually every other sporting circuit: Games are off this weekend.

Every major league baseball stadium will sit idle until Monday at the earliest. Tiger Woods will not play golf. Florida will not play Tennessee. Jeff Gordon will not bump bumpers with Tony Stewart. Barry Bonds will not move any closer to Mark McGwire's home run record.

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out sporting events are absolutely meaningless compared with what's going on in Washington and New York," McGwire said.

Some colleges and auto racing circuits had wanted to go on, hoping to "bring our people together," but those decisions were reversed.

Minnesota Vikings receiver Cris Carter said: "The bodies aren't uncovered yet, and you're trying to provide entertainment? To me, I just didn't think it was worth it."

The players themselves had a huge voice in the NFL's decision.

They were distracted. They didn't want to fly. Some said they wouldn't have played even if the rest of the league did. And they said so.

"It would've been hard to overlook everything that happened in favor of a game," Detroit Lions wide receiver Herman Moore said. "If we had to get on a plane this weekend, I wouldn't go."

The NFL said it would decide later whether to reschedule its games or go with a shortened season. The decision by the NFL, which was criticized for playing two days after the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, had been widely anticipated.

Since Tuesday's attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, baseball has wiped out six days of play with 2 1/2 weeks to go in the regular season. Thursday's decision to cancel all games until Monday will raise the total of postponed games to 91, the most since nearly the entire final month of the 1918 season was canceled.

Commissioner Bud Selig said he wanted to maintain a 162-game schedule, which would allow Bonds to still have a shot at breaking McGwire's record of 70 home runs.

"I believe that extra week will not be harmful," Selig said. "I worry about weather in October. Fortunately, we have a lot of warm-weather teams, a lot of West Coast teams."

Baseball intends to make up all the games by extending the regular season, which had been scheduled to end Sept. 30. The games will be rescheduled for the week of Oct. 1. That could push the conclusion of the World Series into November.

When the weekend's sports lineup was wiped out, so were hundreds of hours of live sports programming, erased from national and local TV schedules. If Americans want diversions, they'll have to find them elsewhere.

"We in the National Football League have decided that our priorities for this weekend are to pause, grieve and reflect," commissioner Paul Tagliabue said. "It is a time to tend to families and neighbors and all those wounded by these horrific acts of terrorism."

ESPN lost the largest amount of live programming, with more than 50 hours. Fox and its cable arm, Fox Sports Net, lost more than 20 hours of nationally broadcast sports programs; ABC more than 15, CBS more than 10, and NBC 9 1/2.

"There is a financial implication," Fox Sports vice president Lou D'Ermilio said, "but it pales in comparison to what's happening in New York and Washington."

After the NFL announcement, the Big Ten, Big 12 and Southeastern conferences reversed their earlier stance and postponed all of their college football games -- often at the behest of the schools.

They joined the Atlantic Coast, Big East and Pac-10 conferences in calling off games, meaning no major college football this Saturday.

"There was real anxiety as the week went on on the part of our football team about traveling by air," said Bowling Green athletic director Paul Krebs, whose school pulled out of a game at South Carolina a few hours before the SEC reversed course and called off its games.

The weekend's Winston Cup race at Loudon, N.H., was rescheduled for Friday, Nov. 23, only the second non-weather postponement in NASCAR's 53-year history.

And Major League Soccer canceled the last six games of its regular season. Playoffs will begin Sept. 20.