BLACKSBURG, Va. — The buses wound through the Blue Ridge Mountains, taking the Yankees from the airport in Roanoke to the heart of a campus changed forever last April. Fans cheered from the sidewalks at Virginia Tech, snapping pictures and waving. If the players looked out the windows, they could see decals of memorial ribbons on the backs of many cars.
The buses stopped at Drill Field, the memorial site for the 32 victims of a gunman’s rampage 11 months ago. The players and staff members, led by the Yankees’ general partner, Hal Steinbrenner, walked solemnly in a semicircle, past the stone markers for the dead.
Derek Jeter was the first player off his bus. Near the far edge of the memorial was the stone for Michael Pohle, a biochemistry major from Flemington, N.J. On the ground beside it was a T-shirt with Jeter’s name and number. A young woman named Marcy Crevonis stepped from the crowd.
“Derek, do you mind if I take a picture by my fiancé’s stone?” she said. “I won’t cry, I promise.”
Jeter said he has felt like this before, after Sept. 11, when he wondered how baseball players could possibly help people recover from devastation. He still does not know, he said. Maybe they could simply make them smile.
Jeter told Crevonis she could have the picture if she smiled. She did.
“That’s part of the reason that we’re here,” Jeter said.
As the principal owner George Steinbrenner watched coverage of the massacre last April, he was moved to help Virginia Tech. Steinbrenner donated $1 million to a memorial fund and asked team officials to arrange an exhibition game on campus.
As a resident of Florida, Hal Steinbrenner said, he will always remember 1990, when a serial killer murdered five students at the University of Florida. But the Yankees had no direct tie to Virginia Tech.
“The tragedy was of such great proportion that it didn’t matter if there was a connection between the Yankees and Virginia Tech prior to the event,” said Randy Levine, the Yankees president. “We all had to rally around these brave people.”
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The buses stopped at Drill Field, the memorial site for the 32 victims of a gunman’s rampage 11 months ago. The players and staff members, led by the Yankees’ general partner, Hal Steinbrenner, walked solemnly in a semicircle, past the stone markers for the dead.
Derek Jeter was the first player off his bus. Near the far edge of the memorial was the stone for Michael Pohle, a biochemistry major from Flemington, N.J. On the ground beside it was a T-shirt with Jeter’s name and number. A young woman named Marcy Crevonis stepped from the crowd.
“Derek, do you mind if I take a picture by my fiancé’s stone?” she said. “I won’t cry, I promise.”
Jeter said he has felt like this before, after Sept. 11, when he wondered how baseball players could possibly help people recover from devastation. He still does not know, he said. Maybe they could simply make them smile.
Jeter told Crevonis she could have the picture if she smiled. She did.
“That’s part of the reason that we’re here,” Jeter said.
As the principal owner George Steinbrenner watched coverage of the massacre last April, he was moved to help Virginia Tech. Steinbrenner donated $1 million to a memorial fund and asked team officials to arrange an exhibition game on campus.
As a resident of Florida, Hal Steinbrenner said, he will always remember 1990, when a serial killer murdered five students at the University of Florida. But the Yankees had no direct tie to Virginia Tech.
“The tragedy was of such great proportion that it didn’t matter if there was a connection between the Yankees and Virginia Tech prior to the event,” said Randy Levine, the Yankees president. “We all had to rally around these brave people.”
Discuss Add this link to... Bury
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