By CARL DUBOIS [email protected] Advocate sportswriter Jeremy Schaap grew up in New York City and was there on Sept. 11, 2001. He covered sports-related topics for ESPN in the aftermath, including how pro athletes responded to the terrorist attacks by helping with relief and recovery. Schaap visited Baton Rouge early this week in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's brutal assault on southeast Louisiana. What he saw and heard is the basis of his report for ESPN's "Outside the Lines Nightly" news program at approximately 12:40 a.m. Friday. The focus of Schaap's piece, he said, is on LSU athletes who helped with the relief effort at the shelter and triage center on campus, including football player Skyler Green and basketball players Glen "Big Baby" Davis, Tasmin Mitchell and Garrett Temple. "We also look at how this affected them, from guys having relatives in their apartments, to how they helped with bringing in supplies, to assisting at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center," Schaap said. "It's an overview of different vignettes of LSU athletes called upon to assist." Advertisement Schaap visited with Donald Hains, a walk-on defensive lineman from Mississippi who couldn't find his parents for nearly 10 days. He learned of their whereabouts Wednesday. LSU gymnastics coach D-D Breaux and football player Andrew Whitworth are among the others featured during the "Outside the Lines" report, Schaap said. He said he found similarities and differences between this tragedy and 9/11. "It was different for me emotionally because 9/11 was an attack," Schaap said, "rather than a natural disaster. New York is my hometown, so that was different too, and being in Baton Rouge is very different from being in New Orleans. "Baton Rouge is kind of surreal," he said, "because unless you were in the shelters or in an apartment where evacuees were, or standing in line for gas or trying to get a hotel room, life seemed to pretty much be running normally there. "People are jogging on the streets. Teams are practicing or working out in the weight room. There wasn't any normalcy in New York in the days after 9/11." Schaap said playing Division I-A football is like a full-time job, and he said the Tigers had their hands full with more serious matters while still doing their job as football players. "They're helping with the relief effort," he said. "They're sleeping on the floor in their houses with 20 other people. That's a tough way to live." Schaap said he's curious to see how No. 5-ranked LSU performs Saturday night in its unusual season opener in Tempe, Ariz., against No. 15-ranked Arizona State. "I will be very interested to see how all of this anxiety affects them," he said. "You never know what's going to happen when it comes down to football. I covered Texas A&M the week of the bonfire tragedy (in 1999). They kind of channeled all of their grief into a really emotional win over a favored team from Texas." The bonfire, a Texas A&M tradition dating to 1909, collapsed that year, killing 12 students and injuring 27. "That was similar because it was something that really struck close to home down at Texas A&M," Schaap said. "I think there was more impact on the LSU community by the hurricane than there was on the A&M community by the bonfire accident." Schaap said the game will hold interest for him for other reasons. "I got to know quite a few of the players," he said, "and they seem like really outstanding young men." The story, he said, won't deal much with the decision to move the game to Tempe. "The bigger thing for us wasn't really the site but the appropriateness of playing at all," he said. "With rare exception, the people I spoke to said it was time to play. "Nationally I don't think there was too much interest in the whole idea of where the game was, but whether these guys would be playing after having been through so much so recently, and considering how many were from areas that were affected." Schaap indicated he thinks the story is far from complete. "One of the things that's interesting to me," he said, "is how Glen Davis, Garrett Temple, Tasmin Mitchell, Tyrus Thomas, guys who were watching people expire at the Maravich Center, will soon be going back into the same building, presumably, to a play a game. "How they deal with that emotionally is going to be interesting. We'll probably follow up on that." LSU basketball coach John Brady said it helped those players to have somebody like Schaap to talk with and verbalize their emotions in a crisis. "After Glen came back from the PMAC and was sitting in his room, it was overwhelming for him," Brady said. "He got emotional. (assistant coach) Butch Pierre went to his dorm room and calmed him down. I think it's healthy when players get a chance to express what they went through, what they saw. "It's a bad situation, a horrible situation, but it was something where they can be better people from having gone through this and develop better empathy for others and more of an appreciation of whatever they have. I think it's therapeutic for your soul, it's a cleansing for them, to be able to talk about it." The "Outside the Lines Nightly" report will air on ESPN approximately 40 minutes after midnight tonight, following "Baseball Tonight," network officials said.
