As Rick Honeycutt sat, transfixed, in Chattanooga, Tenn., the grisly television images of carnage delivered a powerful, almost nauseating sense of déjà vu.

	The San Francisco Earthquake of 1989 did more than halt the World Series.

"Most of the damage in the Earthquake of 1989 was on the freeway in Oakland," Honeycutt recalled a day after terrorists on suicide missions used hijacked passenger jets to topple the World Trade Center's twin towers in New York and destroy part of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. "Many of the victims were our fans. We visited the hospitals in the time between games and you'd see the child who'd lost his parents, or the guy who'd lost an arm because a two-ton boat fell on him.

"Those are the things you take away -- and they stay with you."

And then, after a 10-day hiatus, the 1989 World Series resumed with Game Three. It was baseball as usual, but not surprisingly the players had unusual difficulty making the emotional transition.

"In our profession, we get so involved with the game, we lose perspective," Honeycutt said. "You dream your whole life of making it to the World Series, and then you suddenly realize how irrelevant it all is.

"When you came back, it was like going through the motions. All the purpose and drive and everything you put into it ... it was just gone. Sure, you could still perform your job, but it was really a hollow feeling."

Inevitably, invariably the games go on.

In the wake of Tuesday's horrific wave of terrorism, Major League Baseball has postponed five days of its schedule, with play to resume Monday. After weighing its options, the National Football League postponed 15 games schedule for this weekend. The Professional Golf Association canceled its American Express Championship in St. Louis, and NASCAR rescheduled the New Hampshire 300 until after Thanksgiving.

"Look at this, I've got goose bumps," Tiger Woods said, rubbing his right arm as he walked off the practice field earlier this week. "This is a sad, sad day in America."

Woods, who is accompanied by a retired FBI agent when he plays, understood full well what happened Tuesday in New York, Washington, D.C. and rural Pennsylvania. Now -- as irrelevant as it is in the larger, human picture -- how will he respond? Will he be able to keep that big drive on the par 5s in the fairway?

At some point in the very near future, Barry Bonds will attempt to knock a fastball over the fence in his historic chase of Mark McGwire's home run record. Eventually, the NFL's players will line up opposite each other and again trade blows.

"In this country, we get a distorted picture of what sports is," said Dr. Alan Goldberg, a sports psychologist in Amherst, Mass. "We get so obsessed with winning and being No. 1 that when you get a tragedy like this, it underscores what sports really is. Compared to the real world, sports means absolutely nothing.

"The cruel thing is, life goes on. The fact of the matter is, once you're done mourning, you have to get back to that trivial world -- if sports is your real world. And that's never easy."

Punctuating tragedy
Life, in all its virulent forms, has increasingly projected itself into the arena of sports.

On Aug. 2, 1923, the day that President Warren G. Harding died, baseball postponed its entire slate of games. On June 6, 1944, D-Day, baseball parks again stood empty. The assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 did not stop the NFL from

	Smoke, flames and debris erupts from one of the World Trade Center towers before its collapse.

playing two days later, though it did halt most college games. The 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King and the attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981 postponed NBA playoff games and the NCAA championship game, respectively. Terrorism, which left 11 Israeli athletes and coaches dead, suspended the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich for 24 hours.

Riots in Los Angeles in 1992 caused the Lakers, Clippers, Dodgers and Giants to alter their schedules. In 1998, Hurricane Georges blew out a Miami-UCLA football game and a Marlins-Phillies contest. A year later, the Columbine High School shooting gave the Avalanche, Rockies and Nuggets all serious pause.

And now, the World Trade Center tragedy.

"Any death or disaster creates a pause, a punctuation in our lives," said Alan Klein, a Northeastern University sociologist who specializes in sports. "We don't complete the end of the sentence and it gives us a chance to reflect and feel somber.

"When Korey Stringer died, the Vikings came to a stop. Now, the whole country has stopped. We come to grips with our mortality and we all feel vulnerable. And then the moment passes."

No moment is more chilling, more sinister than the Sept. 6, 1972 early morning takeover of an Israeli dormitory by the Black September group in Munich. Eighteen hours later, the hostages and the terrorists were all dead. International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage declared that after a one-day moratorium the Games would go on.

American Frank Shorter, one of the favorites in the marathon, attended the memorial service in the track stadium.

"This was before they came up with the four stages -- shock, grief, anger and resolve," Shorter said Wednesday from his home in Boulder, Colo. "I went through all of those in two days. The athletes' first thought was, 'We have to go home. Nothing is worth human life.'

"But I think it began to dawn on us walking back to Olympic Village, which was about half a mile from the stadium. You realize as an athlete, in particular, you have to do it. It's the only affirmative thing you can do. Otherwise, it's a completely helpless situation.

"To be fearful, nervous and to think about the potentially bad things that could happen is precisely what they would want. We said, 'We're not going to let this affect us. It wasn't because we were callous, it was because we wanted to make sure that civilization, as we knew it, continued.' "

Two days after the memorial service, Sept. 9, Shorter ran the race of his life. He had heard the speculation that the marathon, the last event of the Olympiad that finished grandly in the stadium, would be a logical target for terrorists. He ignored it as best he could, winning the gold medal with a time of 2:12:19, more than two minutes ahead of Belgium's Karel Lismont.

Today Shorter, some 29 years later, cannot explain it.

"It was one those days that just happened," said Shorter, who works for NBC as a broadcaster and is the chairman of the newly created U.S. anti-doping agency. "I have no idea why or how."

	Lions teammates Aaron Gibson, right, and Tony Semple leave Detroit's practice Wednesday, passing a flag flying at half-staff to honor the victims of Tuesday's terrorist attacks.

From the moment that Operation Desert Storm was launched on Jan. 17, 1991, U.S. President George Bush insisted that Super Bowl XXV should be played for the morale of the country. Ten days later, amid unprecedented security and an electric display of patriotism, the game went on between the New York Giants and Buffalo Bills.

"It's funny, but at times like that you tend, after the initial shock sets in, to concentrate more," said Bart Oates, who played center that day for the Giants. "Your energies are focused, you're more keenly aware of things. And there is a constant adrenaline flow that you're acting under.

"To me, the Gulf War almost heightened my awareness. It didn't detract from the job I had to do."

According to Goldberg, the psychologist, this isn't as peculiar a phenomenon as it seems.

"Most athletes have an ability, once on the field, to compartmentalize things. NFL athletes do it with pain, they disassociate. They put it in a box and don't take it out until after the game."

Oates, today an attorney for Gale & Wentworth, a real estate development firm in Florham Park, N.J., said the Gulf War was actually a rallying point for the players.

"It's like, 'If the troops over there can do what they're doing, I can do what I have to do,' " Oates said. "This was our little diversion. For the guys in the Gulf, this was a way to separate a little, to get a little piece of mind.

"You talk yourself into it: 'In our own little way, we're helping the cause. These guys need to see a Super Bowl."

Playing on
Super Bowl XXV was a rousing, emotionally and artistically successful game. The Giants beat the Bills, 20-19 in the closest Super Bowl ever, before or since.

	“	There are people dead, buildings down. People will see this daily. For them, and that includes the athletes there, it's much, much tougher because there are daily reminders. ”
		— Rick Honeycutt, who played for the Oakland A's when the 1989 World Series was interrupted by the San Francisco earthquake

At the opposite end of the spectrum was the Nov. 24, 1963 game between the Dallas Cowboys and Cleveland Browns. Two days after Kennedy was assassinated, the two teams played on at Municipal Stadium.

"We looked like zombies," remembered the Cowboys' Hall of Fame defensive tackle Bob Lilly. "The weather was dreary. Nobody was jumping up and down. Everybody just had a long face."

The final result -- Cleveland, 27-17 -- reflected the players' lack of emotion. NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, who gave the directive to play the games, said later it was the one decision he wished he could revisit.

"I was stunned by the JFK assassination and it took me a long time to get over that," Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig said Tuesday in a Milwaukee press conference. "The [San Francisco] earthquake in '89, the World Series, that was a tragedy. But this is incomprehensible.

"The greatest country in the history of the world being attacked. So all of this doesn't mean very much today."

Then-commissioner Fay Vincent made the decision to suspend the World Series. Since the quake struck the Bay Area, it hit the Giants and Athletics close to home. The Giants' Candlestick Park was damaged, raising questions about the stadium's structural integrity. Ten days later, they played ball. Oakland won in seven games, but that was hardly the point. "It made me more aware of people -- family, friends, teammates," said Honeycutt, who owns Rick Honeycutt Sportswear in Chattanooga. "We all get wrapped up in sports, but, in the end, that's not what it's about.

"The people in New York and Washington -- like the people in Oakland and San Francisco -- this isn't something that happens in one day and it's gone. There are people dead, buildings down. People will see this daily. For them, and that includes the athletes there, it's much, much tougher because there are daily reminders."

Not surprisingly, these athletes who endured tragedy and duress believe the games should continue.

"I think George Bush is going to say to the NFL: 'Go! We will not be deterred,' " Oates said. "He's saying, 'Sure, we've lost thousands of lives and the economics will affect us for generations to come, but we will continue.' "

	Following the terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Frank Shorter won the marathon. On Tuesday, Shorter again did what comes natural. He ran.

When Shorter first saw the video of commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center, he laced up his shoes.

"I ran a bunch, probably 17 miles," he said. "I think in these horrendous circumstances, the instinct is to go and do what makes you feel the most secure. My guess is you went to the office and worked. It's how we gain perspective."

Shorter said he believes that sport should resume its normal rhythms, as soon as possible.

"You can't judge these incredibly traumatic events by normal measures of decorum," he said, "The swings are too wide. When the bomb went off in Atlanta [during the '96 Olympics], they asked, 'Should we stop?' And the answer, two minutes later, was, 'No way.' It doesn't mean we don't care."

After the profusion of ghastly images on Tuesday, there is one that haunts Shorter more than any other.

"People, real people, jumping out of those buildings," Shorter said. "How can you forget that? Well, terrorism is supposed to freeze you up and control you into not doing the things you usually do. You have to do everything as a human that you can do to resist that. If that means going to an NFL game, God bless, you go to the game."

"It goes beyond having no choice -- you simply have to go on," Shorter said. "You simply have to."

Greg Garber is a senior writer for ESPN.com.