Boilers practice, cope with tragedy

By Paul Trembacki
And Doug Healey

Joe Tiller said the team wasn't focused during Tuesday's practice.

That was to be expected, especially from players such as wide receiver Chris James, tailback Joey Harris, defensive end Akin Ayodele and quarterback Carl Buergler.

As the team practiced in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the United States, Harris and Buergler had concerns about family members who had not been heard from as of Tuesday night, while James was simply waiting to hear his sister's voice.

"I heard she's all right, but I'm not going to believe it until I talk to her myself," said James, who planned to call his sister Julie, a law student at New York University who was not injured, Tuesday night.

Julie James, who lives in Greenwich Village about a mile from the World Trade Center, gave blood to help local victims in New York after e-mailing her family to let them know she was OK.

James' mother, a Tampa, Fla., resident, had been crying and frantically calling relatives throughout the country all day, which Chris said scared him.

Eventually the James family got the good news — the good news that Harris, who has a relative with a job in the World Trade Center, and Buergler, whose uncle was on a plane headed for Pittsburgh Tuesday morning, hadn't heard as of Tuesday evening.

"It's scary," Buergler said. "It's scary that something like that can happen.

"It was a stressful thing practicing. There's stuff like that that's on your mind and at the same time you're trying to prepare for Notre Dame — one of the biggest games of the season."

Although Ayodele had some concerns about his mother's friend, who was in New York and eventually found to be unharmed, he was happy to practice.

"It's something we can do out here to forget about that for a few hours," Ayodele said. "Our team's out here practicing and it's to our advantage to make us better, to get an extra edge, and hopefully we did that today."

Tiller and Purdue athletic director Morgan Burke wanted the team to be together in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the country.

"A lot of these kids, we're their surrogate parents away from home," Burke said. "So you want to pull them together and spend time with them; you don't want them back in dorms or residence halls. We did that and we'll continue to stay on a normal pattern until we hear otherwise."

Like many Americans, Tiller spent hour after hour watching TV Tuesday morning.

Inspired by what he heard from public leaders, including New York Gov. George Pataki and New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Tiller decided to go ahead with practice.

"Government officials said terrorists need to know that we're going to be at work at 7 o'clock tomorrow morning and working on straightening this thing out, so I figured that's a good message. We all need to do that," Tiller said.

Before the full-contact practice Tuesday, Tiller addressed the team in the locker room and discussed moving on.

"I reminded them that as a competitive sporting team we are a microcosm of society," Tiller said. "I listened to the government leaders and they all talked about how resilient we are as a nation and I said we should show that as an athletic team we're resilient and we can bounce back."

Tiller also had team chaplain Marty Dittmar lead the team in a prayer for the victims.

The team then went about preparing for its game with Notre Dame, which, as of Tuesday night, was scheduled to take place at 2:30 p.m. Saturday in Ross-Ade Stadium.

Boilers practice, cope with tragedy

Officials to discuss games' cancellations

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