Michael Strahan was a little more than halfway through his NFL career when 9/11 happened. The defensive end spent all 15 seasons of his pro football career with the New York Giants.
One ominous moment from that catastrophic period that Strahan will never forget took place on the Giants’ practice field outside MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. The World Trade Center’s twin towers, just across the Hudson River in lower Manhattan, were easily spotted from the stadium. Until they weren’t.
But the sudden change in the skyline wasn’t the only haunting sign of what had been lost.
“I remember seeing cars – a parking lot full of cars for people who were never coming back to claim those cars,” Strahan recalls of the area around the stadium. “It was something that just smacked you in the face.”
As the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Strahan was motivated by his memories to pursue a different kind of 9/11 retrospective special, ABC News’ “9/11: United We Stand – 25 Years Later.” The two-hour program, set to air on ABC, Disney+ and Hulu on Sept. 1, explores how sports, music, comedy and the arts helped the country move forward after the unimaginable loss of nearly 3,000 victims and the blow to the armor of American invincibility that the meticulously planned attack represented.
