Friday, September 21, 2001
Esiason grieves for friend lost in attack
Boomer Esiason has so many friends, it's hard to say who's his best friend. But Timmy O'Brien was close.
They played golf and basketball. Their wives shopped together. Their kids played. When O'Brien pondered an offer from the bond-trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald, he said he'd take the job if Boomer's cystic fibrosis foundation could have an office on the same, closer-to-heaven 101st floor of the signature Lower Manhattan skyscraper.
The firm agreed. In 1996, when Timmy O'Brien moved from Patriot Securities on Wall Street to the World Trade Center's North Tower, the Boomer Esiason Foundation moved with him.
O'Brien died last Tuesday. He was among the first to go, in a ball of flame and a wall of smoke. “We're all hoping he went quickly,” Esiason said Thursday.
Esiason's five full-time employees all survived. None was in the building at the time the Boeing 767 jetliner struck near the 90th floor.
We are defined by the people we love and the people who love us. If we are lucky and good, the circle is wide and ever-growing. More than 3,000 people were expected at St. Agnes Catholic Church in Rockville Center, N.Y., Thursday, to memorialize Timmy O'Brien.
Esiason was one of four people delivering eulogies. No notes, he said. No prepared words. Just emotion, pouring from a well inside him that somehow remains as deep as his sadness.
“I'll say who he was,” Esiason decided. “An honest, real person. A combination of the best in all of us.”
We all lost something last week. Joy, confidence, a spark. The compassionate swagger that defines us as Americans. Innocence, mostly. We lost that.
We were the lucky ones, most of us. We didn't lose someone. A friend, a colleague, a husband, a wife. A dad or a mom. A Timmy O'Brien.
Esiason figured he knew 100 people personally who are gone. His home on Long Island is a 20-minute ride by commuter train to Wall Street. His is a bedroom community for brokers and traders. “Six people from our neighborhood,” he said. “Probably 17 from our town.” Gone.
We all grieve our own way. There is no playbook. Anyone who has known Esiason more than five minutes can predict how he has handled things. Days after the attack, he was at ground zero. Dave Rimington, the former Bengal and current BEF president, lifted girders while firemen searched the rubble for life.
They dug through the atomized concrete and twisted steel, to a car owned by a New York fireman. The man's son wanted his father's rosary, the one he hung from the rearview mirror. They only found the car.
Esiason and Tim O'Brien go back to 1984, when O'Brien recruited the Bengals' second-round draft pick to play in a charity golf tournament. Tim O'Brien was one
of those rare people you like instantly. He was a good match for Esiason; Boomer is one of those people, too.
“The friendship was born the minute I met him,” Boomer said.
O'Brien was on BEF's original board of directors. In 1994, Esiason, O'Brien and Boomer's son, Gunnar, went to every New York Rangers home playoff game. The Rangers won the Stanley Cup that year.
“He was in church every Sunday morning, every holiday. He was a very faith-oriented person,” Esiason said. “We know how how much God meant to him. That's giving all of us comfort.
“I never heard him raise his voice or cuss. It was almost like he was too good to be true.”
Maybe now, you could say he was.
They will collect DNA samples from blood relatives, so that if somewhere in that great pile of sad debris something of Timmy O'Brien is found, they will identify him. For now, they mourn, grieve and remember.
“We're all just so worn out,” Esiason said.
Whenever Boomer needed a fan's perspective on the New York Giants, for a TV or radio gig he had coming up, he'd call O'Brien. O'Brien loved the Giants like a wife. The last time Esiason talked to him was last Monday, before the Giants played at Denver in the Monday Night Football game.
“He said, "It pains me to say this, but I don't think we're going to have a good game,'” Esiason recalled. “"The Broncos are opening a new stadium, and we didn't have a very good preseason.'”
Last Monday night, on CBS Radio, Boomer opened the broadcast saying this: “I don't think the Giants are going to win. The Broncos are opening a new stadium and the Giants didn't have a very good preseason.”
Esiason will re-open his foundation. He already has temporary offices set up on Long Island, in Garden City. He will move ahead. That's the way he is. But not yet.
On Thursday, he said some nice things about a dear friend. He wore a blue No.11 jersey, too. That was Phil Simms' number when he quarterbacked the Giants to the championship of the world.
“Only for my man Timmy,” Esiason said. “Only for my man Timmy.”
E-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/daugherty.
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DAUGHERTY: Esiason grieves for friend lost in attack
