Tomorrow will be 25 years since a horrific day in American history, one that still hovers over some Port St. Lucie retirees.
Ongoing recovery since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks informed an Aug. 29 pickleball tournament in Valencia Cay at Riverland, west of Tradition. Many former New York first responders made home there, including some who worked through the carnage of Lower Manhattan.
The 53 courts of the Riverland Sports and Racquet Club – said to be the U.S.’s largest pickleball venue, according to the GL Homes website – opened up for 156 players that morning, said Paul Palermo, the facility’s sports director. The event’s dedication to 9/11 helped it top the usual late-summer brackets of “90 to 100” players.
First responders, both current and retired, have supported Riverland since its founding here in the last decade, said facility Lifestyle Director Tere Muñiz. As St. Lucie firefighters made “makeshift pickleball courts” to keep active, she sought to expand the club’s reach before the 9/11 tournament came to be.
Rafael Diaz, a former New York police detective, pushed for the event. Since moving to the then-new community in 2020 – then “nothing but cattle and boars,” he said – he headed several clubs within Riverland, most recently becoming the vice president of the Port St. Lucie Downtown Lions Club.
In January, he and Muñiz met to discuss “the first time,” she said, that a first responder-centric tournament would take to the courts. The competitions of past Augusts didn’t “draw something like we have here today. It’s almost like pickleball is secondary.”
The day opened with the same decorum of previous 9/11 memorials: a flag hoisted on a firetruck; rifle salutes from county sheriff’s deputies; and soundings of “Amazing Grace” and “Taps.”
Diaz, 69, spoke in his dress uniform during these remembrances, the same as at several local 9/11 ceremonies. He recounted gathering personal remains from the ruined World Trade Center and overcoming site-related cancer. “That had to be the most difficult two years of my life,” he said.
He also welcomed Port St. Lucie Police Chief Leo Niemczyk, himself a former NYPD officer on scene during the attack. These circumstances led to both men and others “continuing to suffer today” from cancer and mental anguish, Niemczyk recalled.
Diaz honored GL Homes executives Charles Saenz and Troy DiNicola with a plaque honoring a $5,000 donation: two $2,500 sums each toward the Lions Club and American Legion 425, both in Tradition. The martial rites ended with emotional remarks by Chad Edwards, a facility coach, as Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” swelled over him.
Support for the event proved spotty. Diaz, along with former New York firefighter Joel Rutsky and Riverland staff, had floated the tournament since January. Throughout June, Diaz said, he gathered “over $30,000” to fund the tournament.
Diaz did not provide a final total of donations toward a “$50,000” goal for the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, to benefit families bereaved by military and first responder deaths, by press time. The nonprofit website, however, shows the tournament raised $2,543 of a $30,000 goal among 24 donors between July and Sept. 6.
Another anniversary means another generation learning the hard truths of 9/11.
By 2001, Steve Gholston, 55, had retired to Connecticut after working as a chef aboard the USS San Juan, a nuclear submarine. He moved here in 2021, where he works in IT and event DJing, attracted to the tournament by its ties to Tunnel to Towers.
His memories of the attacks parallel concerns among people older than himself, many who congregate at local veterans clubs. “Sometimes you don’t know, especially when it comes to how the traditions will carry on,” Gholston said. “It’s hard to gauge that.”
“I see a lot of older people who wear the ‘9/11: Never Forget’ T-shirt,” Gholston said. He added a hypothesis that over time, “you’d never know what they’re actually memorializing; ‘Never forget’ what? That we had a common enemy, or never forget that that’s the time America came together and did great things for each other?”
With first-hand accounts fading, Gholston worried how the attacks might lose their emotional heft among younger people. “I know that many of these people have kids or grandkids in their 20s or 30s,” Gholston said. “A lot of this is going to be lost upon them and they’ll only know this stuff through history books.”
Those new generations include Drew Sperber, a 19-year-old Fire District recruit. Fresh out of Fort Pierce Central High School, he and partner Elliott Mazza shook hands with their beaten pickleball opponents, Rutsky and Stephane Matteau, a top scorer with the Stanley Cup-winning 1994 New York Rangers.
Sperber’s recollections of the attacks were all through “many videos of it and a few documentaries,” he said. The stricter safety regulations that came after, from airplanes to fire prevention, stood for his entire life.
He and Mazza navigated a wide age gap that morning, against opponents “maybe two or three times my age, on average,” Sperber said. They were one of two teams, among 78, to sign up that day in the “19-44” age bracket.
“I’ve gotten a few stray bullets today,” Sperber said. Some of the barbs he received were more in jest, while others were more “persistent. ‘We should not be playing; we’re too young.’”
Sperber maintained, though, that he had “a great day” playing “an all-inclusive game, really. We’re here for a good cause; pickleball is a part of it.”