Ground Zero

Power players lend a hand at Nino's for New York relief effort

Anne Nielsen, Kristy Whelchel, Gao Hong and a volunteer are ready to serve some chow to relief workers.

By Jennifer Pfluke and Tim Nash

NEW YORK -- Somewhere at Ground Zero, the area of Manhattan where rescue and relief personnel work around the clock in the rubble of what used to be the World Trade Center, there are hard hats autographed by New York Power players.

There could be a fireman's helmet with Kristy Whelchel scrawled on it, or a yellow hard hat with Sara Whalen's or Jen Lalor's signature. A police officer is the new owner of Sara Whalen's Power T-shirt, having traded his NYPD shirt with her on the spot. And somewhere there is a bulletproof vest autographed by Ronnie Fair.

A police officer who worked security at Power games this past summer was telling Susan Marenoff about Nino's, a restaurant in Manhattan that has been serving hot meals -- 500 a day -- to the workers at Ground Zero since Sept. 11. So Marenoff, the Power general manager, e-mailed everyone in the organization to see whether they wanted to help at the restaurant.

"I have never gotten a quicker response," Marenoff said. "It was quite heart-warming. We decided it would be a good venue for us to all be together and feed off each other's personalities during this time, and to really help."

Marenoff spent Monday chopping onions. Whalen and Jen O'Sullivan sported plastic gloves and hairnets in their best impersonations of the Lunch Lady. Other Power players served coffee, cleaned tables, and waited on exhausted firefighters, police officers and other rescue workers.

They chatted with the customers, worked, laughed, made new friends and fans, and worked some more. A fun day? Not really. Satisfying? In a way. Ground Zero, the sickening reminder of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center was less than a mile down the street.

Ronnie Fair was one of roughly 20 Power players and staff that went to Nino's on Oct. 1 to help. Fair and her teammates were thrilled to find a meaningful way to help.

"I absolutely wanted to help," Fair said. "A lot of the questions came from the team -- was there anything we could do?"

So Fair and the first shift of workers showed up at Nino's at 6:00 a.m. and got straight to work. The second shift of Power players came at 2:00 and stayed until 8:00 p.m.

"Right away I put on gloves and a hair net and got to work serving sausages and pancakes," she said. "I also learned how to make cappuccino because after I was done serving, they put me behind the bar. There were so many workers coming in and out. Lunch was the busiest, but breakfast was packed, too.

"They all looked so tired. They were really nice and didn't want to take too much of anything. They were so humble and down-to-earth. Some hung out with others in their precinct, others kept to themselves. There was just this atmosphere of camaraderie among everyone."

Camaraderie on a much larger scale became very evident to the Power workers shortly after they arrived at Nino's.

"They have warehouses full of the most unbelievable amount of donations from the city," said Marenoff. "Until you're in it, you don't realize how deep the commitment, the compassion, the contributions, and the generosity is from people all over the country. One of the first things we had to do was throw out Tupperware containers because people are sending in baked goods to this restaurant to help feed the workers. The effort goes so far past to what people think about automatically.

"We did everything from being in the warehouse, to making scrambled eggs, to serving the workers, to cleaning the restaurant, to serving coffee at the bar, to welcoming them in to give them a little relief from their day."

Providing relief to the relief workers was perhaps the most important duty the Power players performed. Monday morning was chilly, in the low 50s, and when the workers entered Nino's they wanted something hot. But they also wanted to talk, to find out more about these women in New York Power t-shirts serving them.

"After the tables were clean, we got to sit down and talk to a few of them," said Fair. "They were curious about our New York Power t-shirts. Most of them didn't really know anything about the Power. So we talked about soccer. They told us their daughters played, and we signed some autographs for them. They asked if we had any more games, and Susan gave them all the information on our upcoming charity game. A lot of them said they'd come.

"I think they just wanted to talk about anything else. Those guys see this everyday-no wonder they wanted to talk about something else."

Added Marenoff, "The players and workers were having conversations ranging from what they're doing at the relief site to talking soccer to talking about where they lived, anything you can imagine. It was a tremendous feeling you can't describe. And yet at the same time, you felt somewhat unfulfilled because you knew there was so much more you could be doing."

The sheer magnitude of their surroundings -- the smoke, the smell, and the very reason why they were at Nino's -- added a gloomy perspective to the feelings of pride and satisfaction the Power staff and players experienced. Fair was in Los Angeles on Sept. 11 and stayed "glued to the TV." Seeing Ground Zero first-hand, however, was overwhelming.

"Television just doesn't do it justice," she said. "I was speechless. I was as tall as the wheels on those big cranes they're using, and yet those machines look miniscule next to the debris. The debris is like 10 stories high. There are scraps of metal bigger than the trucks they were putting them in. There are still fires burning, and the smell is horrible. One building looked like it had completely melted.

"Seeing it just makes you feel awful."

But just being able to help made them feel good. Long after the smell of onions is gone from Marenoff's hands, she will remember her day at Nino's. The whole day, something struck her over and over.

"There was one consistent message that we kept hearing from them, and it's probably not what you'd expect to hear," said Marenoff. "But all they kept saying to us was 'Thank you!' We looked at them with this look in our eyes like, 'Are you kidding me?' What we were doing for them was so trivial compared to what they were doing for us. You couldn't believe how appreciative they were in a time where we couldn't be anymore appreciative of what they were doing."

(c)womenssoccer.com 2001