Twenty-five years have passed since Sept. 11, 2001, but for Joe Andruzzi and his family, the distance barely registers.
The former Patriots guard still talks about that day with the kind of clarity that makes it feel immediate. He remembers the shock of hearing about the North Tower while sitting in a dentist’s chair at 8:46 a.m.
ET. He remembers being back in North Attleboro, Mass., with his wife, Jen, and their two children, waiting on word about his brothers.
And he remembers the scene in New York two days later, when he went to pick up Jimmy at his firehouse.
“I could close my eyes right now, and you have those photographic memories of what went down and what you were seeing that day,” Andruzzi said. “We all have memories of where we were at, what we were doing.
I can close my eyes and think about two days after 9/11. I was down there in New York City, going to pick up my brother Jimmy from his firehouse and looking down the FDR Drive and seeing buildings.
It was like a scene from a movie. Buildings and the windows were blown out, papers still flying in the air, and the smell was just burnt fuel and flesh mixed together.
It was nasty.”
Jimmy, the second-oldest of the four Andruzzi brothers, was stationed at Engine 5 on East 14th Street and narrowly escaped the North Tower before it came down. He declined an interview about it. Joe’s other brothers, Billy Jr. and Marc, were also part of the response or the Lower Manhattan clean-up after the attacks that killed 2,753 people.
For the family, the fear on that morning was real and immediate. Joe and Jen were trying to track everyone down. His brothers made it through.
“[Jimmy] actually gave my parents’ phone number to a guy on the street who had a cell phone at the time,” Andruzzi said. “He asked him to call my parents and just tell them I’m alive, and he did.”
Twelve days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and after Flight 93 went down in a Pennsylvania field, the Patriots returned to Foxboro Stadium for their home opener against the Jets. Joe’s three brothers were there, wearing fire helmets and No. 63 Andruzzi jerseys under FDNY jackets.
As Andruzzi came out of the tunnel, he spotted two flags taped to the wall and made a split-second choice.
“When I came running out and they called my name, I wasn’t planning on carrying those flags. I went out in the tunnel, and there were two flags taped to the wall.
So it was a last-minute decision to rip them off the wall and hold them up high. I knew my dad and brothers were standing on the 50-yard line waiting for me to get there.
People knew my story; they knew my family was there and you’re holding those flags up high. It meant so much.”
The crowd answered the moment, and the Andruzzi brothers tipped their helmets. After the game, they joined Joe and their father for the coin toss and a photo that now sits in every Andruzzi home.
“I tell people all the time: I played in four Super Bowls, and going out there that day, I never had more butterflies in my stomach than going back out there after 9/11 just to prove to people that life goes on. Sports at that time helped heal everybody’s wounds.
That’s what we were paid to do, and it was part of our job. One of the things that we had to do was go out there and do it one play at a time.”
The Patriots lost that day and dropped to 0-2, but the result was almost beside the point in a country heading toward war in the Middle East. On the field, New England also looked like a team headed nowhere. Then Drew Bledsoe was injured on a brutal fourth-quarter hit from Jets linebacker Mo Lewis, and the season shifted to second-year quarterback Tom Brady, a sixth-round pick out of Michigan.
What followed was the start of something nobody saw coming. Brady and the Patriots recovered, finished 11-5 in 2001 and made a stunning run to the Super Bowl. As a two-touchdown underdog against the Rams, New England became the first team to be announced as a unit on Super Bowl Sunday, then won 20-17 on Adam Vinatieri’s last-second 48-yard field goal.
Andruzzi’s role in all of it was central. He started at guard in the Patriots’ first three Super Bowl wins between 2001 and ’04.
Still, he keeps circling back to the larger picture. The country changed.
The Andruzzi family changed. And the toll from the attacks kept growing as first responders later became ill or died from toxin exposure.
“By all means, let’s not just think about what happened the day of,” Andruzzi said. “There have been so many aftermath deaths from 9/11, the fumes and everything like that, cancer, breathing problems. There’s been hundreds of deaths added onto 9/11.”
Billy, the oldest brother, needed open-heart surgery because of a blockage. Marc and Billy Jr. have retired after injuries suffered on the job. Jimmy is still on active duty and will mark his 31st anniversary with the FDNY in October.
Joe is retired now, but he’s still working through the Joe Andruzzi Foundation, which helps cancer patients in New England find financial help and support. The mission is personal after his own battle with non-Hodgkin Burkitt lymphoma, diagnosed in 2007.
Time moved on. Some lives did too.
Others were cut short. For the Andruzzis, Sept. 11 has never really left.
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