PHILADELPHIA – Joe Maddon remembered exactly where he was when he first heard about the 9/11 attacks, almost 3,000 miles away from the Twin Towers at his house in Long Beach, California.
“I got into my Dodge Ram pickup truck and turned the radio on,” Maddon recalled 14 years later. “Reports were coming in and I really thought it was another ‘War of the Worlds’ kind of a hoax.”
It would hit very close to home. At the time, Maddon worked as Mike Scioscia’s bench coach for the Anaheim Angels, part of the long journey that led him from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, to Lafayette College to ultimately becoming a star manager with the Cubs.