Garnet "Ace" Bailey and Mark Lawrence Bavis were Los Angeles Kings' scouts who were aboard United Flight 175 when it crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Kings fan Dave Krasne http://www.bobsblitz.com/2012/06/la-fan-places-champions-hat-at-wtc.html at the WTC Memorial, South Pool, on Panel S-3 (on top of the two men's names) and tweeted :@lakingsinsider @helenenothelen as a kings fan in NYC, I couldn't let Mark Bavis or Ace Bailey miss the festivities," back in June.
Fast forward to this past weekend. Above, that's Bavis' sister, Kathy Bavis Sylvester, and Bailey's widow, also named Kathy. Kings General Manager Dean Lombardi and the Hockey Hall of Fame brought the Stanley Cup to the memorial and posed it where the hat had laid -- right near the men's names.
Now that is a great gesture. And it gets better:
[Kings General Manager Dean] Lombardi said the families went in to see the memorial first and then were joined by the rest of the Kings' group and the Cup.
"The one thing that was the most neat, the sister had said they had never been to ground zero before and said, 'We have no interest in going there. The only way we'd ever go there would be in a celebration mode for these guys with the Stanley Cup.' And she wasn’t kidding," Lombardi said. "This was an incredibly emotional day for them. This is the first day that any of them had been there.
“To hear them say that, and I can’t speak for them, but I think it might have helped them come to terms with it a little bit. When you stay away from something, sometimes it just builds and you've got to confront it at some point. That's probably the biggest thing I took out of it. This might have helped with the healing process, so to speak, and it wouldn't have happened without that type of event. They wouldn't have done it without the Stanley Cup. It was pretty neat from that perspective. That's the one thing that resonated with me the most.”
Lombardi said the group spent about four hours at the site.
"It really started drawing a crowd, but it wasn’t an unruly crowd," he said. "It was kind of weird. Usually you bring the Cup in and you get that whole thing. But this was different. Everybody understood why they were there, so they were respectful. It was pretty special. I didn’t expect it to have that type of impact."
Score.
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