Another unedited excerpt of my upcoming autobiography (March 11, 2025 release):
Paul and I were scheduled to meet with a major potential sponsor at the World Trade Center area that September. We thought nothing of it when our contact called to push our nine o’clock meeting by a couple of hours. I happened to be working out at my local gym when I saw the news on television. A plane had crashed into the North Tower. Like everybody else, I just assumed it had been a horrible accident, that some inexperienced pilot had lost control of his plane.
I called Paul. I told him to turn on the television.
“What channel?”
“Any channel.”
He got to a television just in time to see the second plane hit. We stayed on the line together, watching silently, unable to comprehend what had just happened. “We were supposed to be there this morning,” Paul reminded me. For some reason, that thought hadn’t crossed my mind until then. The phone lines went down a little while after that, crippled by the volume of calls coming into and out of the city.
The World Trade Center had been a special place for me since moving to the United States, a symbol of the city’s grandeur and ambition and scale that never failed to impress me. Getting to spend time at the top of the South Tower during the Kasparov-Anand match (a match which, coincidentally, began on September 11, 1995) is still one of my favorite New York memories, just as watching both buildings smolder and collapse that day remains one of my worst.
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