Two Sensible Decisions: A Call to Race, Then a Call to Cancel

Among the many decisions that Hurricane Sandy forced upon Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, two difficult ones stand out as having been sensible at the time they were made, even if many New Yorkers may not agree.

The first was the call to go ahead with the ING New York City Marathon, in recognition of its role as an uplifting and unifying event that is woven into the fabric of the city.

Many critics of that directive heaped abuse not only on the mayor but also on the runners as being somehow selfish for hoping to preserve the race. Totally, even willfully, ignored was the spirit of togetherness that the race has long brought to the many neighborhoods where people line sidewalks to cheer the marathoners, be it in Bay Ridge, Sunset Park, Fort Greene, Williamsburg, Long Island City, the Upper East Side or Mott Haven.

The second sensible decision was the one on Friday to cancel the race after it had become obvious that the voices of negativism had grown so lou d as to drown out all others. As mayoral aides said, once the marathon lost its power to unify, it lost its reason for being.

Still, the necessity of the second decision did not negate the validity of the first.

It seems that this city's mettle has been altered. For all the usual New York chest-thumping about how nothing gets us down, we've now shown that our knees can buckle. Compare this anti-marathon sentiment with the reactions after past ordeals.

A mere two days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, the National Football League went ahead with its scheduled Sunday games.

That action was criticized. The league commissioner back then, Pete Rozelle, later called it his biggest mistake. But not everyone saw it that way. Pierre Salinger, Kennedy's press secretary, said he had “absolutely” endorsed the Rozelle decision. “This country needed some normalcy,” Salinger recalled for Sports Illustrated in 1993, “and football, which is a very important game in our society, helped provide it.”

Six days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, put normal life on hold, baseball resumed. The Mets were the first New York team to play, in Pittsburgh. They gave all of us as emotionally gripping a sports moment as we've ever experienced when they took the field wearing caps emblazoned with N.Y.P.D., F.D.N.Y. and P.A.P.D. They made every New Yorker proud and more determined than ever to soldier on, even as the fires smoldered in Lower Manhattan.

Just this weekend, the New York Giants played a scheduled game in New Jersey, a state devastated by the storm. The New York Knicks were at home and so were the new Brooklyn Nets. But there were few complaints, if any, about their having played games that were trivial when stacked against the agony in afflicted parts of the region.

To extend Pierre Salinger's point about football to athletics in general, sports is often our communal camp fire. It is where many of us gather for warmth and assurance that we will be safe, that everything will be O.K.

Yet the marathon runners, for some reason, were scorned as self-centered elitists while millionaire ballplayers were lionized. One explanation offered by some for their hostility was that the race commanded resources that they said should have gone to those suffering on Staten Island and in the Rockaways. But the vituperation had an emotional component that went beyond such logistical considerations. A hard-to-fathom hatred of these athletes emerged, even though they are in the main well-meaning amateurs who, in many instances, spent thousands of dollars out of pocket to come here.

To give you an idea of how over the top some of the attacks became, a Brooklyn woman wrote on a Web site called Change.org that the initial desire to hold the marathon was “the personification of greed and evil.”

Real ly now, evil? As for greed, the mayor has been roughed up for pointing out the importance of the race to the city's economy, valued at about $340 million. Taxes on that money help pay the salaries of police officers, firefighters and other city workers. That hardly qualifies as avarice, let alone as a reason to pounce on Mr. Bloomberg.

If the mayor had a notable failing, it was in not living up to his own standards. “Leadership,” he said in a recent interview with The Atlantic magazine, “is about doing what you think is right and then building a constituency behind it.”

When it came to the 2012 marathon in Hurricane Sandy's wake, that constituency was wanting. And so by his yardstick, Mr. Bloomberg as leader landed out of the running.

E-mail Clyde Haberman: haberman@nytimes.com