Craig Greenlee remembers thinking that could have been me, and the memories come rushing back.
Greenlee, a former Marshall University football player, survived the deadliest plane crash in American sports history because he had quit the team. But he lost 37 of his former teammates. The relatively minor decision to leave the team ultimately spared his life.
“Knowing that I could have been on that plane, the fact that I made a decision and it panned out this way, that still amazes me to this day,” Greenlee, of Winston-Salem, N.C., said this week. “It will always be with me. Those things don’t ever fade.”
On Nov. 14, 1970, a chartered Southern Airlines plane transporting the players, coaches, spouses, boosters and officials from a game at East Carolina crashed and burned into a wet, foggy hillside two miles from the runway of the Tri-State Airport. An official cause wasn’t determined. All 75 passengers aboard the DC-9 plane were killed instantly upon impact. Greenlee lost dozens of friends, coaches and acquaintances. There were no survivors.
Greenlee’s survival is a powerful reminder of the sheer randomness of how the day unfolded, who lived, who died, which families were touched, and whose were impacted forever. Every day, people make seemingly insignificant decisions — to join an organization, to run to the grocery store, to grab a coffee — without realizing the possibilities that our choices lead to. Call it “luck” or “fate.”
What is clear is the role chance plays in peoples’ lives, every day, and how consequential the small decisions we make can be. No matter how hard we work, how much money we have or who we are, we are all subject to the vagaries of chance.
“The possibilities of any day are limitless,” Greenlee says. “It taught me there are so many things that can happen at any given time.”
