Watching underdog Navy beat Army over the weekend took me back to the autumn of 1968 when I was a young sportswriter covering college football for a Baltimore newspaper called The News American.
Two things from that storied football rivalry have stayed with me through the years, neither involving the game itself.
One was the remarkable spirit that long-ago week in Annapolis. Navy’s football team was pitiful that season. They’d only won two games all year. But the entire brigade seemed charged with electricity as the big game with Army approached.
I had dinner in the Navy mess hall one night that week. The noise still reverberates in my ears. First, the Middies, all 4,100 of ‘em, were beating knives against their plates. Then, the hand clapping and foot stomping started, and the cheering. Some of it was even printable.
Then, a bunch of the football players were hoisted on classmates’ shoulders and carried up and down the long dining aisles to the accompaniment of raucous cheering.
Outside, huge banners covered Bancroft Hall and Tecumseh Square, and papier mâché statues, too. There were a couple of papier mâché airplanes strung across a wire high atop the square. A “Navy” plane was chasing an “Army” plane over the wire, while lights blinked on and off and a loudspeaker played “Victory at Sea.”
At its best, college football has a wonderful binding effect. Everybody on campus feels part of the same tribe. There’s strength in numbers. All miracles seem possible.
But this distant moment was the changing of a sports era in America — including the military service academies. By 1968, the truly gifted high school athletes were looking elsewhere. The pro game was capturing the nation’s imagination, and salaries were beginning to blossom.
The days of Roger Staubach and Joe Bellino coming to Navy were over. The gifted athletes were thinking, “What do I want, a shot at a pro football career and its big bucks, or mandatory military service time required of all Army and Navy graduates, where I might wind up in a place like Vietnam?”
The answer was clear. The top jocks were heading for civilian colleges, and the military academies were entering such a tough era that they wound up softening their schedules.
But the Army-Navy game was their throwback to the glory days. And the emotional importance of the contest takes me back to a second memory of that time.
Navy lost the big 1968 game, 21 to 14. And the scene that stays with me is the Navy locker room afterwards. The Navy coach was Bill Elias, a nice man who’d inherited a tough situation.
In the locker room, Elias was trying to console his team when a small squad of big-shot admirals, maybe half a dozen of them, marched in. The scowls on their faces remain indelible. You’d have thought a major war had just been lost, and not a mere football game. Losing was deemed inexcusable.
Within a few days, Elias was fired.
This year, Navy was 3-and-8 entering last Saturday’s game, while Army was 8-and-3. Watching the victorious, delirious Middies after the game, you could imagine the celebrating to come.
But imagine the angst in that Army locker room.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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