One on One

by John Feinstein

  The 1993 game was played in the Meadowlands that Saturday in a driving rainstorm. Army led 16–0, before Navy rallied in the fourth quarter to trail 16–14 and then drove the length of the field to set up a chip-shot eighteen-yard field goal in the final seconds. But Ryan Bucchianeri, a freshman kicker for the Midshipmen, let his kick drift wide right. It was a miss that would haunt Navy for years and Bucchianeri for the remainder of his time at the academy, even though he became something of a national hero for taking full responsibility for the miss.

  That night, on the way home to Annapolis in the same awful rainstorm, three Midshipmen were killed when their car slid off the road within sight of the academy. They had just come over what the Mids call “oh shit hill”—because when you crest it, the academy comes into view and your first instinct is to say “oh shit.”

  There were plenty of storylines—some good, some bad, a couple horrific—at Navy. I would do the book that way.

  THINGS BEGAN TO CHANGE that summer. Bob Kinney retired, but before he left he handed me over to his assistant, Bob Beretta, with instructions to “do anything you can to help him.”

  Together, the two Bobs came up with one more idea that they took to Sutton: Let the guy (me) at least talk to the captains. Let the captains report back on how the interviews went and then Sutton could decide whether to allow more players to talk. Sutton agreed. Beretta suggested I come up on the August day that culminated in the annual media barbecue.

  “All the coaches will be there, the supe [superintendent] will be there too,” he said. “You might get some informal time with Sutton, which can’t hurt.”

  The only thing that hurt that day was the speeding ticket I got from a very humorless MP shortly after passing through the Stoney Lonesome Gate, which is at the very top of the army post that the academy is located on. After you pass through Stoney Lonesome you basically go straight downhill for a couple of miles. The speed limit is twenty-five. Unless you ride the brake hard, you can’t help but go at least thirty-five. That’s how fast I was going when I was pulled over by the MP, who had been lying in wait right outside the parking lot of the post exchange.

  “What’s your business here?” he asked.

  “I’m a reporter going to interview members of the football team.”

  “Cadets?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, took my information to his car, and handed me a ticket. “Next time obey the speed limit,” he said, practically shoving the ticket through the window.

  It was only later that I learned I should have told him I was a tourist, that I was a delivery boy, that I had taken a wrong turn and gotten lost—anything but saying I was there to talk to the football team.

  “The MPs hate us,” Jim Cantelupe told me. “They’re all enlisted guys, and they see us as spoiled rich kid future officers. They call us Cad-idiots.”

  Lesson learned. Cantelupe was my first of four interviews that day. Beretta was sneaky fast: he had not only scheduled time for me with the two captains—Cantelupe, a defensive back; and Joel Davis, an offensive tackle—but with two other seniors, Al Roberts and Derek Klein.

  “Let’s get as much done as possible and go from there,” he said.

  Just as at Navy, I liked all four players instantly. Roberts said something that day that has stuck with me ever since: “Leadership is convincing people they can do things they shouldn’t be able to do.”

  Given that Roberts was 6 foot 1 and 225 pounds and played defensive end, he knew what he was talking about. Most high school teams don’t have defensive linemen that small.

  Cantelupe and Klein spent as much time questioning me as I did questioning them. Klein knew my work well because he was a big golf fan. How much would I be around, they asked. I told them what had been going on.

  “We’ll talk to Coach Sutton,” Cantelupe said. “We’ll bring him around. This is too good an idea to let the Navy guys have all the fun.”

  I liked his attitude and his self-confidence (no one on earth has more self-confidence than Cantelupe). But I was, to put it mildly, skeptical.

  That night at the barbecue, I met several people who would become close friends: Tim Kelly, the trainer, and Andy Smith, his assistant; Dick Hall, the equipment manager; and Bob Arciero, the team doctor.

  “I hate Duke,” was the first thing Arciero said to me. “They ran up the score on us last year.”

  I told him I hoped he wouldn’t hold me responsible for that. Apparently, he didn’t. Ten years later when I needed shoulder surgery, Arciero was my doctor.

  At the end of the evening, I spent some time with Sutton. Much to my surprise, before I could say anything about it, he said, “The players you talked to today really enjoyed it.”

  “So did I,” I said. “I’d really like to talk to more of them.”

  Sutton nodded. “How about this,” he said. “We’ve got a bye week in mid-September. Come on up and talk to as many as you can then.”

  “Can I talk to you too?” I said, figuring this was the time to push my luck.

  “Yeah, I think we can arrange that.”

  All I had to do then was get off the post without getting another ticket and the day would be well worth the thirty-five-dollar fine for my morning transgression.

  BOB ARCIERO HATED DUKE even more after the second week of the season. The Blue Devils came into Michie Stadium and kicked a field goal at the buzzer after a horrid call by an official allowed them to retain possession on what would have been a game-ending fumble on their final drive.

  I was there on the sideline, but not in the locker room until after the game. That was okay though; I was biding my time. Plus, my new friends Arciero, Kelly, Smith, Hall, and the four players were more than willing to fill me in on what I’d missed.

  The next week I came up to do the interviews Sutton had agreed to let me do. One by one I sat and got to know the players the way I now knew the Navy players. Even though I was considerably older than each of them, I felt connected to them right away. After Navy had opened the season with a stunning 33–2 win at Southern Methodist, Andrew Thompson, Cantelupe’s counterpart as defensive captain, had put his arm around me walking off the field and said, “I’m so glad you’re part of this.”

  I was too.

  The key to the week at Army was the lunch I had with Sutton. It was a miserable, rainy day, and we met at the Hotel Thayer, which sits just inside the main gate (both named for academy founder Sylvanus Thayer) of the academy. The dining room has a magnificent view of the Hudson River, even on a day shrouded by rain and fog.

  Somewhere over lunch, Sutton and I finally connected. I think he sensed—at last—that the reason I wanted to do the book was the genuine respect I had for the academies and the feelings I had for the rivalry and the players. I never brought up any more access while we ate; I stuck to letting him tell stories about the players and the twelve Army-Navy games (eight as an assistant, four as head coach) he had taken part in.

  After lunch, I gave him a ride back to his office. When we pulled up I took my best shot.

  “Would you consider this?” I said. “Would you consider asking the players how they feel about having me around?”

  Having now talked to just about all the seniors and the key underclassmen, I felt confident I had most, if not all, in my corner.

  “I’ll do that,” Sutton said. “I think that’s a fair request. If they want to do it—especially the firsties [seniors]—I think I should be willing to go along with them.”

  We shook hands and I thanked him. The next day he called me.

  “You’re in,” he said. “Just let us know when you want to come up.”

  AS IT TURNED OUT, I missed one of the most dramatic games Army played that season. The one place the schedule had done me wrong was in putting Air Force–Navy on the same day as Army–Notre Dame. Knowing how important the Air Force game was to both Army and Navy, I felt I had to be in Annapolis that day. Plus, being honest, I figured that game would be more competitive than
the one taking place in the Meadowlands.

  I was wrong.

  Air Force won fairly easily, 30–20. Notre Dame won 28–27 only when Army tight end Ron Leshinski was tackled a foot short of the goal line on what would have been a winning two-point conversion attempt in the final seconds. Army had been down 28–7 and had rallied to come that close to winning. This was a year before college football adopted overtime. Sutton could have kicked a routine point-after-touchdown and been at least a semi-hero for pulling out a tie against Notre Dame. He never considered it.

  “The players never would have forgiven me,” he said. “They didn’t want to tie Notre Dame, they wanted to beat Notre Dame.”

  I spent a good deal of time at West Point the next week getting players to re-create the game for me. Then I went to Boston College with the team. Game day was rainy, windy, and miserable (my abiding memory of that season is bad weather). The Army players loved it: they were convinced that this was their kind of weather.

  They were right. From the very beginning, Army dominated. By halftime the score was an astonishing 42–0. The score was so remarkable that when it was announced in the press box at Navy, a number of writers asked Tom Bates if it was the other way around: Boston College having the 42.

  “I didn’t blame them for asking,” Bates said. “I double-checked it myself. I didn’t think Army would be down by that much but there was no way they’d be up by that much.”

  Except there was a way. The final was 49–7 only because Sutton played everyone on the sideline except me. My only concern all weekend had been that if the team played badly, Sutton might somehow think my presence was a distraction. That wasn’t a concern anymore.

  “You are in, all the way in,” Sutton said in the locker room afterward just in case I had any lingering doubts.

  The rest of the season was pretty much a joyride for me—even Army’s bitter loss at Air Force—because the people at both schools had grown to be completely comfortable with my presence. I went to class with Cadets and Midshipmen, hung out with them in their dorms, and basically saw and heard just about everything there was to see and hear.

  One of the highlights for me was a day I spent with Cantelupe, meeting him for morning reveille at 6:15 a.m. and staying until he needed to get some studying done that night. We went to breakfast and then his first-period class. Since he had no second-period class, we went back to the barracks to spend time in his room (at Navy the dorm is called “The Hall,” short for Bancroft Hall; at Army it is just the barracks).

  Jim introduced me to Kevin Norman, his roommate. Norman was bright, engaging, and funny. He had been a punter but had given up football as a senior to focus on his studies. He would become a pilot who would be killed overseas in 2003. That was one of the realities of doing a book on Army and Navy: some of the people you met were going to put their lives on the line not long after graduation. It makes you stop and think a little bit about athletes who are deemed “courageous” for going for a green protected by water, or coaches who are called “brave” for going for it on fourth and two.

  Norman was sitting on his bed, polishing some boots, when we walked in. Cantelupe sat down at his desk and I sat on Jim’s bed. We were talking about life at West Point when there was a knock on the door and another cadet walked in, grabbed a clipboard off the back of the door, and began walking around the room taking notes.

  “MRI,” Cantelupe explained—morning room inspection.

  I looked around the room. It was spotless. And yet the guy was scribbling away on the clipboard. That didn’t seem to bother Cantelupe or Norman at all. Finally, he left, sticking the clipboard back on the door. I walked over to look at it to see what he possibly could have found wrong.

  Plenty.

  “Uniforms not spaced properly, Cadet Cantelupe’s closet,” he had written. “Too many civilian [aka family] photos, Cadet Norman’s desk.” And then there was one other note: “Unknown object, Cadet Cantelupe’s bed.”

  The unknown object was me. I sat down and told Jim and Kevin I’d come a long way in ten years. “Once I was a pimp and a whore,” I said. “Now I’m an unknown object.”

  THROUGH THE YEARS I’VE been fortunate enough to cover more major—and not-so-major—sporting events than I can possibly count. The one I remember most vividly and most emotionally is that year’s Army-Navy game, played on a cold, clear day (no rain or snow, amazingly enough) on December 2 in Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia.

  Both teams had a lot to play for in addition to what is always played for in Army-Navy. The Midshipmen were 5–5 and trying to wrap up their first winning season since 1982. Charlie Weatherbie, aided immeasurably by his two coordinators, Paul Johnson and Dick Bumpas, had gotten Navy turned around in the right direction. This was their chance to end the streak of losing seasons and the three game string of heartbreaking losses to Army.

  For the Cadets it was an even bigger deal: they were trying to save their coach’s job. Everyone had known all season that Sutton’s job was at stake and the loss at Air Force—after Army had led 14–0—had made it clear that Sutton’s only chance to survive was to beat Navy. The players liked Sutton. The seniors, who had played for him for four years, believed he had grown into the job after adjusting to being the guy who makes decisions rather than suggestions—which is the toughest adjustment for anyone going from top assistant to boss.

  For game day, I had lined up lots of help so it would appear that I was everywhere. Doug Pavek, an ex–Army defensive back who was now an OR (officer-representative) at Army, was carrying a tape recorder for me to turn on during those moments when I wasn’t in the Army locker room. Kent Owens, who had the same job at Navy (they were called “officer-reps” rather than OR’s in Annapolis), was doing the same thing in the Navy locker room. And my friend Wes Seeley, the guy who would declare a year later that Tiger Woods was not the fifth Beatle, had the week off from his golf job and had come to Philly for the game. When I was on one sideline, he was on the other.

  So, in a sense, I was everywhere. The tension in the locker rooms was like nothing I had ever felt, except perhaps before I first swam a 200-yard butterfly in high school. My knees still shake when I think about that.

  Neither team was going to a bowl so this was it for the seniors. All of them were going to feel a great sense of loss at the end of the day, regardless of the outcome. Football had been so important to them all their lives and they knew they would never play it again when it meant so much to them—and to so many others.

  That feeling had been best expressed in a note Joel Davis, Army’s offensive captain, had read to his fellow seniors a couple of weeks earlier, prior to the Air Force game. Davis had played at the Army prep school for a year, where his coach had been Anthony Noto—the same Anthony Noto who had been my first interview at Army in 1990 and had gone on to be a hotshot on Wall Street. Later he would become the CFO of the NFL before deciding Roger Goodell was going to be commissioner for a long time and returning to Wall Street.

  Noto had written to Davis to remind him to treasure his last few days as a college football player. “The hardest thing in life is not rising to fight the battle,” he had written. “It’s rising with no battle to fight.”

  For all the seniors this would be their last battle in a football uniform.

  I came down the tunnel before the game with Army for the simple reason that I found their pregame ritual more meaningful than Navy’s. Weatherbie was a born-again Christian who believed in lots of prayer and lots of slogans. On game day he led his players and coaches in prayer no fewer than six times: before pregame meal, before the coaches met in the hotel, before the team met in the hotel, before the game, after the game on the field, and after the game in the locker room.

  I have no problem with prayer, although I prefer it to be private rather than public. Those who choose to do it in public certainly have that right, but six times in a day—especially when Weatherbie would literally ask God for things like “great pad level” and “the
ability to turn it all loose on the field”—was a bit much for me. Some of the players felt the same way but went along.

  “If it helps us win I’ll pray twenty times a day,” Brian Grana, the only Jewish player on the team, had said to me early in the season.

  Most football teams have some kind of sign posted above the locker room door. It has a quote or saying on it, like “Winners never quit” or “Play like a champion.” Traditionally, as the players leave the locker room, they slap the sign on their way through the door to remind themselves that they are ready to play.

  Weatherbie’s said: “How do you spell fun? W-I-N!”

  The players kind of rolled their eyes when he would bring that up in his pregame talks, but they dealt with it because they knew Weatherbie had hired a good staff and they desperately wanted to win after all the years of losing. Most of them had his pregame speech memorized because it was the same every week.

  The Army locker room was a lot different. You never knew what Sutton was going to say to his players before a game. On this day he said very little other than reminding them what he always said about Army-Navy: “The most desperate team wins.”

  The sign on the door of the Army locker room was a little bit more inspired than the one in the Navy locker room. It was a centuries-old quote from the British poet John Dryden. It said simply, “I lay me down for to bleed a while but I will rise to fight with you again.”

  I still get chills when I type those words and when I picture in my mind’s eye Dick Hall—who had fought in Vietnam before becoming Army’s equipment manager in 1971—standing by the door as each player went out, giving each a firm handshake or hug and saying quietly, “Touch the sign, let’s go,” as each went by.

  It was quiet, it was simple, and it was inspiring. There wasn’t even a tiny bit of fake emotion in it.

  And then, after you touched the sign, you were in the tunnel and Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” was blaring in your ears (chosen by the seniors), and at the bottom of the tunnel the noise was even louder as you went from the darkness of the tunnel to the glare of the sunshine and the noise of the crowd, which was coming at you on all sides. No wonder many players on both teams had said the toughest thing about Army-Navy is getting your emotions under control before kickoff.