One on One

by John Feinstein

  And then came the game.

  Navy’s biggest question mark going in was who was going to be the kicker. They had tried three different kickers during the season without much success. Ryan Bucchianeri, now a junior, wasn’t even in uniform. He was standing with the rest of the Midshipmen, still believing he was the team’s best kicker—and perhaps being correct given the performance of the others who had been given his old job.

  After much debate among the coaches and a week of informal “tryouts,” the Navy coaches had decided to risk going with a plebe who had never been in a college football game: Tom Vanderhorst, a quietly confident kid who had been the best kicker in practice all week. Twice, Vanderhorst trotted out to try field goals with everyone on the Navy sideline holding their breath. Twice, he was perfect.

  Navy led 13–7 early in the fourth quarter and seemed to have the game in hand when it drove to the Army one-yard line. On third down it looked as if Navy quarterback Chris McCoy had an open lane to the goal line to score, but Cantelupe somehow closed on him fast enough to bring him down on the one.

  Fourth down. The game clock was under nine minutes. Army had scored once all day. Logic said Navy should take the chip-shot field goal and make it a two-score margin at 16–7. Charlie Weatherbie wasn’t sure. In the press box, Paul Johnson was telling him, “If you want to go for it, I’ve got a play we’ll score on.”

  Gary Patterson, the defensive backs coach, who has since gone on to huge success as the head coach at Texas Christian, was screaming at Weatherbie to kick the field goal. Weatherbie decided to go for it. The play Johnson sent in was, in fact, wide open: a fake to the fullback followed by McCoy quickly throwing to slotback Cory Schemm in the end zone. But the ball slipped just a little coming out of McCoy’s hands. Not used to throwing the ball very often, especially at such an important moment, he rushed it a little. The ball came up short and Schemm’s dive was futile. The ball rolled to the turf while the Army bench celebrated as if it had just won the game.

  In fact, I distinctly remember Jim Cantelupe turning to Derek Klein and saying, “We just won the game. We just won the f—ing game.” In the book, I changed f—ing to damn so Jim’s mom wouldn’t get mad at him. She got mad at him anyway, so I can now reveal the truth. Jim has since given her two grandchildren, so I think she’ll forgive him.

  Army took over with 8:43 left and put together one of the most amazing drives I’ve ever seen—going ninety-nine yards and converting a fourth and twenty-four along the way when quarterback Ronnie McAda hit a streaking John Graves on the one-yard line to set up what proved to be the winning touchdown.

  John Conroy, who is now a Chicago cop at least in part because asthma made it impossible for him to be sworn in as an army officer, scored the winning touchdown. The game ended with Al Roberts—“leadership is convincing people they can do things they shouldn’t be able to do”—knocking Navy quarterback Ben Fay (in the game to try to pass the football) down just as he released a Hail Mary pass to the end zone. It was intercepted by Donnie Augustus, an extra defensive back put in the game just for that play.

  Lying on the ground, neither Roberts nor Fay could see what happened, but when they heard the roar come from the Army side of the field, they both knew. Roberts jumped up, put his hand out, and helped Fay up. Then he gave him a hug.

  As the teams came together for the playing of the alma maters, I found most of the seniors. I congratulated the Army guys, offered condolences to the Navy guys. I’d been torn the entire day: I didn’t want the Navy seniors to go out without a win over Army. I also wanted Sutton, who I had come to genuinely like once he’d let me inside the circle, to keep his job.

  The only person I couldn’t find was Thompson. After the last notes of the Army alma mater had been played, I heard someone calling my name. I turned around and saw Thompson. Tears were rolling down his face. When I walked over to him, he buried his head on my shoulder.

  “I can’t believe they did it to us again,” he said between sobs.

  At that moment I said perhaps the corniest thing I’ve ever said to someone in my life, but I meant it: “Don’t ever think you’re anything but a winner.”

  Phil Hoffmann, who has been Navy’s photographer for more than twenty-five years, happened to be standing nearby, and he took a picture of us as I was saying that. He sent it to me. It is the only photo of an athlete I have hanging on the wall in my office.

  Thompson was still crying when Gary Patterson, his position coach, walked over. He was jelly-legged from the emotion, so Patterson and I each took him by an arm and walked him up the tunnel. When we got into the locker room, everyone else was in there, already kneeling for Weatherbie’s postgame prayer. I knelt between Patterson and Thompson.

  Just as I did, a security guard, who had followed us inside, put a hand on my shoulder. For obvious reasons I was dressed in neutral colors, so I looked different than anyone else in the locker room.

  “Come on, pal, you don’t belong in here,” he said.

  Before I could turn to show him the two passes—one for the Army sideline, one for the Navy sideline—looped around my belt, Thompson turned and pointed a finger menacingly in the guard’s face. “He’s with us. You get away from him.”

  The guard didn’t argue for a second. He might have wanted to mess with me at that moment, but he did not want to mess with Thompson.

  Weatherbie broke down midway through his prayer, blaming himself for the loss. It was one of the most intensely emotional scenes I’ve ever witnessed.

  Once the players had stood from the prayer and started quietly making their way to lockers, I slipped out and raced down the hall to the Army locker room. The celebration was just beginning. Cantelupe and Joel Davis made a point of presenting the game ball to Sutton—trying to send a message to, as Davis put it, “all the stars” (army generals) in the room.

  Once the speeches were finished, Cantelupe—still in uniform—went down the hall to find Thompson and console him. The two are still close friends to this day, as are many of the players on both teams.

  Cantelupe left the army two years later during a downsizing of the military that allowed a number of graduates to get out before their five-year requirement was over. He’s now a very successful money manager in Chicago.

  Thompson is a major in the marines and about to become lieutenant colonel. He deployed to Iraq for a year in 2008 and came back in one piece. In the summer of 2011, after fifteen years of service around the world, he got the assignment he had always dreamed about getting: being sent back to Annapolis as the marine corps rep to the football team.

  “Maybe now,” he joked, “I’ll get to be part of a win over Army.”

  20

  “Can’t You Just Write a Magazine Story?”

  THE SUCCESS OF A Civil War, the book that came from my year following Army-Navy, was about as gratifying to me as seeing A Season on the Brink and A Good Walk Spoiled each reach number one on the bestseller list. A Civil War never climbed that high, but it was a bestseller and, to this day, still sells in paperback.

  When people ask me what I think my best book was, I always say A Civil War.

  What made the book for me—and I think for readers—was the quality of the people I was writing about. You just can’t play football at Army or Navy without being a remarkable person. It’s too hard. Just going to an academy is difficult. Going to an academy and playing football is pretty close to impossible. That’s why, almost without fail, more than one hundred plebes show up each summer wanting to play football—many recruited, many not recruited—and somewhere between twenty and twenty-five are still around as first-classmen.

  Having spent a year with Army and Navy football players, I had been spoiled. I got accustomed to walking into scheduled meetings a few minutes early and finding the player there waiting for me. If I had a frustration in dealing with the players, it was in getting them to call me John instead of “Mr. Feinstein,” or “sir.” I went to graduation at both schools that year and f
elt like a proud older brother as each of the young men I had come to know so well received his degree.

  At the end of the season, I took each group of seniors out to dinner to thank them for all the time they had given me during the fall. There are not a lot of eating options in the West Point neighborhood, and the “Fat Men,” as the Army offensive linemen called themselves, wanted to go to a Ponderosa because almost everything on the menu was all-you-can-eat.

  So we went to Ponderosa.

  One of the more amazing stories among the seniors that season had been that of a defensive lineman named Adrian Calame. He’d undergone knee surgery early in the year and had been told he wouldn’t play again. Not surprisingly, Calame didn’t accept that diagnosis. He kept working out and kept rehabbing and vowed he would play again.

  I still remember the morning of the Boston College game when the team went for its morning pregame walk around the parking lot at the hotel. It was raining and no one really wanted to be out there, but this was part of the pregame ritual. Calame, on crutches, walked with his teammates. He was part of the team, he took part in the pregame walk.

  And he did come back to play the last two weeks, including the Army-Navy game.

  Calame was quiet and shy, one of the group I simply couldn’t get to stop calling me Mr. Feinstein.

  When we walked into the Ponderosa for dinner, the Fat Men jumped to the front to order their food so they could get started going back for more as soon as possible. Calame was near the back along with Jim Cantelupe, Derek Klein, Abby Muhammad (another defensive back), and me. When it was his turn to order, he said quietly to the cashier, “I’d like two of the all-you-can-eat shrimp dinners.”

  Cantelupe screamed in pain. “Adrian, you’re a senior at the United States Military Academy and you just ordered two all-you-can-eat dinners?”

  “What’s wrong?” Calame said innocently. “I’m hungry.”

  Then he realized what he’d said and everyone cracked up. It was one of those moments bound to come up at reunions years later.

  Army and Navy both went to bowl games in 1996. Sutton had saved his job and proceeded to go 10–2 and win national coach-of-the-year awards. Navy was 9–3. The difference in their records was Army’s 28–24 win in a driving rainstorm in Philadelphia. Eight times in the final two minutes of the game, Navy snapped the ball from inside the ten-yard line trying to score the go-ahead touchdown. Eight times Army stopped them.

  The last Navy fourth down came with five seconds to play. After Ronnie McAda had taken a knee to end the game, Sutton said to me, “What a rout. We had the game won with five seconds left.”

  President Clinton was there to present the commander-in-chief’s trophy, which was not going to Air Force for the first time since 1988. Soaked to the bone and shivering, the Army players stood in line to shake the president’s hand after he presented the trophy. I was freezing. I’m not sure any of them felt the cold or the rain at all. They were that happy.

  MY NEXT PROJECT WAS one that, in theory at least, should have been great fun: I would chronicle a season in the ACC, focusing on the nine coaches and the pressures they felt. Seven of the nine coaches gave me total access to their programs throughout the season. The two who didn’t were Herb Sendek, who was in his first season at NC State and didn’t know me very well, and Dean Smith, who was in his thirty-sixth season at North Carolina and did know me very well.

  I wasn’t that concerned with Sendek. For one thing, even though he was clearly a good coach, he wasn’t all that interesting. For another, he gave me a lot of time and a lot of access. The only thing he didn’t let me do was come into his locker room during games. I didn’t feel as if I was missing that much.

  Of course, I would have loved to be inside Dean Smith’s locker room. But I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Dean had made that clear to me when I was working on A Season on the Brink with his “I wouldn’t let my mother in the locker room” line.

  But I still had to try.

  And so, after I had spoken to seven of the league’s other coaches, I went to see Dean in the spring of 1996. As always, we talked politics—“Doesn’t it bother you that Mike [Krzyzewski] is a Republican?” he would always say. We talked about how frustrating the previous season had been for him: for only the second time in sixteen seasons, Carolina had failed to make at least the Sweet Sixteen, and I had the feeling Dean was not in love with some of his players.

  Then I came to the point. I told him I was doing a book, that the focus was the coaches (and I knew he thought I should focus on the players), and that I wanted complete access to his team whenever I was around throughout the coming season.

  “What do you mean by ‘complete access’?” he asked.

  I told him.

  He was, as I knew he would be, shaking his head before I was finished.

  “You know I’m not going to do that,” he said. “We’ve had this conversation before.”

  “I understand, Dean, but you should know that all the other coaches [Sendek had just arrived at NC State and I had not yet talked to him] have agreed to give me total access.”

  “Well, I figured Mike would do it [always the Duke thing], but the others have too? Gary [Williams]? Dave [Odom]? Bobby [Cremins]?”

  “Yes. All of them. Not just Mike.”

  Dean leaned forward in his chair, clearly not pleased.

  “Look, this really isn’t fair,” he said. “You know we don’t let anyone in our locker room who isn’t part of the team. We don’t even let the managers come in at halftime. That’s been our tradition for as long as I’ve been here.”

  “I know that, Dean,” I said. “But you know slavery was a tradition once upon a time too.”

  Dean leaned forward in his seat, smiling just a little bit.

  “You aren’t really trying to compare slavery to me allowing you in my locker room, are you?”

  As usual, he had me. “It was worth a try,” I said.

  Dean didn’t let me in his locker room. But I think I can honestly say he was about as open with me as he’s ever been. I was allowed to come to practice whenever I asked. I was allowed to sit near the Carolina bench, though not on it. Dean gave me all the interview time I asked for before, during, and after the season. And when I asked him about the various rituals—for example, exactly how did halftime work?—he answered.

  One of our sessions came over lunch on Election Day. I voted early, drove to Chapel Hill, and met Dean in his office. As we walked to his car to go to the faculty club, where he liked to eat, I told him that he was driving a BMW because one of his first managers ran a BMW dealership.

  “We really have known each other too long,” he said, laughing.

  After we had finished, I drove over to Durham to watch Duke practice. When I walked in, Krzyzewski asked me if I had just gotten to town.

  “No, I was over in Chapel Hill,” I said. “I had lunch with Dean. We were talking about how pleased we both are that Clinton’s going to win tonight.”

  Krzyzewski smiled. “Oh yeah, I forgot about you and Dean bonding through your politics. You two bleeding-heart liberals deserve one another.”

  “Yes, we do,” I answered.

  The only time Dean balked at a question during the season was when I asked him what sort of pregame prayer, if any, his team said before a game.

  “That’s personal,” he said. “I’m not going to answer that.”

  I didn’t push it, in part because I didn’t think he’d answer me, but also because I thought I could get the answer from someone else.

  A couple of weeks later, when Carolina played at Clemson, I was standing in the hallway outside the visitors’ locker room just after the teams had gone on the floor to warm up. Dean was one of the few big-time coaches (Dave Odom was another) who went onto the floor during warm-ups. He liked to sit on the bench and watch the opponent and see if he could pick anything up.

  When he walked outside, he spotted me and waved me over. “We say a nondenominational prayer in the
locker room before each game,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Why did you decide to tell me?”

  “I figured you’d find out one way or the other.”

  Spending time with Dean—any time—was always instructional. When Carolina went to play at Virginia in January, I found him pacing the hallway outside his team’s locker room about an hour before the game.

  “I don’t like coming up here,” he said. “They always play us well and I always get a speeding ticket on the way home.”

  “Seriously?”

  He nodded his head. “Seriously. I think it’s the same guy every time. He finds a spot and when he sees my [North Carolina] plates, he pulls me over. Last time we lost up here he pulled me over and said, ‘Tough loss tonight, Coach. License and registration, please.’ ”

  “Maybe you should slow down.”

  “Maybe we should win the game. Then I wouldn’t mind the ticket.”

  As we talked, an old usher walked up to say hello to Dean. As he always did, even with people he barely knew, Dean remembered his name and greeted him like a long-lost friend. “Now here’s someone you should talk to,” he said to me—largely, I suspected, because it might mean I’d stop talking to him. “How long have you been an usher here?”

  Back then, when Virginia was still playing in old University Hall, I don’t think there was an usher working in the building under the age of eighty. The man pulled himself up straight, stuck his chest out, and said, “Twenty-eight years.”

  “Did you hear that?” Dean said. “He’s been coming to this place for twenty-eight years. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “Amazing,” I said. The man walked away, no doubt feeling as if he was only slightly less important (maybe) than the president of the United States.