By Bob Markus

Once they were kings. Once the whole world watched when Army and Navy lined up to play football on a late autumn Saturday. As Gen. Douglas MacArthur famously wired, "We have stopped the war to celebrate your magnificant success." That was in 1944, when the greatest of Army teams, ranked No. 1, had just defeated No.2 Navy, 23-7, to begin a three-year reign as national collegiate football champions. That was in a time when the Army-Navy game was a happening, when 100,000 fans would cram into Philadelphia's Municipal Stadium to see the annual collision of the two service academies. The Army-Navy game, no matter what the teams' records, was to college football in its day what the Super Bowl is to pro football today.

Its day is long past, buried in the mist of memory. Sure, Army-Navy can still fill a stadium today and may do so tomorrow, but it no longer has any relevance to modern football fans. Last Saturday's 34-0 romp by Navy, its unprecedented seventh in a row over Army, was buried, perhaps mercifully, near the used car ads in the back of most sports sections. Chances are, that most football fans, caught up in the delicious dilemma of which Big 12 team was going to play Florida for the national championship, didn't even notice.

I noticed. I've always noticed. I was 10 years old and a Notre Dame fan in 1944 and there was only radio and the Sunday papers with which to follow college football. Did you know that Notre Dame actually was No. 1 through the first four weeks and 5-0 and ranked No. 2 going into week six? Then came successive losses to Navy, 32-13, and Army, 59-0. That caught my attention, all right.

Those were different times, of course. War times. The service teams were loaded with talented players, many of whom had played for other schools before the war and would return to those schools afterward. Among others, Navy had Arkansas' Clyde (Smackover) Scott and Penn's Skippy Minisi. Army had Barney Poole from Ole Miss and Texas A & M's Hank Foldberg. But the two brightest stars of the era entered West Point as true freshmen. Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard both would win Heisman trophies and Davis would twice be runner-up in Heisman voting. Many of the top players who didn't get into the service academies would star for other service teams, like Iowa Preflight, Randolph Field, and Great Lakes Naval training Station, coached by Paul Brown. In the final AP poll in 1944, 12 of the top 20 were service teams, including Randolph Field (10-0), which finished third, behind only Army and Ohio State, both 9-0. Navy (6-3) was fourth.

When the war ended, Navy's talent pipeline shut down as if someone had turned off a faucet, but Army, like its caissons, kept rolling along. This produced three of the most memorable games in Army-Navy history. The 1946 Army team, a perfect season marred only by the famous 0-0 tie with Notre Dame, was a 19 point favorite over 1-7 Navy. But with 92 seconds remaining, Navy trailed only 21-18 and was on the Army 2-yard line. The frenzied crowd stormed onto the field and lined both sidelines as Navy called an illegal timeout and was penalized back to the 7. The Middies then sent halfback Pete Williams around right end, where he attempted to go out of bounds. Engulfed as he was by the crowd, it was difficult to tell if he was out of bounds when Barney Poole tackled him at the 3. The officials said he wasn't and time ran out before Navy could run another play.

Two years later an 0-8 Navy team managed a 21-21 tie with an 8-0 Army team that was more like kissing Lana Turner than anybody's sister. And two years after that 2 and 6 Navy scored a 14-2 victory over unbeaten Army to knock the Cadets out of a national championship.
That was the last truly memorable Army-Navy game--except for 1963.

I was working on the copy desk of The Chicago Tribune's sports department and teaching a course in sports writing at Columbia college in downtown Chicago. I was walking from the school to Tribune Tower down Michigan avenue when I came upon a crowd gathered outside a television sales store. I asked a man watching the screen what was going on and he said, "The President's been shot." I assumed the President had merely been wounded and wondered what affect it might have on the next year's election when my candidate, Barry Goldwater, would likely be running against him. Would it gain Jack Kennedy some sympathy votes? Unaware of the President's itinerary, I asked the man, "Where?" expecting him to answer New York or Washington or some other city. Instead he responded, "in the haid."

Among the many consequences of that fateful day was that I got to cover my first Army-Navy game. Like many other events, the game had been postponed by the tragic occurence in Dallas. The writer originally assigned to cover the game had another commitment and I was given the assignment. At the time I was still pretty much anchored to the copy desk. I had covered four or five college games that fall and, earlier in the year, was the sidebar writer on Loyola's NCAA basketball championship. But this was, for me, a plum assignment. It also turned out to be a helluva story.

Although Army had a 7-2 record, it was unranked and a big underdog to No. 2 Navy (8-1), which was led byRoger Staubach, who would win the Heisman that year. The game turned out to be almost a mirror image of the 1946 game, although this time it was Army desperately trying to beat the clock. Navy led 21-7 on three scoring runs by Pat Donnelly until unheralded Army quarterback Rollie Stichweh scored his second touchdown of the game and ran for a two-point conversion to make it 21-15. Army then recovered an onside kick and had the ball at the Navy 48 with 6:18 to go. These days that would be enough time to score four or five touchdowns and even back then it seemed ample. But Stichweh wasn't much of a passer and Army had no timeouts left. Add to that the fact that the noise of the capacity crowd drowned out Stichweh's attempt to call signals down near the goal line and the result was that time ran out with Army on the Navy 2 and Stichweh desperately trying to get his team lined up.

I was to cover one more Army-Navy game, in 1991, a game memorable only for the fact that Navy, 0-10 going in, beat 4-6 Army, 24-3, for its only victory of the year. The only reason The Tribune even covered that game was that it was played on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. I'm not sure if The Tribune has covered an Army-Navy game since. I doubt it. The Army-Navy game, after all, is not the same and probably never will be. The same, judging by today's headlines in the financial section , might be said of The Tribune.