By Bob Markus
In the eternal debate of God vs. science, I vote for neither. If there really is global warming, why is the general population of the entire upper half of the United States freezing to death? If there really is a God, why isn't Ron Santo in the Baseball Hall of Fame? Just asking. I've always known that I wouldn't live long enough to see the frozen tundra transformed into a tropical rain forest. It is now becoming clear that I won't live long enough to see Santo enter baseball's Valhalla, either. Neither will poor Ronnie.
I really thought there was hope for Santo, the Chicago Cubs slugging third baseman of the '60s and 70s, who played the game with the joyful exuberance of a small boy while hiding from the world the fact that he was a diabetic, requiring daily injections of insulin. His was a two-front war, the first against one of the finest array of pitchers the baseball world has yet seen, the likes of Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry, Hall of Famers all; the second against an insidious disease that can eat a man alive if he's not careful and sometimes prevails even if he is. Since retiring from baseball, Santo has lost both legs to the hunger of the disease, but he has never lost his enthusiasm for the game or his love for the Cubs.
Although I'll argue that he was one of the best third basemen ever to play the game, I won't quibble with those who insist he's also one of the worst baseball announcers ever to do color commentary on a game. That, of course, is irrelevant to the subject at hand. And, in fact, Santo is so blatently in love with the Cubs that it is possible to forgive his shouts of "No!!!" when a Cub commits an error in a crucial spot. Perhaps that anguished "No!!!" is as honest commentary as you're going to find in a broadcast booth.
If you were to ask Santo whether he'd rather go into the Hall of Fame or see the Cubs win the world series, I think he'd be hard pressed to answer. It appears to be a moot point at the moment, because I don't think he's going to see either. This has not been the best of years for most people, but imagine what Santo has gone through in the last couple of months, first watching his beloved Cubs implode in the first round of the playoffs, then seeing his hopes of getting into the Hall of Fame dashed--perhaps forever--when the Veterans committee, comprising all living Hall of Famers, failed to give any player the 75 per cent vote required for admittance. Santo received the most votes of any player, but was not even close to getting the required number.
"It's not going to change my life," said a disappointed Santo upon hearing the news, "but I feel I deserve (to be elected). I put up Hall of Fame numbers during the greatest era of baseball for pitchers and I played with diabetes. Only diabetics can know what I went through." About those numbers: Santo played 15 full seasons, the first 14 with the Cubs and compiled a .277 lifetime batting average, with 342 home runs and 1,331 runs batted in. If those numbers don't impress you, consider these numbers: A .267 batting average, 268 homers and 1,357 r.b.i.s in 23 seasons. That was Brooks Robinson's ticket to the Hall of Fame.
Of course, to judge a player strictly by his numbers can be misleading. Robinson is in the Hall of Fame because he not only was a good hitter, but probably the best defensive third baseman in history (Clete Boyer fans may not concur). But Santo was no slouch in the field, either. I saw both of them play, Santo more often than Robinson, of course, and there wasn't that much difference. Santo, who earned five gold gloves as a third baseman, was as good as it gets in diving to backhand a smash down the line and rising to throw out the batter. One thing that has held Santo back was the fact he never got to display his skills on the national stage, unless you consider his nine All-Star game appearances. Robinson, on the other hand, hit .348 in 18 playoff appearances and .263 in 21 World Series games--and of course fielded superbly.
Many of Santo's friends had assured him that this was his year, that the Veterans committee was certain to endorse him. Three of his teammates: Billy Williams, Ernie Banks and Ferguson Jenkins were among the electors and one of the first things former Cub Ryne Sandberg said upon his induction last year was: "Ron Santo has another vote." I was hopeful, too, but I knew something that Santo, as far as I know, didn't. One of the things holding him back previously, when the Veterans committee was a mix of players and writers, was that one Chicago writer not only voted against him, but campaigned against him every year. That writer has since passed away and, in any event, would not have had a vote this time.
It never should have gone this far, in my view. Santo should have been elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America during his 15 years of eligibility. I know I voted for him every time. I know, too, that being a Hall of Fame voter is not easy if you care at all for the game. There are other players who perhaps are deserving of admittance. I'm going to throw out a name that I doubt you'll see in any other discussion on this subject. Bill Madlock. No? How about four National League batting titles, a .305 lifetime average, and an internal combustion machine that earned him the nickname "Mad Dog?" After his first 10 years in the majors, the length of service that is required for Hall of Fame consideration, Madlock had hit better than .300 eight times and had a lifetime average of .317. Had he retired at that point, he might have had a better chance of inclusion. As it was, he received very few votes--other than mine--and quickly dropped off the ballot.
This year's regular election is, in one sense, a no brainer. Rickey Henderson, baseball's alltime stolen base leader, is eligible for the first time. I can't imagine who wouldn't vote for him unless it be one of those hard liners who insist nobody should get in during his first year of eligility. Beyond Henderson, however, it gets more difficult. Should Mark McGuire get in, despite his alleged steroid use? How about Jim Rice or Andre Dawson, the top two vote getters who failed to get 75 per cent last year when Goose Gossage was the only player admitted?
I voted for the two of them, although I'll admit with not too much conviction. I also voted for pitcher Bert Blyleven, reliever Lee Smith and pitcher Tommy John, who not only was an outstanding pitcher, but has a surgical procedure named for him. That has to count for something. After all, Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance (well, maybe not Chance) got in only because someone wrote a poem about them.
My last vote went for Harold Baines and, again, I'm not totally sure he deserves it. But with only 5.2 per cent of the voters picking him last year, he is in grave danger of going off the ballot. I was covering the White Sox when Bill Veeck first brought him to the big leagues and I'm aware that his quiet manner might have hid his light under a bushel. Perhaps if he gets another chance, his light will begin to shine.
Note to my faithful readers (and you know who you are even if I don't): I won't be blogging next week, but hope to be at the keyboard again Tuesday Jan. 6. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
By Bob Markus
The Heisman Trophy Statue is about as highly regarded in the world of art as Madonna is in the world of opera. But in the world of artifact it ranks supreme. Challenged only, perhaps, by the fictional Maltese Falcon, like Dashiell Hammett's famous black bird it is "the stuff dreams are made of." Nightmares, too. I know, because for a few years back in the late '80s and early 90s, I had a Heisman vote. Each time, I took it seriously and agonized over my choice. More times than not, my choice did not win. Sometimes that was O.K. But I'm still incensed over the way some of the elections turned out.
If I still had a Heisman ballot this year, I would have voted for Colt McCoy. But I wouldn't have been upset if either Sam Bradford, who won it, or Tim Tebow, who didn't, came out on top. All three had outstanding years and who you voted for depended a lot on your own vision of what the Heisman is all about. But for at least some of the voters, it depended a lot on regional bias. I live in Florida now, in the only region out of six that gave Tebow the plurality of first place votes. In fact, the voting throughout the south was so skewed in favor of the Florida quarterback that he ended up with more first place votes than either Bradford or McCoy.
The main reason that Tebow, who won the trophy last year and was hoping to become only the second player to win it twice, did not win again was that voters in the Southwest were equally as biased. Many of them were among the 154 who left Tebow completely off their ballots. Tebow was the first player to fail to win the Heisman despite garnering the most first place votes since Tommy McDonald, star running back for 1956 national champion Oklahoma, finished third behind Notre Dame's Paul Hornung and Tennessee's Johnny Majors. Perhaps more outrageous than the fact that Hornung, who quarterbacked the Irish to a 2-8 record, won the trophy was the fact that Jim Brown of Syracuse finished fifth.
Hornung became a friend of mine and I like to think that my campaigning for his election to the pro football Hall of Fame had at least a little to do with his belated election. Keeping him out, I argued, when his Packer backfield mate, Jim Taylor, was already in, made no more sense than it would to vote Dodger pitcher Don Drysdale into the Baseball Hall of Fame while excluding Sandy Koufax. One of Hornung's biggest critics was a Baltimore writer who consistently not only voted against Hornung but campaigned against him, saying he never saw Hornung have a good game against the Colts. I pointed out to him that, on the same day Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears scored six touchdowns against the San Francisco 49ers in Wrigley Field, Hornung was romping for five against the Colts in Memorial Stadium. Nevertheless, no quarterback with a 2-8 record deserves the Heisman Trophy.
Notre Dame has had seven Heisman winners, which ties it with Southern Cal for the most of any school. I'd argue that more of them than not were due more to the aura of the Golden Dome than the aptitude of the player. The last Notre Dame Heisman winner was Tim Brown in 1987. That was the first year I can remember voting and I thought, and still think, the honor should have gone to Syracuse quarterback Don McPherson. McPherson was the nation's leading passer that year while leading the Orangemen to a perfect 11-0 regular season. I had covered the 48-21 victory over Penn State, a team which had whipped Syracuse 16 years in a row and only the previous season had laid a 42-3 whipping on the boys from Syracuse. To me, McPherson was the obvious choice.
But I wasn't as upset with his second place finish to Brown as I was at Jeff Blake's seventh place finish in 1991. I was one of only seven voters who picked Blake to win, despite the fact that the dynamic quarterback ran and passed East Carolina to an 11-1 record, winning the last 11 in a row after an opening game 38-31 loss at Illinois. Along the way Blake was an almost weekly highlight show on Saturday night sportscasts as he engineered improbable last second comebacks. The Pirates won five games after trailing in the fourth quarter, including a Peach bowl win over North Carolina State, when Blake's 22-yard scoring pass with 1:32 left capped a comeback from a 34-17 fourth quarter deficit. East Carolina finished ninth in the final AP poll that year, its highest ranking ever. If Blake wasn't everything a Heisman trophy winner should be, I don't know who is.
Unless its Gordie Lockbaum. I didn't vote for Lockbaum to win the Heisman trophy, but I did give him a third place vote in 1986. Lockbaum, a two-way player for Holy Cross, finished fifth in the 1986 voting and third behind Brown and McPherson the next year when he actually got 108 first place votes. He probably had a better year in '86 when his 32 first place votes were second only to runaway Heisman winner Vinny Testaverde's 678. The remarkable thing about Lockbaum is that he did not even play for a Division 1A team, yet was a viable Heisman candidate after leading Holy Cross to a 10-1 record in 1986.
College sports was my fulltime beat at the time and I went to Worcester, Mass. before the 1987 season to do a story on him. Here, in part, is what I wrote: "In Arthurian legend, only the pure of heart could hope to find the Holy Grail. Not so with the Heisman Trophy, college football's most precious bauble. The pursuit of the Heisman is open to all, rogues and rascals, saints and sinners. But now comes a Galahad of the gridiron whose leading virtue is virtue. Heisman electors are being asked to consider Gordie Lockbaum not only because he is a great player, but because he is a great person. In a nation weary of stories about athletes who do drugs and other unsavory things, it is a campaign that has a chance to succeed."
It might have had an even better chance if Lockbaum had managed to duplicate his performance of his breakout season in 1986. That would have been close to impossible to do. Lockbaum had been recruited by a few Division 1A including Syracuse, Rutgers and Navy. "I'd be a free safety at Syracuse if I'd gone there," he told me. "I think my situation here is unique. You can't just recruit somebody and say he's going to play both ways. The circumstances aren't always there."
The circumstances that made Lockbaum a two-way player and Heisman trophy contender were these. Lockbaum had played only defense his first two years, but in spring practice in 1986 then head coach Mark Duffner suggested Lockbaum play tailback as "a buffer against disaster." That fostered an internal tug of war within the coaching ranks that came near to breaking out in to open hostility.
On one side was defensive coordinator Kevin Coyle, who would have to start a freshman in his place if Lockbaum went to offense. On the other side was a new offensive coordinator, Tom Rossley, who had never heard of Lockbaum, but knew all he needed to know after watching him play tailback just one day in spring practice. "We have to have him," said Rossly. "As soon as he went in there we started moving the ball. We didn't even know why we were moving it. Was it because they diddn't have him on defense. We'd move the ball right down to the goal line, then they'd flip him over to defense and we'd never get it in.
"We started making bold statements. Give us Gordie and we'll score 28 points a game. If we don't have him maybe we can kick a field goal and win 3-0. The defense was saying they had to have him, at least early on in the year. It got very close to being ugly in some meetings." Duffner agonized over the decision all summer and finally came up with the Solomon-like decision to cut the baby in half, a decision that horrified both sides.
As that season progressed Lockbaum became a situational player on defense, while dominating more and more on offense. He gained 827 yards rushing and another 860 on 57 pass receptions. But in a 17-14 upset oveer Army he played the entire game on defense and made 22 tackles, 19 of them unassisted. That was probably the game that propelled him into the limelight. "I certainly didn't expect all this," he told me. "My friends and I almost laugh about it." B ut he didn't consider himself a joke as a Heisman candidate. "It depends on how the voters look at the award," he said. "A lot of them won't consider me because they don't believe the level of football is up to par." But enough did consider him enough to name him No.1 on their ballots. I couldn't find it in my heart to argue against that.
The Heisman Trophy Statue is about as highly regarded in the world of art as Madonna is in the world of opera. But in the world of artifact it ranks supreme. Challenged only, perhaps, by the fictional Maltese Falcon, like Dashiell Hammett's famous black bird it is "the stuff dreams are made of." Nightmares, too. I know, because for a few years back in the late '80s and early 90s, I had a Heisman vote. Each time, I took it seriously and agonized over my choice. More times than not, my choice did not win. Sometimes that was O.K. But I'm still incensed over the way some of the elections turned out.
If I still had a Heisman ballot this year, I would have voted for Colt McCoy. But I wouldn't have been upset if either Sam Bradford, who won it, or Tim Tebow, who didn't, came out on top. All three had outstanding years and who you voted for depended a lot on your own vision of what the Heisman is all about. But for at least some of the voters, it depended a lot on regional bias. I live in Florida now, in the only region out of six that gave Tebow the plurality of first place votes. In fact, the voting throughout the south was so skewed in favor of the Florida quarterback that he ended up with more first place votes than either Bradford or McCoy.
The main reason that Tebow, who won the trophy last year and was hoping to become only the second player to win it twice, did not win again was that voters in the Southwest were equally as biased. Many of them were among the 154 who left Tebow completely off their ballots. Tebow was the first player to fail to win the Heisman despite garnering the most first place votes since Tommy McDonald, star running back for 1956 national champion Oklahoma, finished third behind Notre Dame's Paul Hornung and Tennessee's Johnny Majors. Perhaps more outrageous than the fact that Hornung, who quarterbacked the Irish to a 2-8 record, won the trophy was the fact that Jim Brown of Syracuse finished fifth.
Hornung became a friend of mine and I like to think that my campaigning for his election to the pro football Hall of Fame had at least a little to do with his belated election. Keeping him out, I argued, when his Packer backfield mate, Jim Taylor, was already in, made no more sense than it would to vote Dodger pitcher Don Drysdale into the Baseball Hall of Fame while excluding Sandy Koufax. One of Hornung's biggest critics was a Baltimore writer who consistently not only voted against Hornung but campaigned against him, saying he never saw Hornung have a good game against the Colts. I pointed out to him that, on the same day Gale Sayers of the Chicago Bears scored six touchdowns against the San Francisco 49ers in Wrigley Field, Hornung was romping for five against the Colts in Memorial Stadium. Nevertheless, no quarterback with a 2-8 record deserves the Heisman Trophy.
Notre Dame has had seven Heisman winners, which ties it with Southern Cal for the most of any school. I'd argue that more of them than not were due more to the aura of the Golden Dome than the aptitude of the player. The last Notre Dame Heisman winner was Tim Brown in 1987. That was the first year I can remember voting and I thought, and still think, the honor should have gone to Syracuse quarterback Don McPherson. McPherson was the nation's leading passer that year while leading the Orangemen to a perfect 11-0 regular season. I had covered the 48-21 victory over Penn State, a team which had whipped Syracuse 16 years in a row and only the previous season had laid a 42-3 whipping on the boys from Syracuse. To me, McPherson was the obvious choice.
But I wasn't as upset with his second place finish to Brown as I was at Jeff Blake's seventh place finish in 1991. I was one of only seven voters who picked Blake to win, despite the fact that the dynamic quarterback ran and passed East Carolina to an 11-1 record, winning the last 11 in a row after an opening game 38-31 loss at Illinois. Along the way Blake was an almost weekly highlight show on Saturday night sportscasts as he engineered improbable last second comebacks. The Pirates won five games after trailing in the fourth quarter, including a Peach bowl win over North Carolina State, when Blake's 22-yard scoring pass with 1:32 left capped a comeback from a 34-17 fourth quarter deficit. East Carolina finished ninth in the final AP poll that year, its highest ranking ever. If Blake wasn't everything a Heisman trophy winner should be, I don't know who is.
Unless its Gordie Lockbaum. I didn't vote for Lockbaum to win the Heisman trophy, but I did give him a third place vote in 1986. Lockbaum, a two-way player for Holy Cross, finished fifth in the 1986 voting and third behind Brown and McPherson the next year when he actually got 108 first place votes. He probably had a better year in '86 when his 32 first place votes were second only to runaway Heisman winner Vinny Testaverde's 678. The remarkable thing about Lockbaum is that he did not even play for a Division 1A team, yet was a viable Heisman candidate after leading Holy Cross to a 10-1 record in 1986.
College sports was my fulltime beat at the time and I went to Worcester, Mass. before the 1987 season to do a story on him. Here, in part, is what I wrote: "In Arthurian legend, only the pure of heart could hope to find the Holy Grail. Not so with the Heisman Trophy, college football's most precious bauble. The pursuit of the Heisman is open to all, rogues and rascals, saints and sinners. But now comes a Galahad of the gridiron whose leading virtue is virtue. Heisman electors are being asked to consider Gordie Lockbaum not only because he is a great player, but because he is a great person. In a nation weary of stories about athletes who do drugs and other unsavory things, it is a campaign that has a chance to succeed."
It might have had an even better chance if Lockbaum had managed to duplicate his performance of his breakout season in 1986. That would have been close to impossible to do. Lockbaum had been recruited by a few Division 1A including Syracuse, Rutgers and Navy. "I'd be a free safety at Syracuse if I'd gone there," he told me. "I think my situation here is unique. You can't just recruit somebody and say he's going to play both ways. The circumstances aren't always there."
The circumstances that made Lockbaum a two-way player and Heisman trophy contender were these. Lockbaum had played only defense his first two years, but in spring practice in 1986 then head coach Mark Duffner suggested Lockbaum play tailback as "a buffer against disaster." That fostered an internal tug of war within the coaching ranks that came near to breaking out in to open hostility.
On one side was defensive coordinator Kevin Coyle, who would have to start a freshman in his place if Lockbaum went to offense. On the other side was a new offensive coordinator, Tom Rossley, who had never heard of Lockbaum, but knew all he needed to know after watching him play tailback just one day in spring practice. "We have to have him," said Rossly. "As soon as he went in there we started moving the ball. We didn't even know why we were moving it. Was it because they diddn't have him on defense. We'd move the ball right down to the goal line, then they'd flip him over to defense and we'd never get it in.
"We started making bold statements. Give us Gordie and we'll score 28 points a game. If we don't have him maybe we can kick a field goal and win 3-0. The defense was saying they had to have him, at least early on in the year. It got very close to being ugly in some meetings." Duffner agonized over the decision all summer and finally came up with the Solomon-like decision to cut the baby in half, a decision that horrified both sides.
As that season progressed Lockbaum became a situational player on defense, while dominating more and more on offense. He gained 827 yards rushing and another 860 on 57 pass receptions. But in a 17-14 upset oveer Army he played the entire game on defense and made 22 tackles, 19 of them unassisted. That was probably the game that propelled him into the limelight. "I certainly didn't expect all this," he told me. "My friends and I almost laugh about it." B ut he didn't consider himself a joke as a Heisman candidate. "It depends on how the voters look at the award," he said. "A lot of them won't consider me because they don't believe the level of football is up to par." But enough did consider him enough to name him No.1 on their ballots. I couldn't find it in my heart to argue against that.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
By Bob Markus
Notre Dame football fans are about to run off another football coach--perhaps justifiably so--and there's nothing unusual about that. Happens all the time (see Alabama, UCLA, Texas A & M, et al). But this is Notre Dame, America's school, whose subway alumni stretch from the A train in Manhattan to the remotest part of Alaska where the natives think a subway comes on a footlong bun with lots of mayo. This is Notre Dame, the school of Rockne and The Gipper, Lujack and Lattner, Ara and Montana (Joe, not the state). Did I mention the Four Horsemen?
I suppose there are schools that could come up with a roster of football immortals that would rival those in Notre Dame's Pantheon. But no other school has Notre Dame's mystique. What other school has a religious icon with the whimsical name Touchdown Jesus? What other school could get away with a nickname that is, if you examine it, an ethnic slur? Sure, and don't the Irish love their boozing and their brawling? In short, Notre Dame is supposed to be different.
Perhaps it is unfair to hold the Irish to a different, higher, standard. Charlie Weis, whose job hangs in the balance after losing 15 games the last two years, still has a winning (28-23) record at Notre Dame. So did the last three other coaches who were axed--Gerry Faust, Bob Davie, and Tyrone Willingham. But merely winning is not good enough at Notre Dame. You have to win big--like Rockne did, like Leahy did, like Parseghian and Devine and Holtz did.
I'm not defending Weis, who has done nothing to indicate he is the right man for the job; I'm just pointing out that, since Lou Holtz left, more or less on his own terms, after the 1996 season, Notre Dame has gone through three coaches. The program now appears to be nearly back to the mess that Parseghian pulled out of a quagmire when he took over in 1964. The Irish had not had a winning season since 1958, when Terry Brennan's last team went 6-4. Brennan had a winning record in four of his five seasons and his 1957 team ended Oklahoma's 47-game winning streak in one of college football's biggest upsets.
Brennan's firing shocked many fans. Hardly older than his players, Brennan's only previous head coaching experience had been at Mt. Carmel High school in Chicago. He had been an assistant at Notre Dame for only a year when he was elevated to the head job, replacing the iconic Leahy, just five years after his own graduation from the school. Many saw Leahy's finger prints all over Brennan's letter of dismissal, but Brennan, who never coached another football game, did not express any bitterness in public. However, in 1969, after I had written a column ripping Leahy's performance as a TV football analyst I received the following letter from him:
Dear Bob:
I read your article this morning about Frank Leahy. I thought you used great restraint because the list of people he has hurt to suit his own special purposes is a long one. I am delighted to see a fine reporter of your caliber call a spade a spade and let people know what kind of person Leahy really is. Good luck.
Sincerely
Terence P. Brennan
In any event, Brennan's dismissal was prelude to the darkest period in Notre Dame football. Parseghian wasted no time in leading the Irish back into the sunlight, guiding the Irish to a 9-1 season and nearly to a national championship in his first season. The Irish won their first nine games and led Southern Cal 17-0 at halftime, before the Trojans came back for a 20-17 victory. Two years later Parseghian got his national title despite the controversial 10-10 tie with also unbeaten Michigan State.
I was part of the Chicago Tribune coverage of that game in Spartan stadium, but I was assigned to the Michigan State locker room. I didn't think I'd written a particularly good story, but when I returned to work the following Monday I was called into Sports Editor George Strickler's office and told The Tribune was breaking its long-standing tradition of having only one sports column and that I was going to write the second one.
That gave me the opportunity to address the real story of that year's "Game of the Century," Parseghian's decision to run out the final 84 seconds and take the tie when the Irish got the ball at their own 30. Like many others, I criticized that decision, but Parseghian told me that with starting quarterback Terry Hanratty hurt and with his backup, Coley O'Brien, a diabetic who needed to take insulin daily, he was not going to take any "foolish chances." When Notre Dame routed USC 51-0 on the final Saturday of the season, Ara was vindicated as the Irish were crowned national champions.
My relationship with Parseghian rather mirrored--in reverse--my feelings about Notre Dame itself. As a small boy I was a huge Notre Dame fan and the worst day of my young life was the Saturday when I sat in a dentist's chair having a tooth extracted while listening to Army pounding Notre Dame 59-0, with the cadet core screaming in the background: "More yet, more yet."
I don't know when my feelings started to change. Perhaps the first time I saw a game at Notre Dame and saw how obnoxious their fans were. When the crowd applauded an injury to a rival player, that was enough to turn me off. Ironically, while I came to dislike the idea of Notre Dame football, the reality was that every time I had to deal with a Notre Dame athlete I was impressed with how courteous and articulate the players were. And their public relations staff was always incomparable, from Charlie Callahan to Roger Valdiserri to John Heisler. The first time I can recall going to Notre Dame was for a scene setter before the 1965 Michigan State game, which was almost as highly hyped as the following year's. Michigan State, destined to win the national title in one wire service poll, was unbeaten while Notre Dame had lost one game early in the year.
Callahan was the sports information director at the time and couldn't have been more helpful. In those days you could take a train from Chicago to South Bend and, when I came back on Friday night before the game, Callahan was at the station waiting for me. He dropped me at my hotel and said, "I'll pick you up for dinner in 45 minutes." I said, "but Charlie, I've got to write my advance." "Write fast," he said.
I sensed, even going back to his Northwestern days, that Parseghian didn't like me. I'm not sure if it was the questions I asked or the way I asked them and he never said anything overtly hostile, but that feeling was there. Later, he became more cordial and this last summer when I saw him at John Pont's funeral he was quite friendly.
The day that Parseghian resigned at Notre Dame after 11 seasons and a 95-17-4 record, I received a call at home from Sports Editor Cooper Rollow. "Get up to Green Bay," he said, "and talk to Dan Devine. There's been a report that Ara Parseghian is resigning and Devine's going to take his place."
My relationship with Devine went all the way back to his years of coaching at Arizona State in the 1950s. I was in the Army at the time, stationed in Yuma, Az, and one of my duties was to be a disc jockey on a local radio station every Saturday afternoon. There I became friendly with Chuck Benedict, the play-by-play announcer for Sun Devils games, and he took me along as a spotter.
So, when Devine became head coach at Missouri, my alma mater, I was very aware of who he was. I didn't get to know him, however, until he became head coach of the Packers. Covering the Packers on the road one week-end I got into a long conversation with Bart Starr, who was then coaching the Packers' quarterbacks, and Bart had some quite disparaging things to say about Devine. But at the end of our talk, Starr said, "Please don't print any of that."
I honored his request, but inserted the phrase, "Bart Starr, who has little reason to love Dan Devine," near the end of my column. I was astonished when, just a few days later, I got a letter from Devine, who was both general manager and head coach of a team in the middle of the season. Devine asked me who had given me the idea that Bart was not enamored of him and I wrote back, rather cravenly, that I couldn't remember how I'd gotten the notion, but that I was a Missouri grad and hence aDan Devine admirer.
Devine had a strange way of answering questions. He would talk for minutes at a time and you would write down the salient points but when he was through and you looked at your notebook you would find he really hadn't said anything. Rather like the candidates on those Presidential debates.
Now, I was sitting in his outer office, along with the Packers' beat men and columnists, just waiting for Devine to emerge from his inner sanctum. When he did, he confirmed that he was leaving the Packers to take the Notre Dame job. He thanked the local writers for their support, such as it had been, and then, after a final farewell, said to me, "Bob, come into my office." When I got there he said, "I just want you to know that whoever gets this job will find it in better shape than I did when I got here." What a master stroke! In one sentence he had absolved himself of any responsibility for his lacklustre record at Green Bay and burdened his successor with unrealistic expectations. That successor just happened to be Bart Starr.
Whatever his failings at Green Bay, Devine was a good college coach and he won a national championship in his six seasons at Notre Dame. After a five year interlude when it again tried to win with a high school coach, Gerry Faust, Notre Dame snatched Lou Holtz away from Minnesota. Once again I was in on the story, hurrying down to South Bend for Holtz's first press conference. I had interviewed Holtz for a magazine length story when he was coaching at Arkansas and, as an interview subject, he was the antithesis of Devine. A glib speaker, who supplemented his income by giving inspirational speeches, he also was a magician so gifted he probably could have earned a living on the stage.
By the time Holtz left Notre Dame after a successful 11-year run, I had retired. So I never got to meet Davie or Willingham, or Weis. Now, when I see Davie on television and watch Willingham's professional life fall apart in Washington I feel a little guilty about any feelings of satisfaction I might have harbored when they were struggling at Notre Dame. As for Charlie Weis, I hope he's given one more chance to prove himself. Does that mean I want him to succeed or fail? I wish I knew the answer.
Notre Dame football fans are about to run off another football coach--perhaps justifiably so--and there's nothing unusual about that. Happens all the time (see Alabama, UCLA, Texas A & M, et al). But this is Notre Dame, America's school, whose subway alumni stretch from the A train in Manhattan to the remotest part of Alaska where the natives think a subway comes on a footlong bun with lots of mayo. This is Notre Dame, the school of Rockne and The Gipper, Lujack and Lattner, Ara and Montana (Joe, not the state). Did I mention the Four Horsemen?
I suppose there are schools that could come up with a roster of football immortals that would rival those in Notre Dame's Pantheon. But no other school has Notre Dame's mystique. What other school has a religious icon with the whimsical name Touchdown Jesus? What other school could get away with a nickname that is, if you examine it, an ethnic slur? Sure, and don't the Irish love their boozing and their brawling? In short, Notre Dame is supposed to be different.
Perhaps it is unfair to hold the Irish to a different, higher, standard. Charlie Weis, whose job hangs in the balance after losing 15 games the last two years, still has a winning (28-23) record at Notre Dame. So did the last three other coaches who were axed--Gerry Faust, Bob Davie, and Tyrone Willingham. But merely winning is not good enough at Notre Dame. You have to win big--like Rockne did, like Leahy did, like Parseghian and Devine and Holtz did.
I'm not defending Weis, who has done nothing to indicate he is the right man for the job; I'm just pointing out that, since Lou Holtz left, more or less on his own terms, after the 1996 season, Notre Dame has gone through three coaches. The program now appears to be nearly back to the mess that Parseghian pulled out of a quagmire when he took over in 1964. The Irish had not had a winning season since 1958, when Terry Brennan's last team went 6-4. Brennan had a winning record in four of his five seasons and his 1957 team ended Oklahoma's 47-game winning streak in one of college football's biggest upsets.
Brennan's firing shocked many fans. Hardly older than his players, Brennan's only previous head coaching experience had been at Mt. Carmel High school in Chicago. He had been an assistant at Notre Dame for only a year when he was elevated to the head job, replacing the iconic Leahy, just five years after his own graduation from the school. Many saw Leahy's finger prints all over Brennan's letter of dismissal, but Brennan, who never coached another football game, did not express any bitterness in public. However, in 1969, after I had written a column ripping Leahy's performance as a TV football analyst I received the following letter from him:
Dear Bob:
I read your article this morning about Frank Leahy. I thought you used great restraint because the list of people he has hurt to suit his own special purposes is a long one. I am delighted to see a fine reporter of your caliber call a spade a spade and let people know what kind of person Leahy really is. Good luck.
Sincerely
Terence P. Brennan
In any event, Brennan's dismissal was prelude to the darkest period in Notre Dame football. Parseghian wasted no time in leading the Irish back into the sunlight, guiding the Irish to a 9-1 season and nearly to a national championship in his first season. The Irish won their first nine games and led Southern Cal 17-0 at halftime, before the Trojans came back for a 20-17 victory. Two years later Parseghian got his national title despite the controversial 10-10 tie with also unbeaten Michigan State.
I was part of the Chicago Tribune coverage of that game in Spartan stadium, but I was assigned to the Michigan State locker room. I didn't think I'd written a particularly good story, but when I returned to work the following Monday I was called into Sports Editor George Strickler's office and told The Tribune was breaking its long-standing tradition of having only one sports column and that I was going to write the second one.
That gave me the opportunity to address the real story of that year's "Game of the Century," Parseghian's decision to run out the final 84 seconds and take the tie when the Irish got the ball at their own 30. Like many others, I criticized that decision, but Parseghian told me that with starting quarterback Terry Hanratty hurt and with his backup, Coley O'Brien, a diabetic who needed to take insulin daily, he was not going to take any "foolish chances." When Notre Dame routed USC 51-0 on the final Saturday of the season, Ara was vindicated as the Irish were crowned national champions.
My relationship with Parseghian rather mirrored--in reverse--my feelings about Notre Dame itself. As a small boy I was a huge Notre Dame fan and the worst day of my young life was the Saturday when I sat in a dentist's chair having a tooth extracted while listening to Army pounding Notre Dame 59-0, with the cadet core screaming in the background: "More yet, more yet."
I don't know when my feelings started to change. Perhaps the first time I saw a game at Notre Dame and saw how obnoxious their fans were. When the crowd applauded an injury to a rival player, that was enough to turn me off. Ironically, while I came to dislike the idea of Notre Dame football, the reality was that every time I had to deal with a Notre Dame athlete I was impressed with how courteous and articulate the players were. And their public relations staff was always incomparable, from Charlie Callahan to Roger Valdiserri to John Heisler. The first time I can recall going to Notre Dame was for a scene setter before the 1965 Michigan State game, which was almost as highly hyped as the following year's. Michigan State, destined to win the national title in one wire service poll, was unbeaten while Notre Dame had lost one game early in the year.
Callahan was the sports information director at the time and couldn't have been more helpful. In those days you could take a train from Chicago to South Bend and, when I came back on Friday night before the game, Callahan was at the station waiting for me. He dropped me at my hotel and said, "I'll pick you up for dinner in 45 minutes." I said, "but Charlie, I've got to write my advance." "Write fast," he said.
I sensed, even going back to his Northwestern days, that Parseghian didn't like me. I'm not sure if it was the questions I asked or the way I asked them and he never said anything overtly hostile, but that feeling was there. Later, he became more cordial and this last summer when I saw him at John Pont's funeral he was quite friendly.
The day that Parseghian resigned at Notre Dame after 11 seasons and a 95-17-4 record, I received a call at home from Sports Editor Cooper Rollow. "Get up to Green Bay," he said, "and talk to Dan Devine. There's been a report that Ara Parseghian is resigning and Devine's going to take his place."
My relationship with Devine went all the way back to his years of coaching at Arizona State in the 1950s. I was in the Army at the time, stationed in Yuma, Az, and one of my duties was to be a disc jockey on a local radio station every Saturday afternoon. There I became friendly with Chuck Benedict, the play-by-play announcer for Sun Devils games, and he took me along as a spotter.
So, when Devine became head coach at Missouri, my alma mater, I was very aware of who he was. I didn't get to know him, however, until he became head coach of the Packers. Covering the Packers on the road one week-end I got into a long conversation with Bart Starr, who was then coaching the Packers' quarterbacks, and Bart had some quite disparaging things to say about Devine. But at the end of our talk, Starr said, "Please don't print any of that."
I honored his request, but inserted the phrase, "Bart Starr, who has little reason to love Dan Devine," near the end of my column. I was astonished when, just a few days later, I got a letter from Devine, who was both general manager and head coach of a team in the middle of the season. Devine asked me who had given me the idea that Bart was not enamored of him and I wrote back, rather cravenly, that I couldn't remember how I'd gotten the notion, but that I was a Missouri grad and hence aDan Devine admirer.
Devine had a strange way of answering questions. He would talk for minutes at a time and you would write down the salient points but when he was through and you looked at your notebook you would find he really hadn't said anything. Rather like the candidates on those Presidential debates.
Now, I was sitting in his outer office, along with the Packers' beat men and columnists, just waiting for Devine to emerge from his inner sanctum. When he did, he confirmed that he was leaving the Packers to take the Notre Dame job. He thanked the local writers for their support, such as it had been, and then, after a final farewell, said to me, "Bob, come into my office." When I got there he said, "I just want you to know that whoever gets this job will find it in better shape than I did when I got here." What a master stroke! In one sentence he had absolved himself of any responsibility for his lacklustre record at Green Bay and burdened his successor with unrealistic expectations. That successor just happened to be Bart Starr.
Whatever his failings at Green Bay, Devine was a good college coach and he won a national championship in his six seasons at Notre Dame. After a five year interlude when it again tried to win with a high school coach, Gerry Faust, Notre Dame snatched Lou Holtz away from Minnesota. Once again I was in on the story, hurrying down to South Bend for Holtz's first press conference. I had interviewed Holtz for a magazine length story when he was coaching at Arkansas and, as an interview subject, he was the antithesis of Devine. A glib speaker, who supplemented his income by giving inspirational speeches, he also was a magician so gifted he probably could have earned a living on the stage.
By the time Holtz left Notre Dame after a successful 11-year run, I had retired. So I never got to meet Davie or Willingham, or Weis. Now, when I see Davie on television and watch Willingham's professional life fall apart in Washington I feel a little guilty about any feelings of satisfaction I might have harbored when they were struggling at Notre Dame. As for Charlie Weis, I hope he's given one more chance to prove himself. Does that mean I want him to succeed or fail? I wish I knew the answer.
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