There is no game I enjoy more then this rivalry.Many of you over the years have read my articles on this game.I always like telling stories esp. the "pranks" that go on the week before.Even this week the CIC trophy was stolen from the Navy lockeroom but it was an inside job.My all time favorite was 2 or 3 years ago when Army kidnapped the Navy goat,tattooed his ass with the Army "A", dyed the Goat pink and led it out into the stadium as the Cadets ran out of the tunnel.I live near the Point,worked baseball and basketball camps there for many summers and have over 20-30 friends that work there.
Army will win today.Pretty bold statement.A lot of my heart has something to do with todays game.
But before I talk about this game yesterdayI read Jerry Isenbergs column in the Newark Star Leger.He's one of my favorite writers.I'm going to paste it here and it's a terrible pasting job on my part because it's 3 pages.But bare with me and read the article.
It's powerful and it's a must read for everyone.
These kids today that play in this game are
The Keepers of the Flame" Go Army beat Navy
The athletes who deserve to be saluted
Friday, December 02, 2005
It's the one shining, clean athletic contest that overcomes the grime and slime into which so much of America at play sinks ... game after game ... season after season ... sport after sport. This isn't the SEC or the Big East, where a plagiarist who happens to be an athlete gets to take a season off for "personal" reasons. I can remember when colleges threw you out for that.
It's not the Big 12, where a coach took a gun away from a football player who had committed a crime with it, saying he didn't want him to get into more trouble. Here in New Jersey, where we are less charitable, we call that surprising evidence.
This year we heard and saw a professional baseball player named Rafael Palmeiro lie to the Congress about steroid use and listened to a thinly coated veneer of self-pity and overwhelming whining from Mark McGwire, who made a fortune cheating and sat next to him in that same forum.
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Page 2 of 3
Last year before the game, three empty jerseys covered empty shoulder pads and were propped up on the Navy side ... Blecksmith, No. 10 ...Winchester, No. 73 ... Zellem, No. 31.
The Navy players who had played and studied and worked alongside some of those who played last year. The trio had thrown its hats in the air at graduation and gone off to a new life ... a life that, for the three of them would require a kind of dedication that only Army and Navy football players must consider and embrace.
The three were gone by then ... two of them swallowed by the tragedy of Iraq and the third a victim of the vagaries that cause an aircraft to malfunction. Blecksmith was a golden California quarterback, but Navy was playing a black-and-white offense so it didn't need his rifle arm. His father had been a Marine and he wanted to be a Marine more than he wanted to be a football star. He stayed at the academy and played three positions.
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On that Saturday that now seems so long ago, Lane Jackson, a Navy linebacker who knew them, walked down to the jerseys and touched each one. In the final 30 seconds, a safety named Josh Smith explained to a reporter named David Kindred how he and Blecksmith had played together; they'd studied together and once did a paper on how building dams affected China's economy.
"J.P. could walk into a room full of strangers, and in an hour everybody would love him," he told Kindred. "He was my buddy, my teammate, my brother."
Now think back to another war and another Army-Navy game.
Maj. Don Holleder had been an All-America receiver at West Point, but after the honor code scandal riddled the team he agreed to play quarterback, although he had never thrown the ball, and he beat Navy.
On Oct. 17, 1967, his battalion was ambushed 60 miles north of Saigon and in necessary full retreat, Maj. Holleder grabbed a medic and said, "Come on, Doc. We got wounded we got to get out."
I see these kids who will play tomorrow and I still think of how he and the medic and a couple of others got to the scene of the carnage, he put a wounded G.I. on his back and began to take him home.
Then a sniper's bullet killed him. The medic's name was Tom Hinger. He was a 20-year-old draftee. At his debriefing he told military intelligence:
But tomorrow Army plays Navy in a game where nobody checks the draft lists, nobody plans to leave school early and the NFL is just a television show to pass whatever free time they have on Sunday.
These players are like no others. Even though Navy will go to a modest bowl game this year, its season and that of Army will be defined by what happens between the two academies in Philadelphia tomorrow.
Our football factories talk about honor and pride, but how many of them would have done what Red Blaik did when he coached a national championship contender only to learn that a huge number of his players had violated the West Point academic honor code in 1951?
Blaik stayed at the Point even though his team had been reduced to the bare bones of what it was and that one of those expelled was his own son.
He felt an obligation.
That's what this game is about -- obligation and loyalty and honor.
They don't need pep talks. All you have to do is throw Navy out there and Army gets the message. All you have to do is throw Army out there and Navy gets the message.
"We were fighting our way back with wounded men, and we were at the edge of the jungle trying to treat them. He saw my bag and he yelled something like, 'Come on, Doc. I need you. We still have wounded out there.'
"I was exhausted, but I had never seen such a commander and I ran after him. What an officer, what a man. He went on ahead, running to the point position. Then a burst of automatic weapons fire cut him down. I tried to patch him up, but he died in my arms.
"I was a 20-year-old draftee and I knew him for just three minutes, but I will remember him for the rest of my life."
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Two years ago, Tom Hinger and Steve Goodman, the infantryman who then killed the sniper whose fire had cut down Holleder, visited his grave in Arlington.
Army meets Navy again tomorrow.
But this really isn't so much about the Army-Navy game.
It's about the men who play in it.
Jerry Izenberg appears regularly
I will be back later and break down the game.
Army will win today.Pretty bold statement.A lot of my heart has something to do with todays game.
But before I talk about this game yesterdayI read Jerry Isenbergs column in the Newark Star Leger.He's one of my favorite writers.I'm going to paste it here and it's a terrible pasting job on my part because it's 3 pages.But bare with me and read the article.
It's powerful and it's a must read for everyone.
These kids today that play in this game are
The Keepers of the Flame" Go Army beat Navy
The athletes who deserve to be saluted
Friday, December 02, 2005
It's the one shining, clean athletic contest that overcomes the grime and slime into which so much of America at play sinks ... game after game ... season after season ... sport after sport. This isn't the SEC or the Big East, where a plagiarist who happens to be an athlete gets to take a season off for "personal" reasons. I can remember when colleges threw you out for that.
It's not the Big 12, where a coach took a gun away from a football player who had committed a crime with it, saying he didn't want him to get into more trouble. Here in New Jersey, where we are less charitable, we call that surprising evidence.
This year we heard and saw a professional baseball player named Rafael Palmeiro lie to the Congress about steroid use and listened to a thinly coated veneer of self-pity and overwhelming whining from Mark McGwire, who made a fortune cheating and sat next to him in that same forum.
Advertisement
Page 2 of 3
Last year before the game, three empty jerseys covered empty shoulder pads and were propped up on the Navy side ... Blecksmith, No. 10 ...Winchester, No. 73 ... Zellem, No. 31.
The Navy players who had played and studied and worked alongside some of those who played last year. The trio had thrown its hats in the air at graduation and gone off to a new life ... a life that, for the three of them would require a kind of dedication that only Army and Navy football players must consider and embrace.
The three were gone by then ... two of them swallowed by the tragedy of Iraq and the third a victim of the vagaries that cause an aircraft to malfunction. Blecksmith was a golden California quarterback, but Navy was playing a black-and-white offense so it didn't need his rifle arm. His father had been a Marine and he wanted to be a Marine more than he wanted to be a football star. He stayed at the academy and played three positions.
Advertisement
On that Saturday that now seems so long ago, Lane Jackson, a Navy linebacker who knew them, walked down to the jerseys and touched each one. In the final 30 seconds, a safety named Josh Smith explained to a reporter named David Kindred how he and Blecksmith had played together; they'd studied together and once did a paper on how building dams affected China's economy.
"J.P. could walk into a room full of strangers, and in an hour everybody would love him," he told Kindred. "He was my buddy, my teammate, my brother."
Now think back to another war and another Army-Navy game.
Maj. Don Holleder had been an All-America receiver at West Point, but after the honor code scandal riddled the team he agreed to play quarterback, although he had never thrown the ball, and he beat Navy.
On Oct. 17, 1967, his battalion was ambushed 60 miles north of Saigon and in necessary full retreat, Maj. Holleder grabbed a medic and said, "Come on, Doc. We got wounded we got to get out."
I see these kids who will play tomorrow and I still think of how he and the medic and a couple of others got to the scene of the carnage, he put a wounded G.I. on his back and began to take him home.
Then a sniper's bullet killed him. The medic's name was Tom Hinger. He was a 20-year-old draftee. At his debriefing he told military intelligence:
But tomorrow Army plays Navy in a game where nobody checks the draft lists, nobody plans to leave school early and the NFL is just a television show to pass whatever free time they have on Sunday.
These players are like no others. Even though Navy will go to a modest bowl game this year, its season and that of Army will be defined by what happens between the two academies in Philadelphia tomorrow.
Our football factories talk about honor and pride, but how many of them would have done what Red Blaik did when he coached a national championship contender only to learn that a huge number of his players had violated the West Point academic honor code in 1951?
Blaik stayed at the Point even though his team had been reduced to the bare bones of what it was and that one of those expelled was his own son.
He felt an obligation.
That's what this game is about -- obligation and loyalty and honor.
They don't need pep talks. All you have to do is throw Navy out there and Army gets the message. All you have to do is throw Army out there and Navy gets the message.
"We were fighting our way back with wounded men, and we were at the edge of the jungle trying to treat them. He saw my bag and he yelled something like, 'Come on, Doc. I need you. We still have wounded out there.'
"I was exhausted, but I had never seen such a commander and I ran after him. What an officer, what a man. He went on ahead, running to the point position. Then a burst of automatic weapons fire cut him down. I tried to patch him up, but he died in my arms.
"I was a 20-year-old draftee and I knew him for just three minutes, but I will remember him for the rest of my life."
Advertisement
Two years ago, Tom Hinger and Steve Goodman, the infantryman who then killed the sniper whose fire had cut down Holleder, visited his grave in Arlington.
Army meets Navy again tomorrow.
But this really isn't so much about the Army-Navy game.
It's about the men who play in it.
Jerry Izenberg appears regularly
I will be back later and break down the game.
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