One on One

by John Feinstein

  On the opening play of that game, Noto chased Grizzard out of the pocket and, lunging, brought him down.

  “This is the way it’s going to be all day, Alton,” Noto said as he helped Grizzard up.

  “This is the way it’s going to be the rest of our lives, Anthony,” Grizzard answered. “You got me this play. I’ll get you the next.”

  The game was like that most of the afternoon. Army finally won, 30–20. When the game ended, the players congregated at midfield to exchange handshakes and hugs. Then, to my surprise, they walked together to the corner of the stadium where the Brigade of Midshipmen had stood throughout the game. I noticed that no one had left, that everyone in the stadium was on their feet. The Navy players lined up, standing at attention, and the Army players did the same.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Alma maters,” someone answered.

  Sure enough, the Navy band played “Blue and Gold.”

  As soon as the last notes died into the frigid late afternoon air, all the players turned and headed across the field to where the Corps of Cadets stood. Again, everyone stood at attention as the Army band played “Alma Mater.”

  The hair on my arms was standing at attention at that moment. All the years I had watched the game on television, I had never seen the playing of the alma maters. Whoever had the game—back then it was ABC—was usually rushing right to another game and didn’t stick around to show the playing of the school songs.

  Right then and right there I knew I wanted to do a book on Army-Navy. I wanted to get to know kids like Anthony Noto and Alton Grizzard better and to understand what made them tick, what made them put up with academy life, what football meant to them, and what the rivalry meant to them.

  Of course, wanting to do the book and actually getting to do it were two different things.

  As soon as I got back home, I called Jack Lengyel, the athletic director at Navy, someone I knew well because of my work at the Post. I asked if I could meet with him and with George Chaump, who had just finished his first season as football coach. I explained to them what I wanted to do: spend a season shuttling back and forth between Army and Navy, get to know the players well, get to know the traditions of the schools and what it was truly like to be a Midshipman or a Cadet. I needed access—complete access—during games and practices and meetings and to the academies themselves. I wanted to go to class, I wanted to be there for the predawn wake ups, the whole thing.

  Lengyel and Chaump said yes. They understood my respect for the academies and for the rivalry, and Jack knew me well. Plus, Tom Bates had told both of them this was a good idea. By then Tom and I were good friends. He trusted me not to screw it up.

  Army, I knew, would be a tougher challenge. I knew Bob Kinney, the sports information director, and I knew Bob Beretta, his assistant. I had spent some time with Coach Jim Young while researching my piece for the National, but he had retired at the end of the season, replaced by his top assistant, Bob Sutton. I had talked to Sutton briefly in the locker room following Army-Navy, but hardly knew him. I had never met Al Vanderbush, the athletic director.

  I called Kinney and told him what I wanted to do. Like the Navy people, he was very enthusiastic. He said he would set up a meeting for me with Vanderbush and Sutton.

  Almost from the minute I walked into that meeting I knew it wasn’t going to go well. I’m pretty good at picking up vibes. Kinney walked me upstairs to Vanderbush’s office. In addition to Vanderbush and Sutton, there was someone else in uniform—I don’t remember his name—but Army always has an assistant AD who is still active military. Vanderbush had been in the army but was retired.

  I could almost feel the frost in the room when Kinney started introducing me to the others. Every question was skeptical. “But what if this happens…?” “What about that…?” “Why would we want to give an outsider so much inside access…?”

  I tried to explain the exact moment when I wanted to do the book and how moved I had been by it. Blank stares. Kinney brought up the piece I’d written in the National.

  “Best piece explaining why Army-Navy is unique I’ve seen in years,” Kinney said.

  “I read it,” Sutton said. “It was very good.”

  A glimmer of hope. I pushed on, explaining I would do almost all my long interviews before the season began. After that, I’d pretty much just be observing until after the Army-Navy game was played.

  “We’ll be in touch,” Vanderbush said at the conclusion of the meeting.

  They were—in the form of a phone call from Sutton. He was very nice about it, but said that in his first season he just couldn’t see dealing with a distraction like having a reporter around in places reporters weren’t usually allowed. I tried briefly to explain—again—that after a while people would hardly notice me. He was firm. I wasn’t going to convince him. I hung up, discouraged.

  As it turned out, Sutton did me a favor. Navy was awful that season, 0–10 going into Army-Navy. Then the Mids turned around and won the game 24–3—no doubt a season saver, but hardly a dramatic game.

  I moved on to other books—Play Ball and then A Good Walk Spoiled.

  IN THE FALL OF 1994, I was starting the research on another basketball book. I was going to spend a season with three coaches—an NBA coach, a college coach, and a high school coach—so I could compare and contrast the pressures at each level of the game. My coaches were Larry Brown, who was coaching the Indiana Pacers, Gary Williams at Maryland, and Mike McLeese, the coach at Dunbar, a public school in Washington, D.C., that often produced good college players.

  Logistics certainly played a role in my picking McLeese and, to a lesser extent, Williams. In fact, my original idea had been to work with three coaches in the Washington, D.C., area, in part to show how different their lives were even though each lived within a few miles of the others, but also—again—because of logistics. Danny, my first child, had been born in January of 1994. Anything I could do to limit my travel was a bonus at that point.

  But Jimmy Lynam, who had just become the coach of the Washington Bullets, turned me down. So I called Brown, who I had gotten to know extremely well during A Season Inside.

  “I’d love to do it,” Larry said. “I’d just think of you as another member of my staff. All we have to do is clear it with Donnie. I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”

  Donnie Walsh was then the general manager of the Pacers. He and Brown had been teammates at North Carolina in the 1960s and were good friends. Walsh was the perfect GM for Brown because he knew how to tune him out on those days when Brown wanted to trade his whole team, even the special kids among them.

  On my way to the Western Open that June (I was still researching A Good Walk Spoiled), I stopped in Indianapolis and actually sat in on all of the Pacers’ pre-draft meetings, which included a lengthy discussion on whether to accept a possible offer from the Bulls that would have brought them Scottie Pippen. During a lunch break the day before the draft, I met with Walsh and explained to him what I wanted to do.

  “So it’ll be like Season on the Brink,” he said. “You’ll hang out with our team from training camp through the playoffs.”

  “Yes—and no,” I answered. I would be around quite a lot, but there were two other coaches involved so I wouldn’t be there full-time.

  “I loved Season on the Brink,” Walsh said. “As far as I’m concerned, if Larry trusts you, I trust you.” He smiled. “Even if you are a Duke guy.” (The Carolina guys always have to say that.)

  So I started the research at training camp, bouncing between the Pacers and Maryland and McLeese. My first sign of trouble came in November when McLeese informed me over lunch he had been hired to coach at Howard. Whoops. Okay, I needed to regroup, perhaps write about the transition from high school to college, pointing out that Howard was no more than five miles from Maryland as the crow flies but a world away in terms of basketball. Or I could find another high school coach.

  In the meantime, I made a lengthy W
est Coast road trip with the Pacers. Things had gone well so far: the players seemed very comfortable with me around. Reggie Miller was the best player and the team leader, and he had accepted me right away. That paved the way with the other guys. And Larry had pretty much treated me like a member of the coaching staff since the beginning of training camp. He even called me “Coach.” Of course Larry calls everyone Coach.

  The Pacers were getting blitzed in the third quarter in Seattle when Larry got ejected. I’d always wondered what a coach did after being ejected, so I went with Larry to the locker room. There, we watched the rest of the game on TV. If getting tossed bothered Larry, it didn’t show. No doubt he thought Jess Kersey, the ref who had ejected him, was a special kid.

  The next day in Los Angeles, David Benner, the team’s PR man, called me in my room.

  “We better talk,” he said. “You could have a problem.”

  I was baffled but went downstairs to see Benner, an ex-newspaper guy who had moved into PR. His brother Bill was still a columnist in Indianapolis in those days.

  “Donnie called me this morning,” Benner said. “He wanted to know if he saw you walking to the locker room with Larry while he was watching on TV last night.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He said you aren’t supposed to be in the locker room.”

  I laughed. This was no problem. I had already cleared my locker room/bench presence with the NBA, specifically with Brian McIntyre, the VP of public relations, who had checked with David Stern and said, “David says if the Pacers can put up with you, they’re more than welcome to do so.”

  I explained this to Benner. He shook his head. “This isn’t about the league. This is about Donnie. He says he didn’t realize you were in the locker room during games.”

  I was stunned. We’d had a very specific conversation in June on the subject, including him saying, “Oh yeah, like Season on the Brink.” In fact, on a number of occasions after games, Donnie had walked into the locker room and said hello to me when I had already been in there with the team. Walsh was scheduled to fly out to LA to join the team for the rest of the trip. Benner suggested that I talk to him when he arrived.

  I said I’d plan on it. In the meantime, I went to talk to Larry.

  “John, I honestly don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “I thought Donnie knew you were in the locker room from the beginning. I mean you sat in on our draft meetings and he was fine with that. I don’t get it.”

  The next morning I went to shootaround with the team and returned to the hotel to find Walsh waiting in the lobby.

  “I guess we should talk,” he said.

  Donnie got right to the point. “I can’t have you in the locker room,” he said. “I know how much Larry likes you, but you’re a potential distraction.”

  I went through the chronology dating to June and pointed out that I’d been in meetings and in practice and the locker room since training camp. “The players hardly know I’m there,” I said. “They’re used to me now. I’m a piece of furniture to most of them.”

  Walsh shook his head. “Can’t take a chance. We lose in the playoffs and someone says it was because there was a reporter in the locker room, Larry and I are both in trouble.”

  I suspected someone had gotten to him—I was convinced of it but had no idea who it might be. I asked him if someone had convinced him that what he thought was a good idea before was now a bad idea.

  “No,” he said firmly. “I misunderstood you. I didn’t know you were actually in the locker room until the other night. I’m sorry about the misunderstanding. You can go to practice but you can’t go to meetings and you can’t be in the locker room.”

  Practice was pretty much the least interesting thing on that menu. As with Bob Sutton, I knew I was in a brick-wall argument. I found Larry, told him what had happened, and said good-bye to Reggie Miller and Rik Smits, the two players I’d come to know best. They all expressed disappointment. There was no point in hanging around. I flew home on a red-eye that night.

  In the end, like Bob Sutton, Donnie Walsh did me a favor. The night after I got home from LA—two days earlier than I would have if not for Walsh—Danny stood up and walked to me for the first time. I would have missed it if not for Walsh.

  That said, I needed a new book idea. I decided it was time to try Army-Navy again.

  19

  Really Special Kids

  IT HAD BEEN FOUR years since my first swing and miss with Army-Navy.

  Navy had just fired George Chaump as coach and hired Charlie Weatherbie, who had been the coach at Utah State, to replace him. One of Weatherbie’s selling points was that he’d been on Fisher DeBerry’s staff at Air Force and Air Force had been dominating both Army and Navy for years.

  I called Tom Bates and Jack Lengyel and told them I wanted to take another shot at doing the book. Once again, Jack set me up to meet with his coach. Over lunch, Weatherbie said to me, “If I call Bobby Knight and ask him if I should do this, what do you think he’ll tell me?”

  “He’ll tell you not to do it—especially if you use a lot of profanity, which I suspect you don’t,” I said. (Weatherbie did say “Jesus Christ” quite a lot, but it was always while praying, which he did early and often every day.) “And if you listen to him, you’ll be making a mistake.”

  Weatherbie told me he’d get back to me. Lengyel was fairly convinced he could assuage any doubts he had. The issue was the same as it had been the first time: Army and Bob Sutton.

  On March 5, I went to the Patriot League basketball quarterfinals, which were played that year at West Point. I was there to write a column on Navy and then drive into New York to do The Sports Reporters on Sunday morning. Before I went up, I called Bob Kinney. Could I get a few minutes with Sutton?

  Kinney said he could probably arrange it but he wasn’t brimming with confidence. Sutton was going into the last year of his contract and his job was very much in the balance. In 1991 he hadn’t wanted a reporter around because he was new to the job; now he probably wouldn’t want one around because he was trying to save his job.

  Sure enough, when I arrived for the basketball tournament, Kinney told me that Sutton was busy getting ready for spring practice and that his position on the book was pretty much the same as it had been. I was stymied. I went and watched the opening game of the tournament—Army upsetting Bucknell—and then found Kinney again.

  “How about this,” I said. “I’ll come up during spring ball and just interview all the seniors and a couple of your key underclassmen. No special access. Just time with the players like you’d give me if I was coming up to write a story for the Post.

  My thinking was simple: I’d start with the access I had to the Navy people and, at the same time, hope I could establish a rapport with the Army players without extra access early on. At the very least, if I did that, I could probably get players to fill me in on what went on inside the locker room as the season went on.

  “I don’t see why that should be a problem,” Kinney said. I began interviewing players at Navy in April, and Kinney began setting up a schedule for me to come up for a week later in the month. In fact, I had made my plans to drive up on Sunday night to be ready to go early Monday morning when I got a call from Kinney on Friday afternoon. I could tell when I heard his voice that—as Miss Clavell might have said—something was not right.

  “I don’t even know what to say about this,” he began, never an encouraging way to start a conversation. “Coach Sutton doesn’t want you to talk to the players.”

  “Wait, I’m not asking for any special access.”

  “I know. I explained that to him. John, he’s a good man, a really good man, but he’s just got his mind set against any involvement in this. Believe me, I’ve tried to explain to him why this is a mistake. He’s not listening.”

  I felt for Kinney. He was clearly caught in the middle. He believed the book was a good idea and clearly felt his bosses were going too far now. It was one thing to deny me spe
cial access, another to deny access that would normally be granted to any reporter. He kept apologizing, and I kept telling him I knew it wasn’t his fault.

  I was too far into the project now to turn back. Or maybe I was just tired of starting the research on a book and then having it yanked from underneath me. If Army wouldn’t cooperate, I’d write the book from Navy’s point of view. I had already started my interviews there and knew that my instinct that the players would be bright, admirable young men with stories to tell had been correct—it would be even more correct than I’d imagined.

  I would do the best I could with Army. I’d still go to games—they couldn’t deny me access to the players postgame could they?—but the focus would be on Navy. In some ways, Navy’s story in 1995 was more intriguing anyway: new coach, three game losing streak to Army, each game decided in the final seconds. Plus, Navy had been dogged by unspeakable tragedy. In 1993 Alton Grizzard had come back for a game in Annapolis and spoken to his former team in the locker room before kickoff. The players still talked about his speech, how he had pleaded with them to please go out and end a five-game losing streak. They had done that.

  A few weeks later, four days before the Army-Navy game, Chaump arrived on the practice field with tears in his eyes. He had to tell his players that Grizzard had been killed in a bizarre murder-suicide in Coronado, California. Grizzard had been talking to a friend, a young woman who had run cross-country at Navy, about her breakup with another SEAL, George Smith. Smith had burst into the room, shot and killed both of them, and then turned the gun on himself. To call Grizzard’s death stunning was a vast understatement. It also provided a reminder of the uniqueness of the Army-Navy rivalry. When Bob Sutton got the call that Grizzard had died, he sat down and cried. He had met Grizzard at the Army-Navy pregame lunch three years earlier, but more than that he remembered what kind of a competitor Grizzard had been.

  “I’m not sure I would have felt any worse if one of my own players had died,” he said later.