One on One

by John Feinstein

  Billy Lange, Navy’s coach until the spring of 2011, had come up with the idea for an alumni game shortly after arriving in 2004. The first year nineteen players showed up. By 2011 the number was fifty. This was Robinson’s first one back.

  He didn’t look a lot different in uniform than in his playing days, but this was hit-and-giggle hoops. He was content to walk up and down the floor, catch an occasional pass, and maybe—maybe—take a shot here and there. There was a lot more laughing going on than rebounding.

  Then Robinson caught a pass inside and casually went up to shoot. An eager youngster named George O’Garro (class of 2006) flew through the air and blocked the shot. Robinson gave him a look as if to say, “What did you just do?”

  But he never said a word. The next three possessions he called for the ball, made a quick move each time, and fired the feathery jumper that earned him the nickname “The Admiral.” Swish. Swish. And swish. O’Garro and everyone else just watched and learned. If you want to play hit-and-giggle, fine. But if you want to play, you better be ready to duck.

  When it was over, everyone went upstairs for dinner and speeches and presentations. Navy was opening conference play that night with a game against Bucknell, but the presence of the ’86 team and David Robinson was the main draw for a crowd that was probably close to double what Navy might normally draw on a Saturday night.

  Prior to the game, all the players from the ’86 team sat at tables on the promenade upstairs and signed autographs. “We know the deal,” joked Carl Liebert, who had been the team’s sixth man. “They’ll take our autographs, they want David’s.”

  The game was scheduled to start at eight o’clock. The autograph party was supposed to end at 7:45. At 7:30 an announcement was made that the line was being cut off. No one paid any attention, in spite of the best efforts of several young Mids in uniform to tell people time was up. The game started. The autograph signing continued. Finally, just before halftime, having signed every single autograph, David Robinson and his kids were able to sit down and watch the game.

  Once a hero, always a hero.

  IT WAS DURING 2004 that Kevin Houston’s world began to crash. Liz was diagnosed with a rare disease called scleroderma, which is a connective tissue disease that in a worst-case scenario can infect blood vessels, muscles, and internal organs. For a long time the disease made her weak and often made it difficult for her to function. It is degenerative and it kept getting worse. One can survive with scleroderma for a while if all goes well, but there is no cure.

  “The doctors told us if we were lucky she could be around into her midfifties or so,” Houston said. “We weren’t that lucky.”

  During the Christmas holidays in 2008, with her immune system already weak because of the disease, Liz came down with pneumonia. She had been sick before and always bounced back. When she went to the hospital on December 30, the thinking was she would bounce back again. “I remember my mom saying, ‘She always pulls through, she’ll pull through again,’ ” Kevin said. “I think we all thought that, kids included. Liz even asked me to bring her laptop to the hospital so she could get some work done when she felt a little better.”

  That never happened. On New Year’s Day, Kevin sat down with the children—who were then twenty, sixteen, and thirteen. “I don’t think we’re getting the miracle this time,” he said. “I think we have to face up to the fact that we’re going to lose Mom.”

  Two days later, Liz died. That night, Luke, who was then a high school sophomore, had a game. “We all decided he should play,” Kevin said. “My brother [Jerry] coaches him. He told me he thought Luke could handle it. He hit his first two 3s that night. Had a career high.

  “It’s funny, all my life basketball was my bailout when other things weren’t that good. At the moment of the worst tragedy of my life, basketball became my bailout again—only this time it was through Luke. His games became the place we could all escape to, at least for a little while.”

  Three years later, Kevin Houston is dating. He is forty-four now but still has the reddish hair and the freckled face he had when he was making Robinson’s buddy Doug Wojcik look bad in front of his family, pouring in thirty-eight points on Robinson and Wojcik’s Senior Night at Navy. He’s still friends with Robinson—he was invited to his Hall of Fame induction along with most of Robinson’s Navy teammates—and as is always the case when genuine tragedy strikes an Army or a Navy graduate, he has been aided immeasurably by his classmates and teammates being there to help.

  “The old saying is that West Point isn’t a great place to be, but it’s a great place to be from,” Kevin Houston said on a cold January morning in 2011, a few hours before an Army-Navy basketball game. “I’m proof of how true that is.”

  THEY’RE ALL PROOF OF that, the kids, now men, I got to know from Army and Navy. When I get phone calls or e-mails, they are usually updates on weddings or the arrival of kids or job changes. Sometimes they are about deployment, which is always scary. Andrew Thompson re-upped for the marines after ten years because they promised to send him to graduate school. They did, but first they sent him to Iraq for almost a year.

  He survived. Kevin Norman, Jim Cantelupe’s roommate, was not as lucky. Norman was an army pilot stationed in Korea shortly before the war in Iraq began. He was piloting a C-112 transport plane when something went wrong and the plane caught on fire. According to the reports of witnesses and the official army report, Norman and his copilot began to descend, with the plane in flames, toward a heavily populated area filled with apartment buildings. But before the plane hit the ground, Norman steered it away from that area and kept it in the air until he found an empty field. That’s where the plane crashed. Norman and his copilot died. No one else did.

  When I talked to Cantelupe, who was out of the army by then, he talked about how everyone who signs on at an academy feels about what they may face when they graduate.

  “None of us want to die overseas fighting for our country,” he said. “But every one of us who graduates from an academy or volunteers as an enlisted man knows he might die overseas fighting for our country. We’re all willing to do that if we have to do that. Kevin always understood that he could die doing what he was doing. He didn’t want to die, but he didn’t fear it. And when that moment came, he saved countless lives, probably knowing that he was about to die himself.”

  That’s courage—real courage. As Cantelupe put it, what made Kevin Norman a hero wasn’t that he died for his country, but that he was willing to die for his country.

  Every year at Army-Navy, several of us go to dinner the night before the game. The group varies from year to year depending on schedules, but often has included Cantelupe and Thompson—good friends who stay in touch all the time—in addition to Derek Klein and John Graves and Anthony Noto and Dave Lillefloren. The last two had already graduated from Army and Navy when I wrote A Civil War. Lillefloren was one of Alton Grizzard’s closest friends, having played with him in both high school and college.

  Lillefloren played on the offensive line; Noto was a linebacker. Every year Lillefloren brings up the pancake block he executed on Noto on the first series of the 1990 Army-Navy game. Every year Noto says the same thing: “It was the other linebacker, not me.” Each keeps promising to bring a game tape the next year to prove his point.

  After dinner, Noto and Lillefloren always go to a nearby Irish bar. It is an unspoken tradition that every year on Friday night, ex-players from Army and Navy gather at this bar to give one another a hard time and to share memories and tell old stories. Just before midnight, the ex–Army linebacker and the ex–Navy tackle slip off to a corner of the bar by themselves. They order a shot of Jack Daniel’s and hold up their glasses just as midnight strikes.

  “Alton,” they say to each other. Then they hold their glasses up to the sky to honor their fallen friend. Army, Navy, it doesn’t matter. In the end, they’re all comrades.

  ON THE NIGHT OF January 21, 2011, I got in my car not long after dark to dr
ive from the Thayer Hotel to Loughran’s, a truly great prime rib restaurant outside of Newburgh, New York, a place with sawdust on the floor and portions of food so big even I sometimes can’t finish.

  This was one of my favorite weekends of the winter. Navy was playing at Army the next day, and I was doing the game on CBS College Sports as part of the Patriot League basketball package I did during the past nine years. My routine was almost always the same: drive to West Point on Friday afternoon and check into the Thayer, one of my favorite hotels because it has fabulous views of the Hudson and absolutely reeks with tradition and history. Sitting in front of the lobby fireplace reading the newspaper on game morning, after I have walked from one end of the post to the other and back, is one of my favorite things to do in life.

  Dinner at Loughran’s on Friday was part of the tradition. Depending on who was around, I would meet anywhere from one to five people to eat there. On this night it would be just Bob Beretta, the former Army SID who had played such an important role in my being able to write A Civil War. Bob was now the number two man in the Army athletic department. Dicky Hall, the equipment manager, had the flu. Tim Kelly, the trainer, had a hockey game. Mike Vaccaro and Kevin Gleason, who had been covering Army when I wrote the book, were both in Pittsburgh covering the Jets in the AFC Championship game. So it was just Bob and me.

  I was driving over the mountain on Route 9W, a very scenic but often treacherous piece of road, when my phone rang. I hit the button on my Bluetooth and answered. It was Jim Cantelupe—no big surprise. He would know I was at West Point for the weekend and would call to check in and see how things were at his alma mater.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Dallas,” he said. “Just landed.”

  My first thought was that he was going to a game down there with someone famous and wanted me to know about it. Jim is a big-time money manager now and works with a number of famous people in jockworld, including LeBron James, Brian Urlacher, and Joe Girardi.

  “What brings you down there?” I asked.

  He took a deep breath, which was my first hint that something was wrong.

  “I’ve got some bad news,” he said in that way when you know the news is very bad. “Christina Klein died this morning.”

  I remember gasping and gripping the wheel tightly because I was afraid I might lose control of the car. All I could say—and I think I said it at least five times—was “Oh my God.”

  Christina Klein was Derek Klein’s wife. I had first met her when she was Christina Wills at postgame tailgates during my Civil War season. She and Derek were high school sweethearts who had continued to date through college, even though Derek was at West Point and Christina was back home in Michigan going to Albion.

  She was one of those people you like instantly: tall with dark hair and eyes that lit up when she smiled. Beyond that, she had a way of making everyone feel as if they were her best friend within five minutes of meeting her. She was, along with Cantelupe’s mom, Tina, the mayor of the postgame tailgate. If someone didn’t have a drink in one hand and food in the other, Christina was running around insisting on finding you a drink or more food.

  When I made the standard jock joke to Derek about “How in the world did you convince her to date you?” I think I was only half joking. As Derek would say years later, “She was the role model for the girl all the guys wanted to marry.”

  Derek and Christina got engaged soon after the Army-Navy game in December of 1995 and were married a year later. Derek made Christina wear flats during the ceremony so she wouldn’t be taller than he was when the photos were taken. After Derek got out of the army, they lived back home in Michigan for a while before Derek got a great job in sales and they moved to Dallas. By then they had three children—Caroline, Carson, and Michael—who are now eight, six, and three.

  If there was ever an All-American family it was the Kleins. Most years they came to the Friday night, pre–Army-Navy dinner. Caroline and Carson also attended those dinners as infants.

  It was Derek who one night proposed a toast to Andrew Thompson.

  “What for?” Drew asked.

  “For sacking [quarterback Ronnie] McAda to put us in fourth and twenty-four,” Derek said. “If it weren’t for you, we never would have pulled off one of the most dramatic plays in Army history.”

  I won’t repeat Thompson’s response, but you can probably guess.

  Once I had stopped saying “Oh my God,” I asked Jim what had happened. It turned out Christina had a history of depression in her family. She’d had a bad bout with it in 1998, but her doctors had gotten her on the right meds and for twelve years she was completely healthy.

  But in 2010 the disease flared again. Derek and Christina went to three different doctors who tried different meds for both depression and insomnia. “The last six weeks, she didn’t sleep at all,” Derek said later. “She wasn’t just in emotional pain, she was in physical pain too.”

  That morning, Derek had awakened at about 5:30. Christina wasn’t in bed. Her battle with manic depression had just ended.

  I have known Jim Cantelupe for sixteen years. When his college roommate died, he was stunned but in control. Now he was crying on the phone.

  “I caught the first plane down,” he said. “There are about five guys already here and there are more on the way. We’ll find a way… somehow… to get Derek and the kids through this.”

  The guys he was talking about who were there or on the way were Derek’s teammates. By nine o’clock that night no fewer than ten of his Army teammates were in his living room. “They just dropped everything in their lives and got down here to help me right away,” Derek said. “They haven’t stopped.”

  All the time in sports we hear athletes talk about their teammates being family or how close they are. Most of the time you hear this talk in winning locker rooms. The closeness and the bonding are all tied to winning.

  At the academies the bonds are far stronger than that. They have to do with shared experiences and with truly becoming family. No one would have more support in dealing with tragedy than Derek Klein. At the memorial service for Christina, twenty-two Army football players—Class of ’96—were there. Cantelupe was designated to speak on their behalf.

  “I remember I had my head down because I was trying not to lose it completely,” Derek said. “I knew if I looked at Jim while he was talking about Christina, I was going to break down completely. But as he was winding down I looked up and there were twenty-one other guys standing up there with him. They had walked up there just to show their support for Christina—and for me. That memory has gotten me through a lot of tough days and nights since then.”

  So has Andy Person—also Class of ’96, United States Naval Academy. Person was one of four brothers who played at Navy. In 2007 he lost his wife, Dottie, to cancer, leaving him to raise their five children. One of the people who reached out to try to help him back then was Derek Klein. And so, not long after Christina’s death, Andy Person got in touch with Derek.

  “You are in hell now,” he told him. “I know, because I’ve been there. Slowly, it will get better.”

  They are in constant touch. “If you understand what Army-Navy is all about,” Derek said, “then you understand that I know the Navy guys are going to be there for me too. We played football against each other a thousand years ago. We’re brothers for life.”

  A couple of days after Christina’s death, I talked to Derek on the phone. He was, as you would expect, in hell.

  “Marrying her was the best thing I ever did in my life,” he said. “What people don’t understand is that she had a fatal disease. It killed her the way cancer kills people. It just happened differently, with the suddenness of a car accident. I’ve loved her since I was sixteen.”

  “And she loved you back,” I said, knowing after all those years that it was true.

  The next day Derek sent me an e-mail, basically thanking me for calling. The last line of
the e-mail came straight from the John Dryden quote that had hung over the door to the Army football locker room.

  “I lay me down for to bleed a while but I will rise to fight with you again.”

  I read that line over and over again, crying—just as I’m crying right now. And then I thought, as I am thinking right now, how very damn lucky I have been to have known the people I have known over the past twenty-five years.

  Acknowledgments

  In a sense, I have twenty-five years of people to thank for this book. I will attempt to get through all those who deserve mention in a little bit less time than that.

  I’ll begin with those who were gracious enough to give me time for this book, who sat and talked about the old days and the more recent days in their lives: Damon Bailey, Ron Felling, Dan Dakich, Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Gary Williams, Steve Kerr, Ivan Lendl, Mary Carillo, Paul Goydos, David Duval, Tom Watson, Davis Love, Joe Torre, Bobby Cox, Bud Selig, Andrew Thompson, Jim Cantelupe, Chris Spitler, Kevin Houston, David Robinson, and Michal Pivonka. Special thanks to Derek Klein, who was willing to talk about an unspeakable tragedy only a few weeks after it took place.

  Thanks also to a bevy of people who helped me track people down: Bill Acree, Nate Ewell, Pat Courtney, Rich Levin, Scott Strasemeier, and Bob Beretta.

  And, as always, the people I work with: Michael Pietsch, John Parsley, Eve Rabinovits, Heather Fain, and Marlena Bittner at Little, Brown, and my agent-for-life, Esther Newberg, and her staff at ICM—Kari Stuart, Lyle Morgan, Liz Farrell, and the always-thorough John Delaney.

  And then there are my friends and colleagues: Keith and Barbie Drum; Jackson Diehl and Jean Halperin; Ed and Lois Brennan; Rick Brewer; David and Linda Maraniss; Lexie Verdon and Steve Barr; Jill and Holland Mickle; Terry and Patti Hanson; Doug and Beth Doughty; Bob and Anne DeStefano; Bud Collins and Anita Claussen; Wes Seeley, Andy Dolich, Pete Alfano, and David Teel; Stan Kasten; John Dever; Eric Spitz; Gary Cohen; Beth “Shumway” Brown; Beth Sherry-Downes; Bob Socci; Pete Van Poppel; Omar Nelson; Frank DaVinney; Chet Gladchuk; Eric Ruden; Scott Straseemeier; Billy Stone; Mike Werteen; Chris Knoche; Phil Hoffmann; Joe Speed; Jack Hecker; Steve “Moose” Stirling; Tiffany Cantelupe; Anthony and Kristen Noto; Pete Teeley; Bob Zurfluh; Vivian Thompson; Phil Hochberg; Al Hunt; Wayne Zell; Mike and David Sanders; Eddie Evans; Bob Whitmore; Tony Kornheiser; Mark Maske; Ken and Nancy Denlinger; Matt Rennie; Matt Vita; Matt Bonesteel; Kathy Orton; Camille Powell; Chris Ryan; Harry Kantarian; Jim Rome; Travis Rodgers; Jason Stewart; Mike Purkey; Bob Edwards; Tom and Jane Goldman; Mike Gastineau; Tom Ross; David Stewart; Mary Bromley; Dick “Hoops” and Joanie “Hoops” Weiss; Jim O’Connell; Bob and Elaine Ryan; Frank Hannigan; Geoff Russell; Jerry Tarde; Mike O’Malley; Larry Dorman; Jeff D’Alessio; Marsha Edwards; Jay and Natalie Edwards; Len and Gwyn Edwards-Dieterle; Chris Edwards and John Cutcher; Aunt Joan and Neil Oxman; Bill Leahey; Andy North; Steve Bisciotti; Pam Lund; Kevin Byrne; Dick Cass; Mike Muehr; Martha Brendle; Joe Durant; Gary “Grits” Crandall; Drew Miceli; Bob Low; Steve Flesch; Brian Henninger; and Tom and Hilary Watson. And extra thanks to Jake Pleet.