Fit to be tied about the Army-Navy experience

But I can guarantee something will happen tomorrow that didn’t happen in either of the games I saw between the academies. There will be a winner. And a loser. And I no longer will be all tied up over a great rivalry that produces a stirring setting unlike any other.

I’ll let you make the odds that are probably greater than winning the lottery, but I’m saying nobody can match my record. Of the 107 games, there have been seven ties. I have witnessed two games in person, and both were ties. By the same score, 7-7. My unblemished, but slightly tarnished, record is 0-0-2, which some might equate to kissing half your sisters (sorry girls, I had to do it).

Thanks to the rules now in force, there will be a decision. And thanks to Navy coach Paul Johnson’s high-wire offense, I am confident one team will score more points (probably in one half) than I’ve seen from both teams in two prior games.

For me, this game always has had a magical appeal. When the game was played in old Municipal Stadium in 1944, I was outside selling the News-Post at three cents a copy (sometimes earning a two-cent tip to go with the penny profit, which was pretty heady stuff).

That game was the coming-out party for Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard, Mr. Outside and Mr. Inside for the powerhouse Army teams of the mid-1940s, as the Cadets scored a mild upset with a 23-7 win in a game featuring the top two teams in the country. But I missed that show because paperboys had to stay outside.

In addition to Davis and Blanchard, there was another notable Army-Navy debut that year. It marked the first of 41 consecutive program covers designed by Gib Crockett, a cartoonist for the since-departed Washington Star.

Years later I remember taking Sunday afternoon car rides down Ritchie Highway with favorite Auntie Joan to welcome the Middies home and listen to the clanging of the bell after a win over Army. Perhaps growing up in the World War II era had something to do with it, but there has always been something special about Army-Navy, something that went way beyond football games.

When the opportunity to see the 1956 game in Philadelphia came along, I was a just-turned-21 college junior and Red Blaik was two years away from introducing Bill Carpenter as Army’s Lonesome End. Bill McElroy, who ran the bookstore and coached track at Loyola College, was my sponsor — payback, I think, for agreeing to run on the cross country team. That was hardly the smartest decision of my youth but worth a $6 ticket to one of the country’s great sporting events, and you couldn’t beat the convenience of a train drop-off and pickup just outside that city’s Municipal Stadium. It took longer to get to our seats in the top row of the open-ended end zone than it did to get to the gate.

That’s about all I remember about that game. It was 7-7. Nine years later, by now writing for the paper I used to sell, one of my early plum assignments was traveling to Philly to write an Army-Navy “sidebar.” I don’t remember any more about this one than I did about the first, except that it ended exactly the same way — with a pair of lonesome touchdowns. And my story wasn’t any more exciting than the game.

Maybe that’s why I passed when Army-Navy played here in 2000, even though by then the rules at least assured a decision. I’m not making that mistake again. I’ll be there tomorrow, in the stands, just like the first time (with better seats, but I’m not telling), taking it all in, the pageantry, the flyovers and the football, especially knowing a 7-7 score can only be temporary.

A Baltimore native who has covered the local and national sports scene for more than 40 years, Jim Henneman is a past president of the Baseball Writers Association of America and an active voter for baseball's Hall Of Fame. His column also appears weekly in Press Box. He can be reached at sportscoper@aol.com.