Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2008-05-05 07:00:00.0
Current rank: # 1,911 of 4,929

BALTIMORE -

Forty years ago, when Army-Navy football still presented itself as a passion and not a marketing technique, Bill Elias looked into the future and saw that it ended in about 10 minutes. He was Navy’s football coach, and he had just lost to Army. In Annapolis, this is considered a sin without human parallel.

The score was 21 to 14. I was a young sports reporter covering the game and scrambled down from the press box to the Navy locker room at Philadelphia’s ancient football stadium, where Elias, looking like a condemned man, gathered his forlorn team.

Things were about to get worse in a hurry. Maybe half a dozen of Navy’s top brass entered the locker room, and blocked out everyone else. When they emerged about 10 minutes later, they wore expressions that looked like battle scars. Before or since, I’ve never seen such grim, tight-lipped, furious faces. Somebody would have to pay for this terrible disgrace of the loss of a football game.

In the short term, it was Elias. He was fired a few days later. But, in a larger sense, it is college football, including Navy and Army, that has paid a price for the past 40 years. And events of the past week, revealed in The Examiner, have crystallized the bad news.

At West Point, they’re changing the rules of the game. Army, Navy and Air Force students — football players included — have always served a mandatory five years of active-duty military service after graduation. They don’t all serve in combat, but all are commissioned as officers and have to put in their time.

Joe Bellino did it, even after he won a Heisman Trophy and had pro scouts drooling after him. His years in the military left him with only shreds of the pro football career he might have had without his service time.

Roger Staubach did it, too. Like Bellino, he put away his Heisman Trophy and went off to serve his country, instead of merely himself. Then he returned to football, and he had a Hall of Fame career.

But now, from a memorandum issued by the secretary of the Army and obtained by The Examiner, we learn that Army is allowing some of its football grads — the ones who can really play the game — to pursue pro football careers instead of directly fulfilling their military requirements.

Army rationalizes this by declaring their “unique talents” can bring more positive attention to West Point, and the Army in general, than the drudgery of serving as some faceless platoon leader in the middle of Iraq.

Don’t these people know there’s a war going on?

They do, but maybe the war’s part of the problem. Forty years ago, Bill Elias understood the future by facing reality. The lads who’d once played college ball for the love of the game suddenly noticed all the new money being tossed about by pros. The college game had always dwarfed the pros — until the ’58 Baltimore Colts knocked off the New York Giants in their legendary Sudden Death championship contest and electrified the country.

By ’68, the pros had stolen much of college football’s thunder. The best athletes now turned up their noses at Army and Navy. They wanted pro football money — and they didn’t want any part of Vietnam (or any other war.)

Elias saw it coming. In the 1950s, under Eddie Erdelatz, Navy won 65 percent of its contests and produced Joe Bellino. In the early ’60s, before Vietnam and the mushrooming pro contracts, under Wayne Hardin, Navy still won 65 percent of its contests and produced Roger Staubach.

Then, as the pro mystique and money kicked in, and Vietnam worsened, Elias won 11 games over four years. He was followed by Rick Forzano, who won 10 games in five years. Later, there came Gary Tranquill, who took six years to win 20 games, and George Chaump, who needed six years to win 14 games.

At Army, the record was similarly dreary. Neither school could recruit top players any more.

That’s what the new Army ruling’s all about. They want to whisper to a promising high school kid: Do well enough, and maybe we can sneak you into the pros. Do well enough, and never mind all that stuff about higher calling, and patriotism, and service to country.

This is about service to self. It’s about winning a few football games at West Point. It’s about telling the country you stand for one thing, and hoping nobody notices the sanctimony behind it.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com