MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
As it has been for so many, the Army-Navy game has always been one of the circled days on the calendar for our family – for various reasons, beginning with it being the most compelling and moving college football game of any season, with Saturday’s 17-16 Navy win being no different.
My father Glen, after spending one year at Yale, received an appointment to the Naval Academy and would go on to graduate from Annapolis in 1954. So the week of the Army-Navy game was a pretty big deal around our house.
In the early 1960s, Glen took my brother Kevin to Philadelphia for some Army-Navy games. I, on the other hand, was left behind because I was “too young” to go, which, in retrospect, I actually was; but just as soon as I was old enough, they said, Glen would take me, which, of course, never happened.
One year when Glen and Kevin didn’t go, we all watched the game at home and I remember asking, “Why don’t we like Army? Aren’t they on our side?”
After getting a “Who are you?” look from Glen, my mother Colleen confirmed to me that, yes, we were on the same side, but not during the football game, explaining the competitiveness and the camaraderie the service academies shared.
Mother was well-versed on Navy life as she taught outside of Annapolis when Glen was at the academy and then was with him in Pensacola, where my brother was born at the United States Naval Hospital, and then Corpus Christi and Cherry Point.
It was also in the mid-’60s that we began to visit Annapolis semi-regularly to see friends. So after visiting the academy a couple of times myself, the indoctrination was complete.
Go Navy! Beat Army!
Despite the parting of ways with Glen in the early ‘70s, Kevin, Mother and I always rooted for Navy as there are just some things you don’t stop doing.
The only Army-Navy game I’ve been able to attend was in 1993 at old Giants Stadium at the Meadowlands. It rained all day and Army won, 16-14, as the Navy kicker missed a short field goal attempt in the final seconds.
But the game was significant to us as former Bishop Walsh Spartan Joe Ross played a significant role in the Army victory as a junior running back.
If I never go to another one, that will be fine, for I’ve been able to see, experience and feel this pageantry and celebration of sacrifice, service and brotherhood in person. It only takes one Army-Navy game to last a lifetime. I strongly recommend it to anyone.
Joe Ross was co-captain for Army his senior season and rushed for nearly 800 yards. The following February, he was honored by the Dapper Dan Club of Allegany County with its top award for bringing the most national recognition to the area through athletics, and at least 20 of his Army teammates traveled from West Point to be with him at the dinner.
It was a moving and exhilarating evening to say the least, providing one of the great Dapper Dan dinner memories of my life.
The Army-Navy game also came to mark a Christmas tradition in our family as well. One year my brother, who was in town from Frederick, and I decided, at the urging of our mother, to buy our Christmas tree on the morning of the big game.
Kevin and I always had the knack to pick out the perfect tree whenever either one of us saw it, which is what we did that particular year at LaVale Lions, with the first tree we saw registering as the winner.
We had been gone from the house for perhaps an hour before we proudly returned with the tree, which was a beautiful tree, and which our mother later in the season would begrudgingly admit. But it took a few egg nogs for her to do it.
The issue that day was we had returned too soon, and Mother was, let’s just say, irritated because she didn’t believe we had put enough time and effort (aka toiling to the brink of suffering) to pick out the right tree. And my mother being one to never let anything go, let my brother and me know about it for the rest of the weekend even though everyone who saw the tree loved it, including her.
“That’s not the point,” she would say.
So from that point on, Kevin and I (silently, of course) decided to make our own point and get the tree each year on the Saturday of the Army-Navy game. We dutifully left the house in the morning and returned to LaVale Lions to pick out the perfect tree. All in less than 20 minutes.
Of course, once we finally returned to the house, we talked about all of the places we had gone to find the tree so it would live up to the standard. Thus, all was well with Mother because we had toiled and we had suffered.
When in reality, we had been at Shaw’s Cafe sitting at the bar eating, drinking, catching up and rooting for Navy to beat Army. In fact, it was on one of those visits that Shaw’s owner Steve Parsons gave Kevin the recipe to his world-famous Christmas crab balls.
I thought of those days on Saturday afternoon – of Christmas trees, of Shaw’s Cafe and Steve Parsons and his famous crab balls, of our mother Colleen and, most of all, my brother Kevin.
From the beginning, our father Glen pretty much just tolerated us; and we, in turn, did our best to tolerate him.
Yet to this day, it’s still, Go Navy! Beat Army!
Funny how it all works.
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communicat…ions. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT