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Honoring a Coach and an Upset
The former coach Paul Dietzel being greeted by Rollie Stichweh at a reunion Friday at West Point. Dietzel’s 1964 Army team beat Navy, 11-8. [Chang W. Lee/The New York Times]
By GEORGE VECSEY
Published: July 19, 2009
West Point, N.Y.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/sports/ncaafootball/20vecsey.html?emc=eta1
They beat Navy. They beat Roger Staubach. Forty-five years later, that is worth celebrating, all over again.
The old boys from the United States Military Academy brought back their coach, Paul Dietzel, and his wife, Anne, last weekend to commemorate one of the great upsets of college football — Army 11, Navy 8 — in November 1964.
By that time, Vietnam was looming over the men who played in that game, and it looms over them still. But the main reason to get together was to celebrate their coach, who prepared them and cajoled them into stopping one of the greatest college players ever.
This was when Army still had some leftover cachet as a football power, from the 1940s. Recently, Army has not been able to recruit enough talent, but its new coach, Rich Ellerson, has some ambitious plans, including a rematch with Notre Dame in Yankee Stadium in 2010, to be announced Monday. The echoes of Dietzel’s epic victory are still heard along the Hudson.
Dietzel, 84, still paints and talks up his recent book, Call Me Coach. There are many traces of the charismatic young man who left Louisiana State University — where he had won a national championship in 1958 — to return in 1962 as head coach at West Point, where he had served two tours as an assistant.
Anne Dietzel estimated that they have lived in 25 different homes. Once, she said, she asked a contractor how the heating system worked in her new home, and the man asked if her husband was around, so he could explain. Her husband was off recruiting linebackers in Ohio, she said; the contractor had best explain it to her.
He inherited the men in the room, now in their mid-60s, with charming wives and bad knees and successful careers. He is still Coach, a man who had control of every detail, except in his own household. Bill Zadel, the big tackle, was lying in the infirmary with a leg injury in 1964, when Coach paid a visit. Dietzel was so sweet, so solicitous, that Zadel allowed as how he was already feeling a bit better. That’s good, Zadel, Coach quickly said, because you’re playing both ways on Saturday. He played nearly 60 minutes against Navy, too.
Coach did have a light side. One summer, the Nashville Banner reporter Fred Russell was visiting camp, driven in a jeep by the assistant coach Bill Battle. Suddenly, there were explosions in the woods up ahead, and Battle urged Russell to seek cover, because live ammunition was unexpectedly being fired. That night, before the Rita Hayworth movie on base, everybody was treated to another film — Fred Russell diving into the underbrush.
Dietzel also kept tabs on missed bed checks and youthful pranks. The worst thing that could happen was to be addressed as “Son,” said Rhesa H. Barksdale, one of the team managers, now a federal judge in Mississippi and Louisiana, who arranged the weekend with Dietzelian precision.
No stranger to military life, Dietzel had flown B-29 missions in the Pacific as a 20-year-old, before playing center for Miami of Ohio, the so-called cradle of coaches, on the same squad with the future coaches Bo Schembechler, Bill Arnsparger and Ara Parseghian. He was an acolyte of Sid Gillman, Red Blaik and Bear Bryant before winning the national title at L.S.U.
After his first season in 1962, Dietzel converted Rollie Stichweh from halfback to quarterback, and Stichweh nearly beat Staubach as a junior, only to run out of time near the end zone. In 1964, playing quarterback and safety, Stichweh tried again. The old boys like John Johnson, Frank Cosentino and Vince Casillo still recall Dietzel’s game plan, to pressure Staubach from the wings, not let him move around.
Stichweh, who played 55 minutes that day, remains a lifelong friend of Staubach’s. They played in the same backfield in the East-West game, and Stichweh ran for a touchdown. Staubach served his hitch and became a great pro quarterback, but there were no all-pro players at Army.
As seniors, Stichweh and Zadel and the others began to hear of former cadets being killed or injured in Vietnam. “It began to get personal,” Stichweh recalled. By 1967, Stichweh was a captain in the 173rd Airborne on Hill 875 near Dak To, up near the Cambodian border. He said that playing football was only one part of the academy’s preparation to perform under pressure.
“By the time I was at Hill 875, it was already baked into your soul,” he said.
Zadel was a Marine officer a few kilometers away, but they did not know how close they were. Stichweh learned his first daughter had been born when he received a message scribbled on a shoe box, dropped in a package from a helicopter. They both survived and came home, Stichweh to become a top executive at the consulting company Towers Perrin and Zadel to become a highly successful businessman.
For a while, the teammates consoled themselves with the assurance that they had been fighting to advance democracy in Asia.
“That was my story at cocktail parties,” Zadel said the other night, adding that he had changed his mind after learning about the misgivings of President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara, who died July 6.
“I read the excerpts from McNamara’s book,” Zadel said, referring to McNamara’s belated admission that the war was in vain. “I was incensed.”
Stichweh said that every Memorial Day he visited the cemetery at West Point to honor his 26 classmates, including a member of his wedding party, who died in Vietnam, all of them, he said, after McNamara began to experience “his own little epiphany.”
Those comments were made in private; Stichweh and I have known each other for almost half a century. At the dinner, Stichweh was gregarious, as always, noting how Dietzel had come through a broken family, married well, lived his Christian faith.
In his remarks, Dietzel wept a few times and made people laugh many times. A few people at the academy had been upset when Dietzel left with a record of 21-18-1 after the 1965 season. He negotiated for more control at South Carolina, but his record there was a mediocre 42-53-1. That is old business; the academy is home; the memories are mostly fun.
On Friday, Dietzel recalled how, after becoming head coach, he had been summoned to the home of Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the commandant, and later the commander in Vietnam.
“You could say Westmoreland was a little stiff,” Dietzel said, kindly, recalling how his assistants had been aching for a beer, just to relax. Then Katherine Westmoreland, the vivacious wife of the general who was known as Kitsy, told the coaches she had some good advice about how to succeed at the academy.
With that, Dietzel said, she turned her back to them and hiked up her dress, revealing — in a dignified fashion, of course — black panties, with two words printed on them: Beat Navy.
It took them a few years, but they did. Forty-five years later, that is worth celebrating.
E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com
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