Scorecard

Thin Gray Line
Army's losing the battle to stay competitive

George Armstrong Custer, West Point class of 1861, whose remains are buried at the academy, had a seemingly better chance against Sitting Bull than Army athletic director Puck Greenspan does of restoring to glory a sports program best described as bullet-ridden. Consider:

The West Point men's basketball team, which sent coaches with names like Knight and Krzyzewski into the hoops world, finished 1999-2000 at 5-23, its 15th consecutive losing record, and wound up 307th of 318 teams in the RPI. The Cadets drew only about 800 per game in the 5,000-seat Christl Arena. Worse, Don DeVoe, a former West Point assistant who was passed over for the head job back in the '60s, has led Navy to seven straight winning seasons and three consecutive victories over the Cadets.

As of Monday, Army's baseball team was 11-12-1 and trying to get over the departure of coach Dan Roberts (son of Hall of Fame pitcher Robin Roberts), who resigned on March 14, days after being arrested for driving while impaired by alcohol. Roberts's record over 14-plus seasons: a middling 282-295-5.

The Cadets' football team, once among the grandest in the land, was a mediocre 44-55-1 in nine seasons under Bob Sutton. On Dec. 6, a day after Army's 19-9 loss to Navy, Sutton was fired on the street outside the Cadets' Philadelphia hotel. He had been on the staff since 1983 and was a national coach of the year candidate as recently as '96, when Army went 10-2.

Beyond the predictable reason for the Cadets' struggles—the shrinking pool of scholar-athletes willing to make the requisite sacrifices to play at a military academy—West Point also lacks first-rate athletic facilities. Greenspan believes a $30 million addition to Michie Stadium (paid for by boosters, not taxpayers) will help turn things around when it's completed in 2002.

Greenspan, who had success at Illinois State, is serious about putting Army sports back on track. He requires every coach to complete a self-evaluation form that covers such topics as competitiveness, fund-raising and media relations. He values the school's heritage—one thing he praises about Todd Berry, Sutton's replacement, is that Berry is a military history buff—and evokes a pantheon of Army heroes when he talks about setting the Cadets on a winning course. "Eisenhower, Patton, Blaik, MacArthur, Krzyzewski," says Greenspan. "Those are not small-thinking people."

Neither, though, was Custer.
—Robert H. Boyle

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