A Civil War: Army vs. Navy

John Feinstein

Many years ago, I read John Feinstein's book about a year inside the Indiana University basketball program, "A Season on the Brink." It was terrific. I thought about reading another Feinstein book, but they tended to focus on sports I don't care for much, like golf, so the only other one I'd read over the years was "Play Ball," his book about major league baseball.

"Play Ball" should have told me something. There were good parts in it, but Feinstein is a rather pedestrian writer, and he works better giving his sound bites to sports talk shows than he does at length ("Brink" notwithstanding; when you're dealing with Bobby Knight, your prose can't help but come alive).

Anyway, a couple years ago I got "A Civil War" for 75 percent off at a bookstore going out of business, and I finally decided to pick it up.

I don't know what you can compare the Army/Navy football rivalry to. In the book, the new Navy coach, Charlie Weatherbie, likens it to Auburn/Alabama or Ohio State/Michigan, but it's much more intense that that. As Feinstein points out (over and over again), at the service academies you're dealing with football players who are all there on scholarship, who are often playing football more for "fun" than the hopes of an NFL contract, and who very likely may be fighting alongside each other, defending the United States, before long. All this combines to make Army/Navy an extraordinarily important game, even though it hasn't mattered much in the final rankings for about 40 years.

Feinstein travels with both teams -- an Army squad that's trying to help its coach keep his job, a Navy squad getting used to a new coach and overcoming several scandals. The players work incredibly hard at their studies, waking up early in the morning to make class. For someone at, say, FSU, football may be the hardest part of their day; for service academy players, it's the easiest, especially after the brutal hazing they experience in their first year at school.

Anyway, the two teams have similar seasons, with Army possibly being slightly better (it almost beats Notre Dame), coming down to an Army/Navy game where both teams are about .500. We get to know most of the players and the coaches and what they go through to make their lives count.

But Feinstein can't really pull it off. I couldn't tell many of the characters apart, or even what team they played for. I found myself skimming through game descriptions trying to find out the score. The only time his prose came alive was in describing the Army/Navy game itself (won by Army on an amazing 99-yard drive in the game's closing minutes). It's a shame, because these are obviously people you can care about. If I did, it wasn't because of Feinstein.

I think I'll stick with Frank Deford.