On one college football Saturday last month, opponents poured their intense desires to beat one another onto the field. Those raw emotions spilled over into eight fights after the games.
Some of them began after victorious teams tried to plant their flags on opponents’ fields. These were all “rivalry” games. Some would say the vitriol-fueled displays should be expected.
But two weeks later, when two of the most bitter rivals in sports finished a game that would grant one of them a year’s worth of bragging rights, they honored one other instead. Navy beat Army 31-13, but after the win they followed tradition and each team sang the other’s alma mater to the fans.
As the College Football Playoff starts this weekend, and more emotions kick in, we won’t see Army or Navy. We can be reminded of their sportsmanship.
“I remember after my senior season, just not having anything left,” said Clint Bruce, a four-year Navy letterman at middle linebacker in the 1990s and a former Navy SEAL who now helps veterans and their families transition from military service. “Wasn’t my best game. And I was getting lifted up off the field, and I assumed it was gonna be my teammates, guys I served with, and it was some of Army’s offensive line.
‘It was just this commitment we made to each other, not knowing we would go to war together, but it’s a commitment we made to each other about what we knew about each other.’
Bruce lost the game four times as a player, as did former Army running back Carlton Jones, who joined him in the leadup to this year’s game to talk about civility amid their rivalry.
The event, held in Washington, D.C., was moderated by CBS broadcaster Brad Nessler and co-hosted by the Rose Bowl Institute and the Reagan Foundation & Institute, a nonpartisan initiative to help move the country past division.
Here are four things they shared that are valuable for any youth athlete, coach or parent.
(Questions and responses are edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the entire interview here.)
Opponents on field might be teammates in real life
Team spirit is something we can carry with us throughout our lives, especially through the competitive relationship we forge with opponents.
Nessler: You guys spent 364 days a year getting ready to beat each other, so the whole goal is the Commander-in- Chief’s trophy. Then when your career is over, football-wise at least, now you’re obviously on the same team. Did you have any interaction where, “OK, I’m gonna be with some Navy guys, and I’m gonna be with some Army guys?”
Bruce: In the special operations community, we operate in a joint environment, and so you run into a lot of the great Army football players. You work for guys that you competed against, and it was a real privilege because you’re always trying to learn about your leaders and you’re trying to learn about your team. And when you walk into someone who played at Army or even Air Force, there’s some things you already know about them. A lot of times you’re trying to make these high-speed trust decisions, and the inherited trust of competing against someone, it transitions to fast decision-making on the battlefield.
Jones: I was an air defense officer initially commissioned, and so on deployments I worked closely with a Navy unit. They were the mechanics on one of the platforms I was working on, and so I had to work on it every day, but I already knew they had our back. No issues, not anything. A little bit when I first heard about it, I was like, “I don’t know about working with Navy.” (Laughter.) But we get over it once everybody does their thing to do their job and complete the mission.
Like teammates, opponents can make you better
Jones, who served for the Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, remains the Black Knights’ second-leading rusher with 3,536 yards. What he misses most about those years on the field, though, is preparing for games at West Point.
“I miss practice more than games,” he said, ‘because at practice you’re talking to your teammates, you’re involved, you have the interaction, you have the coaches. You’re pushing each other.’
Spirited competition alongside teammates, like opponents, can push athletes and teach them lesson about themselves.
Nessler: I’ve done every rivalry in the NFL: Duke-North Carolina basketball; Celtics-Lakers in NBA. I don’t broadcast baseball, but I assume people would say Yankees-Red Sox. This game, best rivalry ever?
Bruce: Show me a game where everyone playing is willing to die for everybody watching, and I’ll tell you we have company. Everybody on that field has sworn an oath to defend everyone. And I think in the annals of a rivalry, this is a unique one and it stands apart.
Jones: You can’t really fully understand it until you’re in it. The academies are hard; every day is hard because everything’s expected of you academically, militarily. And then to be an athlete, at the Division I level, it’s hard on a daily basis. You go through these periods and low times where you just want to quit, you don’t want to be there, and you almost have your paperwork drawn up. But what draws you back in is your teammates, that brotherhood. You talk to a friend, you talk to a teammate, I’m like, ‘We got this. We’re here together to get this.’ And that’s what draws you in, and that’s what makes the rivalry, that brotherhood, so strong. Because it’s not just, ‘OK, we compete together on the football field.’ On a daily basis we’re competing. We’re together on everything we do.
Bruce: And that’s life, and the faster you learn it, the better you are. And I’ve always told my daughters, ‘Hard now, easy later; easy now, hard later.’ That’s the only two ways of it. And so we front load that hard into our lives. And I would say it blesses us and those depending on us for sure.
In sports, your opponent is not your enemy
Earlier this week, Hall of Fame basketball coach Rick Pitino announced on X, formerly Twitter, his St. John’s men’s team would no longer be participating in a postgame handshake line after ‘witnessing multiple problems.’
Coach Steve: Should postgame handshake be banned in kids’ sports? No, it should be celebrated
The Army-Navy game requires postgame participation. The teams jointly sing each school’s alma mater, and it’s not an enjoyable experience for everyone. The loser’s song comes first.
‘It’s anger. It’s frustration. It’s all those things. Those emotions are going through your mind as you sit here, singing first,’ Jones says.
The end result, though, fuels the rivalry, but also a community.
Nessler: Three weeks ago, Michigan-Ohio State, Arizona-Arizona State, Florida-Florida State, North Carolina-North Carolina State, they’re trying to plant the flag and all of that. And I realize there’s a lot of 18-to-22-year-old testosterone flying around at a football game, and you don’t want people doing something on your logo, but I mean that compared to what you guys do at the end of your games, it couldn’t be farther apart.
Bruce: Especially your last (game), the magnitude, the weight of it. The appreciation for what you’ve been a part of, and the heartbreak that you’re never going to get to do it again. And the hope that the ones that come behind you play it the way you try to play it. It all hits you. I tell you, there’s one person that does not like the Army-Navy game, and it’s my bride, because her birthday is on the same day as the Army-Navy game. And for the two years that we were dating — she’s my ring dance date, we’ve been married for almost 27 years, been together for 30 — she’s just like, “Army, they’ve ruined two of my birthdays.” Because I’m not over it. I’m like, ‘I’ll send you a cake. Leave me alone.’
We’re adversaries, but we’re not enemies. Because enemy is that outside agent, that enemy of the nation that we unite against. We have this looming third-party actor that hates both of us. It’s easy to rally towards each other when that happens. And so I think we’re advantaged because we’re aware of the circumstances and the institutions that we serve in the nation that we serve. We can get shoulder to shoulder on that one pretty quickly.
‘If you’re not willing to get beat, don’t play’
Sports, like politics, is a realm of life where people feel they can mistreat others to uplift themselves. They do it through their words, but also through their actions.
Take youth sports. How many times have you watched the opposing coach try to game the system for an advantage? He or she calls a hitter over to chat when their team has the lead during a timed baseball game, or they intimidate the teenage referee into reversing a call.
Instead, you could be the one who notices a protruding gym mat that forces a basketball player’s foot out of bounds. A youth coach once stopped the game and offered my team the ball when this happened.
That’s the spirit of Army-Navy, and the lives it engenders.
Bruce: I’ve always taught my daughters: ‘You win, you lose, you get beat.’ Losing is you beat yourself; getting beat is just getting beat; and winning’s winning. Don’t lose. And if you lose and you learn, then you move that from the loss category to the getting beat category. And if you’re not willing to get beat, don’t play. Don’t show up, because that’s why we show up on Saturdays to figure it out, right?
Coach Steve: How to be a good loser, like Caitlin Clark
Nessler: I’ve seen teams try to trick the rules. That happened (with) Oregon this year. I know there’s some Michigan people in here. Coach Belichick just took the North Carolina job, so Deflategate, or Spygate. Gamesmanship and sportsmanship are two different things, aren’t they?
Jones: Gamesmanship, it’s like a gimmick. You’re looking for a gimmick that eventually they’re gonna figure out, and then you’re gonna have to start from scratch and do it all over again. For the sportsmanship, you’re doing everything right the same way every day. Then you don’t have to go back. You’re creating more work for yourself if you’re trying to find a gimmick or a shortcut. Just do everything the right way.
Nessler: You talk about sportsmanship. This recent presidential election, is that the biggest lack of sportsmanship you’ve ever seen leading up to something?
Bruce: Love will give you a gear that hate won’t. And sometimes the people I was playing against, that felt like hate, but it wasn’t, that wasn’t the heart of it. I remember when I was in the (NFL), there’s guys like, ‘You’re the meanest guy I ever played against.’ I’m like, ‘I didn’t hate you. You’re just in the way, man.’ I think the performance advantage of love as fuel versus hate for fuel is unrivaled. Hate will allow you to run hard and fight hard against an enemy. Love will make you run out of the street to pull a guy out.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.