Two things happen every early December: Army plays Navy in football and many Americans mark the anniversary of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that triggered the U.S. entry into World War II. Because both events are linked to the military—and because of football’s traditional affection for warlike analogies—the tenuous connections can get a little weird.
There annually are over-the-top references to the Army and Navy players “preparing for battle,” as if strategizing for touchdowns somehow resembles life-and-death circumstances. Or strange expressions of anxieties assuming that gridiron mediocrity at West Point and Annapolis—for years on a level below the fully professional operations at Alabama, Florida State, Ohio State and so on—somehow translates into a creeping incompetence among U.S. soldiers and sailors.
Beyond that, Navy players in the late 1980s, in the midst of a three-game losing streak to Army, resorted to seeking motivation in what they called the “rumor” that whenever Navy would lose four consecutive years to Army, it meant the United States would go to war. Navy in fact had lost four straight right before World War I and, in the mid-1930s, before World War II broke out. Too bad Navy’s recent dominance—13 victories in a row, begun the year after 9/11, and counting—couldn’t do anything to negotiate the end to American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq over the same period.
It’s a tired old maxim that sports (and especially rough-and-tumble football) not only are a proxy for war but also a training ground for real international conflict. Britain’s Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said that the “battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” But, while fitness and persistence surely are as helpful in war as they are in football, what happens after every Army-Navy game is that everybody can just go out to dinner in peace.
In the midst of World War II, after Army won the 1944 game against Navy, victorious coach Red Blaik received a giddy telegram from the Pacific theater: “The greatest of all Army teams (stop) –we have stopped the war to celebrate your magnificent success.” It was signed by General Douglas MacArthur, a West Point grad (MacArthur played baseball there) sounding every bit like a proud alum. Army’s victory, of course, did nothing to end those global hostilities.
More reasonable is to recall the memory of many fans attending the NFL game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers on Dec. 7, 1941, when news came of the devastating Pearl Harbor attack. They were struck by the incongruity of such a grave reality—the disorientation a younger generation felt on Sept. 11, 2001—intruding on a carefree afternoon at the stadium.
Football—sports in general—is better confined to its entertainment value than some good-vs.-evil world order. In fact, one beauty to the Army-Navy game is how immutable it is—same “fight” songs, same pre-game rituals, same mascots—while there remains hope that war is not permanent.
When Army and Navy played on Dec. 7, 1991—50 years after Pearl Harbor—there were appropriate halftime acknowledgments of that significant anniversary. But, too, the world had moved on. In the parking lot at the Philadelphia stadium that day, scores of Japenese cars, which had brought Americans to the game, were in evidence.
There is such a thing as ancient history. And games are just games.