He's all right, not wide right

Sporting News, The, Dec 18, 1995 by Dave Kindred

Syracuse said no way. Penn State almost laughed. So a little wide receiver out of a Buffalo high school did this: He enrolled at the U.S. Naval Academy and became a helicopter pilot. Only a bad ear took Phil McConkey out of the sky, and only then did he become a professional football player, only then catching a deflected Phil Simms pass to score for the Giants in a Super Bowl. "God deals the cards," is the way McConkey put it, "and we just play 'em."

By Napoleon McCallum's reckoning, he cut down hundreds of trees working with his daddy to make fence posts for their pasture outside Cincinnati. Football was fine, but work and school came first, which is how the magical running back wound up A the Naval Academy, there to spend a night on an aircraft carrier watching jet pilots do hero things: "They were landing at 180 miles per hour and had to stop in 300 yards. Man. It was scary."

Roger Staubach and Napoleon McCallum and Phil McConkey did their Navy duty and played professional football as well. They get a mention here because they are the exceptions. Right-thinking folks consider our military academies the last remnants of big-time college football as it ought to be. No one goes to Army, Navy or the Air Force Academy to warm up for the NFL. They go to the academies to learn something and, in their spare time, play some ball.

So every Army-Navy game is worth our attention. And if we ask a question or two, we can find a story almost never heard in college football these days. We have in mind the story of a kicker named Tommy Vanderhorst a freshman at Navy who had never played a college game until he almost beat Arm two weeks ago.

He began the season as the 11th of Navy's 11 kickers, so far down the depth chart he wasn't issued a helmet the first three weeks. He dressed with the varsity for only three games. For the Army game, he wore No. 78, but no one knew it because he'd been given the uniform too late to have his name in the program at Philadelphia's Veterans Memorial Stadium.

And then, for three hours on the most wonderful Saturday afternoon of his life, Tommy Vanderhorst listened to the waterfall's roar of nearly 70,000 people who had gathered m that ballpark to see the game of his dreams, Army against Navy. Electric,' he would say. "God, it was good.' His mother sat in the bleachers; she said, Can this be happening?"

Vanderhorst had played football only two years. No peewee, no junior high. Just two high school seasons at Newnan, Ga. There he kicked maybe three or four field goals and maybe 35 extra points. No one at Navy knew he could play at all - until he walked on with the gaggle of kickers.

They couldn't have kept him away. The son of a flier who was one of six Vanderhorsts in the Navy for World War 11 and Vietnam, Tommy Vanderhorst in the seventh grade decided on the Naval Academy. High school classes were chosen with that in mind. So was football, for there were moments when he allowed himself to imagine, "What if ... ?"

What if he woke up someday and found himself playing football at Navy? What if he played in the Army-Navy game? Even watching that game on television, he loved the grandeur of the idea it represented: patriotism. Here's what he thought: "Now, that be so much fun."

The eighth week, Vanderhorst heard the sound that scrubs long to hear. He heard Navy Coach Charlie Weatherbie say, Vanderhorst, come here." Or something. By phone he told his parents, "The coach knows my name."

The ninth and 10th weeks, Vanderhorst dressed with the varsity. He didn't kick, but he competed for the kicker's job the week before the Army game. On the practice fields, Navy players screamed at the kickers to simulate the hostilities coming. They shouted, "This is to beat Amy." Under that pressure and alone of the kickers, Vanderhorst kicked perfectly.

But only the day before the game did a coach tell the plebe he was the man. Navy might have waited because its kicker's job comes with a haunting memory. Ryan Bucchianeri, a freshman in 1993, missed an 18-yard field-goal attempt wide right on the last to lose to every Navy kick with the chant "WIDE RIGHT!"

Navy's coaches needn't have worried. Tommy Vanderhorst saw nothing to fear because he saw too much to love. His what-if of high school days had happened. He looked around the Philadelphia stadium to feel the fun. He first kicked only two minutes into the game, an extra point.

At 7-all early in the third quarter, Vanderhorst kicked a 39-yard field goal, the longest of his lie. Early in the fourth quarter, he kicked a 22-yard field goal to give Navy a 13-7 lead. In front of 68,853 spectators, on national television, he had become a star.

Navy came to a place where another Vanderhorst field goal could have won the game. But inside Army's 1-yard line midway through the fourth quarter, Navy chose not to kick but to throw a fourth-down pass into the end zone. It fell incomplete, and Army then marched 99 yards to win, 14-13. It was Army's fourth consecutive victory Navy, the four by a total of six points.