Culture
Enter Blake Horvath’s name into Army-Navy lore, but remember Bryson Daily’s too
LANDOVER, Md. — Bryson Daily lives West Point and Army football. The west Texan — who plays quarterback more like a defensive end hunting quarterbacks — has found time amid the unrelenting routine of a cadet to absorb history of the Army-Navy rivalry as well.
He does have help with that, counting Rollie Stichweh as a friend and adviser. Stichweh has stressed that leading a team is “about keeping everyone level through all the highs and lows more than anything,” Daily said, and Stichweh knows as much about this game as anyone. If you don’t know that name, here’s essential Army-Navy lore: Roger Staubach and Navy beat Army in 1963 in one of the most memorable editions of game, one that was pushed back a week because of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy Jr., one that came down to the final possession. Navy’s 21-15 triumph was its fifth in a row in the series, capping a season that saw the Midshipmen finish No. 2 in the rankings and Staubach win the Heisman Trophy.
The other quarterback was Stichweh. A lot more people knew it a year later when both were seniors and Stichweh beat Staubach to end the streak, before heading off to serve in Vietnam and win the Bronze Star Medal and Air Medal. On Saturday at Northwest Stadium, in the 125th edition of this game, Army’s Daily was the senior star who had to endure the bitterness of “singing first” in his last opportunity.
Blake Horvath was much more than just the other quarterback.
The Navy junior entered his name in the annals of this game and in a few more households at large with 196 yards and two touchdowns rushing, 107 yards and two touchdowns passing, a 31-13 stunner of a win and significant contributions toward the celebration to match.
“You’re talking about a guy who didn’t even get honorable mention all-conference, you know?” said Navy coach Brian Newberry, which of course contrasts with Daily winning AAC offensive player of the year and finishing sixth in Heisman Trophy voting. “And he outplayed the guy on the other side today, truth be told.”
Bryson Daily’s 16 pass attempts were his second most this season. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
And he felt it, as they all did, as they always do. This capped the season of the most combined national relevance for these programs in decades, and that’s something to watch as both continue to develop players and chemistry over years while the rest of the sport plays annual roster Etch A Sketch. Horvath and Navy (9-3) served notice that college football in 2025 should watch out for Horvath and Navy.
But who cares? These are the moments they’ll talk about for the rest of their lives. It’s that important to all who play and all who serve, the rest of college football be darned. The reason an Army-Navy game is on more bucket lists than parasailing in Hawaii is because each one serves up an intersection of intensity, pageantry, history and humanity that you can’t find elsewhere.
The cadets from West Point and the midshipmen from Annapolis march onto the field before the game in breathtaking displays of precision and order, from young people who have signed up to protect our country. This felt like a typical football afternoon coming in, walking past an Army Rangers tailgate with George Thorogood’s “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” blaring from speakers and folks singing and drinking along. Inside the stadium, nothing is typical. College football does pageantry at a high level, but not this.
Then you’re reminded that these are 18- to 22-year-olds when they take their seats and belt out “Sweet Caroline,” or chant at someone to take off a shirt, or groan collectively when something goes wrong on the field. That happened often for the cadets Saturday, their 11-1, AAC champion, No. 22 Black Knights outfoxed early, fooled late and pushed around often in a game that lived up to its reputation as the most physical you’ll find in the sport.
“It, frankly, makes the season a bit of a disappointment, that’s just the truth of this game,” Army coach Jeff Monken said after his team was outgained 378-178, a week after beating Tulane to win the AAC for the first conference championship in school history.
The sad, or wonderful, reality of Army-Navy is that Army would trade all those wins right now for Saturday’s. When Horvath took the final snap for the final knee in victory formation, the order, precision and intensity turned to kids losing their minds. Horvath hopped around and asked for more noise from the midshipmen. Junior fullback Alex Tecza of Mt. Lebanon, Pa., who had the first big play of the game, 32 yards on a throwback screen off a play that looked like a speed option going the other way, did a backflip.
He found his backfield partner and high school buddy, Eli Heidenreich, who had an even bigger play: 52 yards and a touchdown on a catch and run, putting Navy up 21-10 and giving Horvath a share of the school single-season record for passing touchdowns (13) and himself a share of the record for touchdown catches (six). Heidenreich spiked the ball after that touchdown — “kind of an out-of-body experience,” he would say later of that — but now he was just looking for people to hug.
HEIDENREICH HOUSE CALL!
Navy increases the lead! pic.twitter.com/23muqMib0l— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) December 14, 2024
He couldn’t get to Brandon Chatman yet, because Chatman was up in the stands along with several other Navy players, making the most of the moment. Chatman is a junior too, “Snipe Z” in the Navy offense to Heidenreich’s “Snipe A,” and he caught an 18-yard touchdown pass from Horvath in the game. Chatman grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in tough circumstances, agreeing to live in the garage so his mother could rent out his room, sleeping with a fan inches from his face to keep from waking up in pools of sweat.
He was going to play slot receiver for Warner University, an NAIA program in Lake Wales, Fla., when Navy found him and saw a place for him in this kind of offense. His resolve was tested when a close friend was shot back home and he couldn’t attend the funeral while in “plebe summer” — basic training for incoming freshmen — but he stayed in Annapolis.
“This place basically saved me,” Chatman said.
“The thing about Chat is, whatever’s going on in his life, there’s always a smile on his face,” Tecza said of Chatman. “The happiest kid I’ve ever met, a kid who never complains.”
A kid who has his first win over Army, after Army had won two straight and six of eight. The same was true of another junior, Horvath’s co-MVP in this game, nose guard Landon Robinson. All he did was pile up 13 tackles on defense and make the play on special teams that broke the game open — getting the look he wanted from Army on a Navy punt, calling for a direct snap and rumbling for 29 yards. Senior linebacker Colin Ramos made the play stand by pouncing on Robinson’s fumble at the end of it.
Robinson, whose father was a Kent State gymnast, made Bruce Feldman’s annual Freaks List for benching 450 pounds and squatting 650. He was the only nose guard in the nation in 2023 who played on the kickoff team. Maybe this Navy offense, which took big advances in versatility in 2024, can find more work for him.
“We’ll work on that ball security,” Horvath joked.
The initial Navy celebration had to pause for a few moments so the Midshipmen could line up behind the Black Knights in a show of respect while Army and the cadets sang their alma mater. Their faces were grim and stayed that way through the long walk from the field into the tunnel and their locker room.
Navy celebrated its third win against Army in the last nine meetings. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
Daily, who was held to 52 yards rushing and 65 yards and a touchdown passing — with three interceptions when forced to get out of character and wing it around as Army faced a deficit — led the team in that endeavor as well. Meanwhile, Navy was singing second for the first time in three years, and reigniting the party afterward.
“There’s a pain that comes with singing first in this game,” Horvath said. “We didn’t want to do it again.”
Midshipmen players were still making all kinds of noise as they finally got to the tunnel and their locker room. One yelled, “Do they have a football team?!” in an apparent reference to a joke Monken made at Navy’s expense earlier this season in an interview with Pat McAfee on ESPN. Newberry entered his postgame news conference with two loud words: “Hell yeah!”
But it was mostly respect, on and off the field, and that’s not fabricated because it can’t be. Newberry got on the topic of these programs and their record 20 combined wins this season moving forward with success in college football, saying: “It’s hard these days with the changes in college football to really build a culture that’s built on love and trust.”
Pure jubilation.
Navy earns the right to sing second. pic.twitter.com/NfIE3gmeiI— CBS Sports College Football 🏈 (@CBSSportsCFB) December 14, 2024
Daily agrees. He has a strong sense of the history in this rivalry and strong feelings on the future, telling The Athletic recently: “This 100 percent works to our advantage. We know who we’re going to battle with every day for years. And the biggest key with that is being able to hold each other accountable. Guys don’t get up in arms or in their feelings if they get called out. That can only happen if you’ve got relationships that last for years.”
Now Daily is a graduate of this rivalry, 2-2 overall and 1-1 as a starting quarterback. They’ll be playing for him in 2025, just as he has played for those who preceded him. He left the place Saturday night as an advising alum like Stichweh, with some words for the Black Knights who get to have more of this wonderful game.
“Feeling this loss, feeling this pain,” he said to them, “and just never letting it happen again.”
(Top photo of Blake Horvath: Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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