He grinned as he walked in the room, a sight so rarely seen. Who knew Jake Crouthamel could smile?

He made a few jokes in an otherwise somber moment. Who knew the man who called winning a national championship ‘a relief’ could laugh?

Others walked in before him with eyes red from crying, some still dabbing the tears away. Who knew a man without emotions could bring such feelings out in those who know him best?

He came here a small-towner from Perkasie, Pa. And now, 26 years later, Jake Crouthamel, the Syracuse director of athletics, is ready to leave. He’ll officially retire June 30, 2005, it was announced Wednesday. He’ll leave behind a body of work that took Syracuse to athletic heights few thought possible and a persona that too often cast him as a villain in the eyes of the SU community.He was always himself, foibles and all, never trying to be anything less or more. His monotone could shut eyelids at a caffeine pill convention. He smokes. A lot. Sometimes 30 cigarettes a day.

He’s been the most powerful man in Syracuse athletics for 26 years. Heck, he’s been one of the most powerful men in college athletics. But he still carries himself like the Dartmouth football head coach who arrived at SU when the Orange still played football outside.

‘I’ve gotta say,’ Crouthamel said, ‘knowing who the candidates were for the position 26 years ago, I was the best of a very bad lot.’

He never hid from, or apologized for, being himself, in public or behind closed doors. Yesterday, as he leaned back at the podium and his jacket spread, a trademark pack of Winstons could be seen through his breast pocket.

‘He is held in awe by other athletics directors,’ said Dick MacPherson, who preceded Paul Pasqualoni as SU’s football coach, ‘because Jake is who he wants to be.’

Of course, he was who he wanted to be at a price. Crouthamel picks his words carefully and speaks slowly, with the glare of a gunslinger. That never endeared him to the Syracuse community, the one he provided with a first-class athletic program.

Dull. Icy. Calculating. Those were the words used to describe Crouthamel.

‘If I had only coached here for a year and left, when I walked into his office, I might have interpreted (his personality) that way,’ SU lacrosse head coach John Desko said. ‘He can be a little bit dry, a little bit to the point with the media and community.’

‘You’d love to be able to dispel that notion,’ associate athletic director Janet Kittell said yesterday, still wiping tears from her eyes. ‘I think it’s because they don’t see him the way somebody working side-by-side would. To see the emotion, and to see the caring, and to experience firsthand the integrity, and the careful, thought-provoking conversations that we have … you don’t see people on the outside the way we see them on the inside.’

He can make fun of himself. Jake Crouthamel can (gasp!) laugh.

He showed that yesterday, in public, as he so rarely does.

‘I can’t wait to get to this roast, because there will be a lot of material out there collected over 26 years,’ Crouthamel said with a chuckle, referring to a roast Chancellor Nancy Cantor will hold in the spring.

Still, especially when it came to the football program, fans saw the stolid figurehead. As SU slid last season, public pressure for Crouthamel to dismiss Pasqualoni intensified, so much to the point that Crouthamel had to call a press conference last December to announce Pasqualoni would not be fired.

At times, the feelings of contention went both ways.

‘It’s frustrating to me,’ Crouthamel said last spring. ‘Everything now becomes frustrating to me. You win a game, nobody cares. You lose a game, everybody cares. It would be nice to have it be the other way. At least somebody cares when you win a game.’

Really, though, if those people stopped to think what Crouthamel has accomplished in two-and-a-half decades at Syracuse, stopped to look past the calculating voice and steely eyes, they would see the reason a medium-sized private school in Central New York became an elite Division I athletic program.

From the start, Crouthamel used forward thinking to enhance Syracuse athletics. He built the Carrier Dome and made sure it would be on campus, thereby connecting sports and academics in a way unique to this campus.

He helped create the Big East and originated the Big East tournament, giving birth to a basketball powerhouse. He cultivated a basketball program that would win a national title in 2003, and a lacrosse program that has won nine national championships since he arrived.

And he did it all with a passion and care those outside the program rarely saw.

‘Jake has run this program for 26 years as well as any athletic director has run any athletic department in the country,’ Syracuse men’s basketball coach Jim Boeheim said. ‘He has conducted himself in the absolute highest amount of integrity, character and morale that you could ever find. They will not find anyone who can do any better than what has been done by Jake Crouthamel.’

Not bad for the best of a very bad lot. Not bad at all.