Lisa Evans couldn’t believe it when she saw the 1978 snapshot. No way was that man really her father. It couldn’t be Jake Crouthamel with a full head of brown hair and a spotless young face.

‘I said to my husband, ‘It’s like looking at a picture of the President of the United States when he enters office,” said Evans after looking at a picture collage following Crouthamel’s retirement announcement in November. ”Then four years later, look and see how different the picture is of him.”

Multiply that exponentially and you see what’s happened to Syracuse’s 66-year-old outgoing athletic director. When Crouthamel officially retires on June 30, after being at the helm for 27 years, there won’t need to be a plaque listing the accomplishments to remember him by. A headshot would suffice.

While some people wear their heart on their sleeve, Crouthamel’s is etched on his face. Each wrinkle crinkling up his forehead and each gray hair barely covering his scalp is there for a reason.

Forming the Big East, overseeing the renovation of SU’s facilities, dealing with NCAA investigations of SU men’s basketball and lacrosse programs, fighting for women’s athletics in a male-dominated market and later saving the Big East when others were fleeing for the ACC doesn’t just happen without a little stress and aging.

‘There’s always an event,’ Crouthamel said. ‘You plan, literally, your whole life around the program.’

From the moment Crouthamel left his Dartmouth College football coaching position and moved his family to Syracuse in 1978, he made the SU athletic program his life. Working up to 100 hours a week, satisfying his appetite with an orange until dinner and smoking around 30 cigarettes a day to cope with the stress – that’s all part of the job in his eyes.

But since he doesn’t let people peek inside his emotions nor share the daily grind he endures, the public doesn’t get a true understanding of the compassion he has for the program, said Associate Director of Athletics Janet Kittell.

Instead, fans see the aging Crouthamel, always unemotional and stoic. The one who glares more than he smiles and opens his pack of cigarettes more than his mouth.

When he does speak, he crafts carefully guarded responses in a painfully slow manner.

What does the community care about his personality, he thinks. As long as he provides fans with winning seasons and championships, he can be as dull and icy as he wants.

‘Everyone has this impression of him being an icy ogre, as Bud Poliquin would say,’ said his wife, Carol. ‘But that’s not the way he is.’

To those who know him, he’s so much more than just an athletic director. He’s the witty individual who wrote a four-page poem for his wife’s 60th birthday and crafted another for the 10th anniversary of the Big East. He’s the entertainer who will put on a show for his grandchildren or NCAA executives by playing the ukulele and singing along.

‘That was a long time ago,’ said Crouthamel, as if trying to refute the notion that he knows how to have fun. ‘Those were the days when I looked more like that (1978) picture.’

He still strums the Hawaiian instrument and recently wrote another poem, but those are hobbies reserved for his private life. And even then, Crouthamel is usually too preoccupied to partake in those activities.

He gets restless if he has nothing to work on, Carol said. His idea of relaxing is working in the yard, building stonewalls or remodeling basements.

While others relax on the weekends, Crouthamel spent his roaming the Syracuse sidelines during his tenure. He tried to be on-hand for every Syracuse sporting event, regardless of whether there were 40,000 people in the stands or 15.

‘He, more than any other (Division) I-A athletic director in the country that I can imagine, is at everything from field hockey to women’s lacrosse to men’s soccer,’ Kittell said. ‘Our office on a Tuesday night might be in the pouring rain watching a contest. There is no end to our office hours. This isn’t a job. It’s a lifestyle. We clearly do this for riches that are not reflected in our checkbooks.’

Even when the fulfilling moments have happened during his tenure, it’s not like Crouthamel to bask in the glory. He never appeared in any photographs when the men’s basketball team won the championship in 2003, when he called the victory a ‘relief’ more than anything else. The same can be said for the nine men’s lacrosse championships won under his reign.

None of the national titles or 24 Big East championships SU teams have taken home during his time rank as the most gratifying moment of his career. The only time he admits to experiencing a truly ‘wow’ moment didn’t occur during a championship celebration or while watching a big game, but rather at a practice .

It happened over Winter Break in December 1997, when the No. 4-ranked Syracuse football team was practicing on the Carrier Dome turf for the Fiesta Bowl while the early-season No. 1-ranked basketball team practiced on the hardwood. Only there could he sit back and enjoy everything he had worked so hard to create, free from the game-time stress and media spotlight.

Funny thing is, that moment might never have been possible without his supervising the construction of the Dome, which became an instant recruiting tool that catalyzed the football, basketball and lacrosse programs’ successes.

The same could be said for what he’s done for SU women’s athletics. Crouthamel financed the construction of new fields and gave women’s softball, soccer and lacrosse the resources to go from newborns to contenders in less than a decade.

And yet he’s deflected the praise that’s meant for him.

‘I’ve said this before and I will say it many times again,’ said Crouthamel during his retirement press conference, ‘I have hung on to (my staff’s) coattails and they have dragged me on to success – our success.’

He might be modest with his comments but not with his compassion. He had a perfect chance to leave when the NCAA began investigating the men’s basketball and lacrosse programs in the early ’90s. Other schools were courting him, but he didn’t want to leave Syracuse during its darkest days.

‘In order to be a good athletic director, everyone should have to go through an NCAA investigation,’ Crouthamel said. ‘Otherwise, you really don’t quite understand what it is you’re supposed to be doing.’

When Boston College, Virginia Tech and Miami left the Big East, Crouthamel again stayed strong and kept the conference afloat. He didn’t want to be working during the summer of 2003 when the Big East was left scrambling to fill the void, but duty called. Rob Edson, associate director of athletics, gave him a cell phone so he could take part in all the conference calls while vacationing in Cape Cod.

‘I can’t tell you how many conference calls he was on that summer on the back porch in Cape Cod, constantly trying to move through the woods with his cell phone so he could stay connected,’ Evans said.

Perhaps his biggest accomplishment is that he’s managed to weather all the storms and keep the Syracuse athletic program among the nation’s elite, Evans said.

‘He didn’t just stay afloat – he was a ship for others,’ Kittel said.

Through it all, Crouthamel’s quietly sailed along, taking Syracuse to newfound levels of success but never taking credit for it. He doesn’t want to be remembered when he’s gone. If the athletic department throws a farewell party for him, he won’t attend.

He’d rather not think about the legacy he’ll leave behind.

‘In our business, you’re as good as your last game,’ Crouthamel said. ‘If you win your last game, great. If you lose your last game, you’re a turkey.’

Though Crouthamel’s on payroll until June 30, that onus has already shifted to current athletic director Daryl Gross, who was hired on Dec. 17 and took over Crouthamel’s vacated office in February.

Staying true to form, Crouthamel slid into the shadows and moved into a new office at Drumlins Country Club. Other than acting as the Syracuse Regional Tournament Director in March and remaining accessible should Gross need any help (the two haven’t spoken since Gross started in February), there’s no need for the office.

After 27 years, Crouthamel just needs the security of having an office. Stripping that away from him will be the worst part of retirement, he said. The workplace has become such a part of his daily routine that he doesn’t know how he’ll cope without it.

His family hopes he might finally relax with his wife in their Cape Cod home, but chances are Crouthamel will still find something to keep him busy.

‘Those oysters better watch out,’ Crouthamel said, ‘because I’m invading their territory.’

Regardless of what he’s doing, as Crouthamel stated during his retirement announcement in November, he’ll never be able to get away from the daily grind that dictated more than half of his life.

‘I have spent the last 40-plus years on a college campus and it is going to be difficult to leave that environment,’ Crouthamel said. ‘I will continue to go to football games on Saturdays and basketball games near Cape Cod. That is what I do – it is my life.’

Published on April 25, 2005 at 12:00 pm