Tom Izzo took the top bunk. Mel Tucker took the bottom. Several feet above their pillows, fighter jets took off and landed well into the night.
“I didn’t sleep much,” Izzo said Tuesday, a few days after their overnight on the USS Carl Vinson off the coast of San Diego, an excursion last week that included several other Michigan State coaches.
“I said, ‘I”m older, I’ll take the top (bunk),’” Izzo continued. “We had executive bunk beds, so we probably had three or four more inches (of space) than (the sailors) do.”
Izzo and Tucker were part of an invited contingent that also included MSU hockey coach Adam Nightingale, baseball coach Jake Boss, men’s golf coach Casey Lubahn, former Detroit Red Wings coach Jeff Blashill, Hope (Michigan) College men’s basketball coach (and former Laingsburg coach) Greg Mitchell and Michigan State assistant men’s basketball coach Doug Wojcik, a former Naval officer, who, as a young man, spent most of a couple years on ships, though they weren’t quite the size of the USS Carl Vinson.
This wasn’t how Izzo or anyone associated with Michigan State basketball saw the Carl Vinson 12 years ago, when the Spartans played against North Carolina aboard the same flight deck that Izzo and Tucker and the other coaches slept just below last Thursday night. The remnants of that first aircraft carrier college basketball game were still present, seen in photographs in the ship’s barbershop from that night in 2011.
This time, Izzo and Co. saw the ship in action — from the flight deck as planes and helicopters took off and landed yards away from them, to the bridge high above, all the way down to the captains quarters, barracks, offices, hospital, dentist offices, mess areas and kitchen, several floors below the deck. There were 9 or 10 floors in all, reached by steps that were essentially ladders. Every step seemingly was another opportunity to knock a knee or hit your head, even for Izzo.
“Other times (on the ships), they didn’t let us go to places like that,” Izzo said of the two games, including last November’s loss to Gonzaga on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Both games were played aboard docked ships. Thursday, the MSU contingent and others — 13 of them in all — were flown in an Osprey to reach the Carl Vinson.
These weren’t tours. They were guests as the sailors, pilots and everyone aboard practiced, preparing for an extended deployment. They ate a meal with officers, another with the chiefs and breakfast with the sailors. They were up at 6 a.m. after a few hours of sleep — once the planes stopped taking off and landing just above their heads.
“It was loud,” Izzo said. “Mel slept with some earphones in. I didn’t have any at the time so I just didn’t sleep, but I don’t think he slept much either. And then we got woken up at 5:45, 6 o’clock and the whole thing, the routine starts again.”
“I mean planes are taking off and landing literally 5 feet above our heads,” said Boss, who took the bottom bunk in his tight sleeping quarters with Lubahn. “The room literally shook. It was unbelievable.”
That said …
“It was the experience of a lifetime,” Boss continued. “The way that the operation ran, with a bunch of 22-year-olds on deck and not being able to communicate verbally with each other because of the noise … it was incredible to watch. I mean, really, everybody had a job. They all did their job. And everybody’s relying on everybody else. To watch that operation run with hundreds of millions of dollars — billions of dollars — on that ship and probably at stake … I mean, if you screw something up, you’re going to lose a plane. More importantly, somebody could die. And to watch that whole operation run as smoothly as it did was was incredible. The pride that they took in doing their job well was maybe the most impressive thing that I saw.”
The accountability the sailors had to each other — some of them still teenagers, from all walks of life — stood out as well. It was a level of accountability that made Izzo envious.
“They do a great job of convincing each other that you’re part of a team,” Izzo said, especially impressed by the precision of the flight deck crew in conjunction with the pilots when a mistake means disaster. “There are 19-to-23-year-old guys out there that are coordinating these things.”
“I’ve gotten to do so many cool things in this job,” Izzo continued. “Going to Germany (for a game on the Ramstein Air Base in 2012) and going to Kuwait and being there a couple of times with the troops. The military things I’ve gotten to do just give me a better appreciation for why we should be doing a better job taking care of our people that come home, why we should be doing a better job of appreciating the jobs they do when they’re there. Because the pay is low. The work is long. And, I mean, it’s not inhumane. Everything’s clean and right. It’s just, you ain’t having a party in your room, I can tell you that.”
Having Izzo there, however, did seem to be a welcomed occasion for some of the sailors and a brief break from routine, including for a couple of them who were at the Michigan State game in November aboard the Abraham Lincoln.
“I mean, Izzo’s a celebrity anyway,” Boss said. “But the amount of people that stopped him and wanted a picture and all that, and he obliged every single one of them, it was really kind of cool to watch.”
