ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, November 21, 1996 TAG: 9611210017
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LEXINGTON
SOURCE: DANIEL UTHMAN STAFF WRITER
THERE IS NO BIGGER SUPPORTER of VMI athletics than the school's superintendent, Maj. Gen. Josiah Bunting III.
They walk humbly around him, saluting when appropriate, but always giving him a wide berth.
He is VMI's superintendent and he always is on the sidelines at football games.
Dignitaries and administrators call for him from the Ferebee Lounge, VMI's luxury box at Alumni Memorial Field, asking him to come up and entertain the generous alumni or reminisce with a classmate who may be in town.
Their requests are as effective as a parent calling into the night for a child to come home to the dinner table. Maj. Gen. Josiah Bunting III treats the requests as if they were voiced in the midst of a deadlocked sandlot baseball game. Dinner can wait. There's a game to be won, and he's on the same team as Keydets coach Bill Stewart.
``He likes being down there with everybody,'' Bunting's wife, Diana, said with a chuckle. ``I think he thinks he's a coach.''
That may be fantasy. Reality is this: Josiah Bunting III, 57, is a fan. Always has been, always will be. And always on the sidelines, as close as he can get to the game.
In swim of things
Bunting's affection for the sporting life can be traced his childhood outside Philadelphia. His father was a Phillies fanatic. Since he was 6 years old, Bunting admired Ted Williams and the Boston Red Sox. He still quotes late Fenway Park public address announcer Sherm Feller with reverence.
He used to fight his stepfather and stepbrother for the spot closest to the television when it was time watch college football. ``That house would grind to a halt when there was a football game on,'' Diana said.
Bunting's stepbrother, Dick Ebersol, attended college at Yale, where he volunteered to be a spotter for ABC Sports. Now he's the president of NBC Sports.
Bunting's own family is rich with athletic experience. Diana, a Hollins College alumna, is a horsewoman, runner and former high jumper. The oldest son, Josiah IV, is a cold-water swimmer who lives in San Francisco and regularly swims laps to Alcatraz Island.
Bunting has run 40 marathons and in the 1960s was captain of VMI's swim team, competing in three freestyle events. Legend has it he once singlehandedly outscored the entire UVa team, although he doesn't remember for sure. ``You know what I resent about swimming?'' he said. ``Even now when I get in a pool, I begin swimming laps, mindless.''
He participates in sports as a viewer, as well. When VMI has an off week, he'll go watch other colleges compete. Four weeks ago after speaking at the New Mexico Military Institute, he attended the Texas Tech-Texas A&M game in College Station, Texas. A former president at Hampden-Sydney College, he was on the Tigers' sidelines when they visited Washington and Lee this season. On Sundays, he flips on the television and watches the NFL. ``I'm probably the only Philadelphia Eagles fan in the state of Virginia,'' he said.
``I get high playing sports, I get high watching them. I'm the kind of guy at one o'clock in the morning on Thursday night, I'll watch San Jose State against Oregon when it's on ESPN.
``I just love it.''
Well-rounded
A conversation with Bunting bounces among many elements that contribute to what he calls, ``the life of the mind.''
A discussion of the techniques of Eagles coach Ray Rhodes can flow smoothly from a talk of the German sentimentalism found in the work of 19th-century piano composer Robert Schumann. A recollection of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that led VMI to pursue coeducation leads Bunting to invoke William Butler Yeats' poem, ``The Irish Airman Foresees his own Death,'' in explaining his own passage to VMI some thirty years ago. He says he chose VMI on ``a lonely impulse of delight.''
``I came here like many people do, almost by chance,'' he said. ``I remember vividly the first time I saw VMI, from U.S. 60 on the hills above Buena Vista. I knew when I got here that it was an appropriate, proper chemical mixture.''
Later, as a Rhodes scholar studying at Oxford University near London, Bunting met Diana Cunningham, who was at Sorbonne in Paris as part of Hollins' study-abroad program. They later married.
Now that he is back in Lexington, Bunting feels pride when he looks at VMI's athletic department, even if it does not command the same attention it once did.
``We are exactly where we should be. I-AA in football and Division I in other sports,'' he said. ``The only proviso that we have to keep working to schedule ourselves as much as possible with schools of similar size, similar resources, similar viewpoints as to the role of athletics, and that means in my mind, the College of William and Mary, The Citadel, Richmond, and ranging farther afoot, schools like Lafayette, Lehigh, Ivy League universities, places like that.''
That said, Bunting is not pushing to end VMI's membership in the Southern Conference. He said the only sport that may be out of place in the league is football, although he added that it is in the middle of a ``rising tide.''
``Bill Stewart, by temperament, is very similar to me,'' Bunting said. ``He is a natural fan. He believes anything he does or anything his teams do will be a victory. He bounces back from defeat after about four or five minutes.
``I think VMI, for the last couple of years,'' Bunting continued, ``has been blessed by the accession of a number of extraordinarily talented and passionate young teachers, administrators and coaches. They infect other people with their own optimism. There's a kind of a VMI style, if I may call it that, that plays very well in our alumni family.''
Many members of that alumni family would like to see VMI play in a conference centered around its major rivals. Bunting has spoken with his colleagues at those schools about forming such a league, but nothing has materialized.
``I am enthusiastically for such a conference if it were possible in any way,'' Bunting said. ``Anything that could unite JMU, William and Mary, Richmond, VMI as the nucleus of a conference which would be geographically contiguous with Virginia.''
New teams to cheer
For now, however, much of the athletic department's attention is focused on integrating women into VMI's intercollegiate athletic program. Bunting said he anticipates an expansion of the corps from 1,250 to 1,350 or even 1,400 cadets, so spaces won't be taken from the male population. Women's athletic programs will be established in the same way; as additions to the school's overall offerings, not by subtraction from other extracurricular programs.
Still, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., for example, has only 535 female cadets after going coed in 1976. That's roughly half the enrollment of Diana Bunting's single-sex alma mater, Hollins.
After talking with colleagues at the United States' military academies, Bunting expects the first women at VMI to be ``very aggressive, very inventive.''
Bunting will help VMI get ahead of the timetable set by its predecessor academies, which took five years to install a women's athletic program after 1976.
When they begin competition, the newest student-athletes can expect to see Bunting nearby, whether they are in a cross country meet or running the basketball court at Cameron Hall.
He's given two pep talks to the football team this season, before games against Richmond and The Citadel. Both talks were followed by VMI victories. Perhaps that's why at halftime of last Saturday's game, the cadets gave Bunting a birthday present: an eight-month old bulldog named Eleanor. A bulldog is The Citadel's mascot.
``It's great to have him on the sidelines,'' Stewart said. ``We all feel that way, the players, the staff and me.''
Bunting stands there not only as a superintendent, but as a fan, and dreamily, as a teammate.
LENGTH: Long : 146 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DANIEL UTHMAN\Staff. If VMI is playing a home footballby CNBgame, you'll find Maj. Gen. Josiah Bunting III on the sidelines.
color. KEYWORDS: PROFILE