You don’t know Jake Crouthamel, but that’s his fault.

He doesn’t want you to know him. It’s not his job to be popular, personable or even palatable. He’s just a businessman.

Director of Athletics for Syracuse University. It’s a big job, and he’s done it now for 25 years. He’s a workaholic. He’s well respected. His peers think he’s a darn good athletics director.

Stop. That’s all he wants you to know.

‘He’s a man of few words, so I don’t know him super well,’ says Kathleen Parker, SU’s field hockey coach who’s worked under Crouthamel for a quarter century. ‘I don’t know if anybody knows him very well.’

Crouthamel’s a puppeteer. He pulls the strings that have helped mold the Orangemen into a national power. Chances are Syracuse’s men’s basketball team would still be title-less without Crouthamel running the show.

Like most good puppeteers, Crouthamel’s best friend is his curtain — one that, over the years, he’s effectively fortified into a stonewall. Publicly, he speaks in slow, deliberate phrases. He’s stolid. Dull. After Syracuse won the national championship earlier this month, Crouthamel called it “a relief.’ His wife, who sat next to him as the Orangemen celebrated the win, jokes that she thinks she saw him smile.

Public perception practically has Crouthamel, 64, pinned as a mannequin — so emotionless, so cold he’s barely human. But if you peek through his curtain, you’ll see otherwise. You’ll see that, as Crouthamel completes his 25th year as Syracuse’s director of athletics, he lives, breathes and, sometimes, even laughs. He cares about Syracuse athletics and he’s sacrificed for it.

‘Publicly, yes I’m stoic and unemotional,’ Crouthamel said. ‘But that’s all perception. If someone thinks I’m unemotional or unexcitable or stoic inside, than that’s 180 degrees from fact. I care tremendously about this program, and I’m willing to make sacrifices for it.’

Fact is, Crouthamel forfeited much just to get to Syracuse. After a successful, seven-year stint as the head football coach at Dartmouth, he resigned in 1977 and accepted his current job at SU. As he packed up his car and his family to leave Hanover, N.H., for Syracuse, he turned to his wife and two daughters — one in high school and one in junior high — and said: ‘Say goodbye to paradise and get ready for reality.’

His wife, Carol, told Crouthamel she’d stay in Syracuse for five years but no longer. To Crouthamel, that seemed reasonable.

‘I have no idea why I stayed here so long,’ Crouthamel says. ‘I certainly never expected to. I don’t think it’s good for an institution to have somebody in a position of responsibility for as long as I’ve been here. But time just kept passing so quickly.’

Maybe because Crouthamel rarely had time to check his watch. He dove into work, first helping bring Syracuse its Carrier Dome, then helping to form the Big East. He joined one committee after another, including the NCAA men’s basketball tournament selection committee, which had him traveling across the country several times a year.

A few other schools came calling, hoping to woo Crouthamel away. But the timing never seemed right. The one time Crouthamel felt tempted by an offer — from a Big Ten school around 1990 — Syracuse’s basketball team was under NCAA investigation, and Crouthamel felt he needed to stick around.

Crouthamel kept the department alive financially, ran the staff and traveled to every football game. He attended as many other Syracuse sporting events as possible. His wife often said, ‘How do you stand this, being at games every day of the week, never taking any time off?’

Crouthamel didn’t flinch.

‘He’s a workaholic,’ says his younger daughter, Christie. ‘He knows that about himself, and we knew that about him growing up. Our expectations for that were set from the day we were born.’

Carol and the kids vacationed without Crouthamel, going to Nantucket Island, Mass., for a few weeks each summer. Sometimes, Crouthamel would make it for part of the vacation. But often, bowl games and other SU events sufficed for family trips.

One of the few pictures in Crouthamel’s Manley Field House office shows his wife and daughters smiling widely on a raft during a trip to the Snake River in Wyoming in the 1980s. For Crouthamel, it’s a picture of a memory missed. Work kept him from going on the trip.

‘He’s a very dedicated father, and family is of huge importance to him,’ Christie says. ‘But I also know that he’s extremely married to his work. Dad certainly wasn’t going to go to ‘bring the parents to school day’ or anything like that.’

These days, with his daughters grown up and married, Crouthamel finds a little more time to get away. He takes off a week in each of the summer months to join his wife — and often his daughters and three grandsons — at their house in Cape Cod. Within a few years, he’ll retire there.

Only problem is, Crouthamel’s wife has already retired to Cape Cod, spending most of her summer there. So many nights, Crouthamel leaves his office, picks up a pizza and eats alone at home.

‘I get kind of sick of hot dogs, hamburgers and the such,’ Crouthamel says. ‘It can be a little bit lonely. It’s certainly a sacrifice of the position.’

So is stress. The day-to-day insanity of the job has kept Crouthamel from quitting smoking — he smokes about 30 Winston cigarettes a day — and has him downing 10 half-cups of black coffee during the workday.

He hasn’t had lunch in 25 years because, he says, it’s a ‘waste of time.’ Instead, he survives by eating one piece of fruit every morning — usually an orange — and dinner, which is always accompanied by rice.

Crouthamel’s exercise is mostly limited to walking, though he still appears in good shape. He had back surgery to correct a pinched nerve in the mid-1980s and hasn’t been able to jog much since.

‘Health-wise, it’s not the model we want our athletes to follow,’ Parker deadpans. ‘Honestly, I don’t know how he’s still alive.’

‘This job is incredibly stressful,’ Crouthamel says. ‘This is a business of instant gratification or demoralization. You learn to deal with that. It’s a hell of a way to live. It’s absolutely stupid, really.’

Addictive, too. Crouthamel’s been on that roller coaster for 25 years, and he knows that, when he gets off, it might be a little scary. He needs to keep busy.

For Crouthamel, even a day spent vacationing at Cape Cod needs some sort of plan. In the morning, he’ll spend a few hours at Hyannis Harbor, watching ferries come and go and helping the occasional confused traveler. After that, maybe he’ll play the ukulele — a four-string, guitar-like instrument he’s played for more than 30 years — to his grandchildren. In that audience, the crowd favorite is ‘Winnie the Pooh.’

His family is already fretting Crouthamel’s retirement, scheming about ways to keep him busy. His wife hopes he’ll get involved with Habitat for Humanity. Christie will encourage him to do some sort of landscaping, his favorite — or, depending on who you ask, his only — hobby.

‘My dad wouldn’t know what to do with free time,’ Christie says. ‘He does not just sit around. There will have to be something keeping him busy.’

‘I’ll do this for a few more years before I retire,’ Crouthamel says. ‘The community has had it with me. In terms of public perception, the new guy who comes in will have it made.

‘There is this great notion like, ‘How do I want to be remembered?’ To be quite honest with you, when I’m gone, I’m gone. I’d rather not be remembered at all.’

Published on April 28, 2003 at 12:00 pm