John Cheek would have been labeled an “athlete-scholar” during his years at Washington College—a convenient phrase for students who arrived on athletic scholarships and were also expected, somewhere down the list, to succeed in the classroom.
I’ve never liked the term. I doubt Cheek would have either.
Washington College never set out to produce students who could quote John Rawls while winning national championships. Its ambition was simpler, and more demanding: to help students learn how to think well. That was William Smith’s charge in 1782, and it remains the school’s quiet ideal.
Cheek embodied that idea long before anyone put a name to it.
On paper, his athletic career borders on myth. Lacrosse historians still rank him among the finest players of his era. In 1976, he was named Division Player of the Year. He was twice Division Attackman of the Year, a three-time All-American, and later one of only two Washington College players named to the U.S. National Team. His induction into the U.S. Lacrosse Hall of Fame places him in rare company.
But the statistics don’t quite capture what you saw.
At a time when the dominant programs—especially in New York—relied on size and force, Cheek played with finesse, imagination, and something close to improvisation. Watching him could feel less like sport than performance. He helped lead Washington College to improbable victories, the most amazing with the small college’s upset victory over Johns Hopkins, in not by overpowering opponents, but by outthinking them.
Still, what stays with me has little to do with lacrosse.
I wasn’t in Cheek’s inner circle. I didn’t play the game, wasn’t playing football when Sadler died, nor did I live in Somerset’s East Wing, where he served as resident assistant my freshman year. But many of my closest friends did, and through them—and later, through my work as a fundraiser for college, I came to know him pretty well.
The clearest early glimpse of who he was came under terrible circumstances.
Within days of arriving on campus, a freshman in Cheek’s dorm collapsed during a pickup football game on the lawn. His name was David Sadler. He died before the ambulance could take him away, with his newly formed friends watching in horror.
For a group of 18-year-old kids just beginning college, the shock was overwhelming. In the 1970s, there were no counselors waiting to help students process something like that. Orientation went on. Classes began. That was the expectation.
Except, in Somerset, something different happened.
Cheek took responsibility in a way that felt so instinctive rather than performative. He organized a caravan of students to drive eight hours to Boston for the funeral. And when they returned, he did something even more important—he opened his room – every night it seemed.
Night after night, these gutted souls would gather there. They sat on the floor, in bean bag chairs, Hall and Oates playing in the background, drinking Natty Boh, passing joints, talking their way—slowly, unevenly—from shock toward a crude form of acceptence and a bonding that would last a lifetime.
That was Cheek at his best.
He was quick to puncture his own legend. He knew lacrosse had earned him a scholarship, but he never mistook it for destiny. There were plenty of players in Maryland just as good, many of them at Hopkins.
He loved the game. He loved to compete. But he also loved the process of testing himself—and expected the same from others.
On the field, he pushed his teammates to be their best. Off the field, those late-night sessions blended humor and something close to therapy. He had a gift for cutting through ego, dismantling hero worship, and delivering a perfectly timed insult with a disarming smile.
He was independent in ways that set him apart. He had little interest in fraternity life. He dated women who were far smarter than him, and he actually liked his classes. And when admiration tipped into idolization, he shut it down quickly. A classic Cheek quote was to tell someone to shut up or he wouldn’t be their idol anymore.
That instinct followed him after college.
In the early 1980s, he joined a small group of other Washington College graduates at Alex. Brown in Baltimore. Within a few years, he became one of the firm’s top producers. At one point, he calculated—half amused, half astonished—that he had made more in his first two years than his father had earned in a lifetime.
Success didn’t soften his edge.
In 1986, I invited him to a small dinner at the Maryland Club as part of a fundraising effort for a new athletic center. It was a classic setup: a trustee and lacrosse champ Peter Boggs, my boss, and me—three against one.
Cheek spent the evening ordering three outrageously expensive bottles of Bordeaux, fully aware he wouldn’t be paying. After dinner, he suggested a nightcap. We agreed, thinking we might finally close the deal.
His “quiet spot” turned out to be the Hippo, then one of the largest gay discos on the East Coast.
He wasn’t there to provoke so much as to observe. He sat back, wearing the grin he had perfected over the years, watching the three of us try to adjust to a world we clearly hadn’t expected.
And he wasn’t finished. From there, he led us to one of Baltimore’s more notorious strip clubs and, again, simply watched.
That was Cheek—part provocateur, part teacher. He liked to unsettle people just enough to remind them how small their assumptions might be.
Even as a millionaire, he preferred to ride Amtrak coach on his frequent trips to New York, saying that was where all the fun was happening.
I thought of all this when I heard he had died last week of a heart attack, still in his early seventies.
In the end, the lessons that stay with you rarely come from where you expect. They come from moments, from conversations, from people who understood something essential.
John Cheek understood how to think well—and how to help others do the same.
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