79-63

My man Dave “Whassup, Bitch” Storm had a couple of freebies for Saturday’s home tilt between Virginia and division rival NC State, so along with The Professional, aka Gordon Stokes, I rolled down to Charlottesville to watch my men’s college hoops team try to get a win. I had no idea that a Saturday could be so painful.

Jennifer Young, also known to many of you as “The Snatchologist”, calls the two-hour drive from Washington to Charlottesville the longest two-hour drive in the history of two-hour drives, and she’s right, really...Route 29 going south from Manassas to Charlottesville is painful, featuring neither the flavor of the South nor the sights of the West. The road stops are nearly devoid of character; my most vivid memories are of the Clark Bros. Gun Shop about halfway to town, and the former Miniature Horses Ranch, which has since been converted into something more respectable. Otherwise, you get valley after valley, stand-alone two-bedroom after stand-alone two-bedroom, flashing yellow intersection after...you get the idea. The drive to Hooville is almost like that first hour after you cross into Ohio; you wish for a second that you had never made this trip, but it’s all about the destination, and you try as hard as you can to concentrate on that.

Speaking of which, is there...has there ever been...will there ever be a drive more sleep-inducing than rolling down 29 at 65 MPH? Oh, the number of times I have almost died from falling asleep at the wheel while driving to and from Charlottesville! I used to make that drive after just waking up, and there I was, an hour into it, snapping to like someone had just turned the lights on in ARTH (Art History) 253!! The comedy of this must be seen to be believed; each and every time I drive to Charlottesville, I don’t think it’s going to happen, and then whammo...I catch myself just before hitting the guard rails.

This time around, Gordon was the driver, so we made fun of almost everything and everyone we know in order to make the two hours that much more merry. Of course, the James Brown Greatest Hits CD and the Classic Run DMC Collection always makes that easier, but I digress.

Once we got to town, we picked up our tickets and went over to the stadium. UVA came in with a record of 12-7; after winning their first 10 in a row, they have gone two and seven since. Although the ‘Hoos lost a close game to Maryland last week, they got bombed at Wake Forest, and they got throttled at North Carolina before that. (Oh yeah, and they get the chance to play at Duke on Wednesday, which means we are going to get bombed again.) By all accounts, we are having one of the worst years in our modern era; the division that Virginia “competes” in (I use that term lightly) is the ACC, and the ACC is much stronger than it has been in the recent past. This has meant a number of nights where Virginia has been blown right out of the stadium, but on this day, we have a good shot at winning. Even though NC State has been hot, road teams have had almost no success this year, and since Virginia lost that Maryland game at home just three days prior, they ought to be fired up to win on their home floor.

“I feel good about this one,” said Gordon just before tip-off, sealing our doom. “I don’t know, it’s just a feeling I’m having.”

I realized later that this “feeling” Gordon is talking about comes from the hot dog (perilously named “The Smokie Big Bite”, spookily misspelled) he has just consumed from the local 7-11 we stopped at on the way into town. Gordon’s a pretty bright guy, a middle-school history teacher that gets along well with everyone. However, I have been with him about 40 times over the years where he has decided to eat the hot dogs from 7-11. In fact, Gordon has sampled a number of items from the 7-11 menu; for me, if it’s not in a bag and made by somebody else, I’ll never ever ever ever eat the food from freakin’ 7-11.

Five minutes into the game, we are losing, but I am optimistic our fortunes will improve despite the fact that our best inside player, Elton Brown, has missed two shots from less than five feet away. The coach, Pete Gillen, has changed the starting lineup for our team, giving freshman JR Reynolds more minutes since he has shown flashes of brilliance in his last five games. Even Majestic Mapp, a point guard that plays less than 10 minutes a game, is starting; maybe Pete actually reads the paper and realizes that he needs to play someone at point guard that can actually dribble the basketball after Maryland beat Virginia by taking advantage of poor point guard play. Maybe Gordon’s “feeling” is going to go just right for us.

Then, it starts to happen, and if you have ever attended a home UVA sporting event, that ol’ feeling comes back at you in a rush, doesn’t it? NC State started scoring baskets inside at will, running back-door cuts ad nauseum by running essentially one play—a high screen-and-roll featuring their best player, Julius Hodge, that could alternately be a screen-and-pop or a screen-and-drive—and even though about a hundred fans in our section were yelling at the coach to make this adjustment, our players looked like they had never seen a variation of this play before.

Worse, it was so quiet in University Hall that I could literally hear fans from NCSU yelling at UVA’s players six sections over. I thought our fans were bad when I was still in school (and, they were); man, this was fucking atrocious on Saturday. Even though it is early February, you could have told me that classes were not in session and I would have believed you, since it seemed like some kids just said

“Yo, man, fuck it, I’m not going out in the cold to watch us play State”

and stayed at home to get the kegs set to go for parties that night. You had your token student fans in the lower bowl of the student section, doing what they do best...whip out a flask, wear a silly orange cowboy hat, half-heartedly boo the opposing team’s free-throw shooters, and on and on. You also had your sorority packs showing up like they had dinner plans right after the game was over: Chastity in her Abercrombie vest, slacks and boots; Hope in her cute sweater/tight jeans/Gucci shades combination, and so on. Even with a 3 PM start time, you had folks still showing up halfway through the first half, like this was a fucking Lakers game at the Staples Center.

It was embarrassing, really, watching and listening to our fans fade from pitiful to indifferent to downright nonexistent. Normally, I am the loudest, most profane person in your section at a sporting event; even with my toned-down act on Saturday (I am, ahem, “more mature”), I was amongst the ten-loudest people in the building, booing almost every bad call like this was for the national championship, booing Julius Hodge every time he got away with a charging violation, yelling at our big men for allowing NC State’s talentless center to pound the ball in the lane and go up and hit shots...and of course, I was booing the UVA coach for calling time outs at the most inopportune of times.

(For UVA fans: seriously, in the Wake game, the UNC game and now this game, didn’t you half expect Pete to call a timeout midway through the second half and just leave the gym? During the Wake game, when we were getting bombed by like 25 in the first half, I thought for sure Pete would call a twenty and just say “Hey guys, good luck the rest of the season. I’m going to try to catch the early flight back to Charlottesville so I can start packing.”)

In the second half of the current game, things only got worse, and even though we were only down 15 with 7 minutes to go, many of our “loyal” fans decided they wanted to beat the rush and they just left right then and there. Me being me, I started booing our own fans for giving up with so much time left. The people sitting around us were loving this, because I was booing children, older folks and even a pregnant woman for leaving with so much time left in the game. Then, I just started lying:

“Hey, where are you going?? Come on, people, stick around...we’re going to make a run! I can smell that 15-0 run coming up any second! I paid good money for these seats!!”

The run didn’t come...and, we lost by 16. Final: 79-63.

I was dejected. Now, we’re in last place in the division; last place! Six or seven teams from our division will make it to the NCAA Tournament; one of those will assuredly not be us. Although I had watched the team on TV a half-dozen times prior to this game, when you see it in person, it really does illustrate just how badly the coaching staff has lost this group of men. Players didn’t seem to really care what was going on around them as they were blowing it; moments of passion were few, and quite far between; the only second half adjustment that I could make note of was that Pete decided to not play Mapp again in the second half. Why is anyone’s guess, but I wish someone on the coaching staff would have told the UVA players that Julius Hodge will end up being a second- or third-team All-American, because he continued to torch the ‘Hoos in the second half on the way to 26 points for the game.

In pain and irate that I had suffered through this debacle, Gordon and I did what any sane human being would do after watching his team get throttled at home: we gorged like there was no tomorrow. Thanks to Dave and his wife Audrey, we went to Big Jim’s Barbecue for dinner, and my friends, you can’t do much better in Charlottesville. For $12, I had an order of wings, a bacon cheeseburger and a chili dog...and I didn’t even go into cardiac arrest! Of course, as I looked around our table, we had consumed three burgers, wings, fries, beans, a chili dog and a Philly cheesesteak; I’m sure that one of us should have died that night.

Gordon and I didn’t make things any better by walking next door to Krispy Kreme (the sign DID say that they were hot) and getting a dozen hot glazed doughnuts. We wondered aloud how the inventor of the Krispy Kreme doughnut wills himself to sleep each night; sure, he’s made a tasty doughnut and he’s loaded, but there are kids out there right now using KKs to get high, and that wouldn’t make me sleep any better at the end of the day. I also wondered if KK has come up with a machine that will completely glaze a regular ring doughnut; right now, there’s an unglazed portion on the bottom of each doughnut, but just imagine if they invent a glazing mechanism that will coat the entire damned doughnut! Kids shouldn’t be allowed to eat these things, man...dangerous!

It was a nice capper to a long day, but even Keith “Dogshit” Karem had to ask, when will the losing end? Certainly not this year, and even next year is going to be tough to stomach...oh, and did I mention the new football schedule?

Random Bellviews, courtesy of Bell and Longer Community Trust:

The LA Lakers at full strength: Opening Weekend
H2O Nightclub, on the Waterfront: $9.50 Show
Credit cards: Matinee
Icy back roads: Rental
Women at Duke: Hard Vice

bellview--when in doubt, shoot the three

79-63