a tale as old as time

Making the rounds today is this column by SBNation's Andrew Sharp:

Murder at UVA: George Huguely, Yeardley Love, and Lacrosse's Worst-Case Scenario

It's a well-written column. It's an earnest, well-meant attempt at making sense of something that wasn't supposed to happen, written by someone with some insight into the lives of lacrosse players. It's truthful and doesn't take leaps of faith with the facts of the case.

It's also wrong.

Flat wrong. As with many sensationalistic murder cases, this one has attracted attention from the media, much of it obnoxious and sleazy, in an attempt to Make Sense Of It All, which really boils down to little more than a battle for your precious advertising dollars. Andrew Sharp is to be commended for his effort to do something other than try and convince you that this is the culmination of a program gone rogue; in the end, though, he's little more than another unknowing victim of the culture that he purports to be an objective observer of. The focus here is on lacrosse culture as he describes it, ignoring almost entirely the aspects of that culture (which are most of them) that apply to the rest of society.

Lacrosse is a rich kids' sport, explains Sharp, and that means the social scene entails cliques, entitlement, parties, drugs, and of course, "lacrosstitutes." George Huguely went to an elite private school and then an elite university, and this background, somehow unique and insular, is supposed to have contributed to the murder.

There's nothing unique about lacrosse. Sharp treats it as such, implies as such, but it's not true. Rock has its groupies. Hockey has its puck bunnies. Football has...well, Ali Larter in a whipped-cream bikini, among other temptations available to football players in the football-obssessed culture of Texas. Hollywood? Sure, but in a real-life world where high school football stadiums cost sixty million dollars, do you doubt this goes on? In a world where baseball has a steroid problem and NBAers toke up like Cheech and Chong, do you see anything different if there are drugs in lacrosse? Rich kids are going to be cliquish and find their way to the liquor cabinet without the help of lacrosse.

Sharp blames lacrosse while claiming not to blame lacrosse. Of course you can't blame the sport of lacrosse. A bunch of sticks and balls did not conspire to murder Yeardley Love. But you can't put the finger on lacrosse "culture" and claim not to be blaming the sport. Sharp writes:

But if we're looking to understand this tragedy in a way that teaches us anything, lacrosse matters. .... George Huguely may not have felt "entitled" to date Yeardley Love regardless of her objections (that conclusion's too easy) but it's entirely conceivable that lacrosse's entitlement culture, filled with excess, enabled him to turn to drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism, and without any social repercussions, burying his "issues" deep inside. .... And whatever the case, really, it all points to the same problem, where lacrosse is at least tangentially complicit.

If the police find any person in this case who is "tangentially complicit," they'll slap 'em in handcuffs and charge 'em with something. It's not legal to be complicit in a murder. So Sharp is, in fact, blaming lacrosse, whether he means to or not. If I asked you today about a case where an athlete murdered a girl with whom he'd previously been in a relationship, you'd say it was George Huguely; if I had asked you the same question last week, who might you come up with?

I ask because O.J. Simpson did not have the privileged, "sheltered" upbringing that George Huguely had. I ask because neither did Rae Carruth. It didn't take wealthy parents or an enabling social circle or a certain kind of lifestyle for these men to decide to kill someone. (We're just going to go with the standard assumption about OJ, alright?) Steve McNair didn't kill an ex-lover - but his ex-lover did. If you want to extend the "athletes killing people" (or trying to) meme, we can roll on to Mike Danton or Ugueth Urbina, neither case being somehow exacerbated by the culture of their respective sport.

With apologies to Angela Lansbury and her voicing of a kindly old mother teapot in Beauty and the Beast, the jealous murder of a lover is a tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme. Robert Browning described it in a poem called "Porphyria's Lover." Victor Hugo's villainous Claude Frollo tried it - repeatedly. Greek mythology is chock full of this stuff.

And a quick Google search will turn up roughly ten quinzillion individual results, all around the world, describing how jealous, rageful people killed someone they loved or once loved. Did George Huguely need the lacrosse culture to help him commit this murder? Like hell he did. Is it really necessary to "find a reason" for the act of an intoxicated, probably jealous kid with major-league anger issues?

Ultimately, Sharp has it backwards. This kind of story would earn headlines in no newspaper but the Cav Daily if an English major had killed another English major. This story made headlines because the principals are lacrosse players, and that would be true if the principals were soccer players, basketball players, swimmers, or anyone wearing a UVA uniform, or a UNC one, or a Tennessee one, or a Cleveland State one. It's a lacrosse story because of the effects it'll have on the game of lacrosse, not the other way round.

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I wish my own clumsy words could do any kind of justice to a personal hero of mine and the best human being in all of sports, but they can't. So I'm left with nothing but this: RIP, Ernie Harwell.

we can't ever have nice things around here

Not long ago, things looked pretty amazing for the state of UVA athletics, what with three ACC championships and multiple #1 rankings for spring sports all across the board. That earns you a short blurb in the local newspapers underneath the attendance figure and the price of a Mike Vick autograph at the VT spring game. (Hey, he owes like, millions in fines and doesn't have any marketable skills outside of "fastest NFL clipboard stand ever.")

But Big Media being what it is, a #1 ranking in a sport not named football is only newsworthy when a team member is arrested for murder. Welcome to UVA, where Rule 2(b) - the Sabre meme that describes the unwritten rule forbidding UVA to have nice things - isn't just for ACC refs and NCAA selection committees any more. It's more like Commandment 2(b) or Newton's 2(b) Law of Physics. ACC championships must be balanced out with.....murder on 14th Street. Sure, that sounds like a fair trade - thanks, cosmos. That was the most tragic, shocking, prominent, mad-lib-your-own-adjective piece of news from the weekend, but for good measure the fates added a few more pieces of negative publicity:

- Star recruit K.P. Parks got himself tasered at a traffic stop while he - according to the article - resisted efforts to take him into custody. The only charges that stuck out of the whole thing were for (for lack of a better term) driving like an idiot. The two sides of debate that always, always spring up in cases like this boil down to "kids behaving badly" and "cops behaving badly." Parks wasn't brought to jail after being treated at the hospital, which tells me there's an aspect of the latter mixed in with the former and the truth is in the middle. Nothing up to this point has ever suggested that Parks is anything but a high-character individual with high-character parents to set him straight, so this in the big picture amounts to little more than noise. And his mom and dad just look like the kind of people you don't misbehave in front of.

- Mike London needs a Facebook tutor. The NCAA in their infinite wisdom has decided that posting on Facebook walls is a form of cheating, which means that UVA now gets the pleasure of reporting a secondary violation to the NCAA and, I dunno, taking away London's Facebook account for a week as a self-slap to the wrist. Whatever. I guess this is what it feels like to be in the SEC, except that newspapers in SEC towns have mastered the art of winking back whenever one of their coaches wanders into the gray areas of the rulebook. The Knoxville News-Sentinel has a very large rug for sweeping things under.

That stuff boils down to nothing more than unnecessary bad publicity for the University. The Love murder is different. Eyes and ears eager for news have had a lot to digest in the last 36 hours, and enough news has come out to actually form educated opinions. This is now a case of "innocent until proven guilty" only in the most technical legal terms, unfortunately. The latest:

- George Huguely has been removed, without fanfare, from the team roster. In a Right Thing kind of move from the school, Yeardley Love has not.

- Early in the day, it was announced by Huguely's lawyers that they felt the incident was little more than an "accident with a tragic outcome." I don't for a minute believe it's coincidence that the affidavits requesting a search warrant made their way to the media this afternoon, or that it was announced that Love received death threats on her computer. According to the affidavits, Huguely waived his rights to shut the hell up and confessed to:

1) sending emails (of an as-yet-unknown nature) to Love
2) kicking in the door to Love's room
3) shaking her by the throat and slamming her head against the wall
4) taking her laptop from the room and trying to dispose of it

The whole thing smells like shots fired in the battleground of public opinion. Huguely's lawyers portray this as something he totally never meant to happen; the police and prosecution give you good reason to believe he totally did. Score one for the state.

This is not Duke. There's no he-said-she-said here, no lying bitch of an accuser, no changing stories. There is a dead girl and a confession. All that's left is the legal wrangling, some technicalities if the defense can find any, and the question of how many years George Huguely spends in prison. The University's steps should be to protect the players - both men's and women's - from prying media eyes and to print up Yeardley Love's diploma. And yours should be to support the teams in their quest for an NCAA title when they're ready to pursue it.

George Huguely arrested for murder; fellow Wahoo is the victim

I had a post going that was recapping the weekend. It doesn't matter any more.

UVA lacrosse player dead, another in custody.

It's the kind of thing that sends an electric shock through your heart, and not in a good way. Yeardley Love was a senior on the women's lacrosse team; George Huguely plays on the second midfield unit for the men's team. The latter was reportedly the former's boyfriend, and now, her alleged murderer.

Unbelievable. What happens to the rest of the season for both teams is totally unknown, and right now, unimportant. More important now is the Love family, to which all sympathies are extended, and the facts of the case. But - and not to turn this into the Duke case - when an arrest is made that quickly, "alleged" becomes, unfortunately, more of a constitutional formality than anything.

Update: the press conference about the case, predictably, sounds as if it was almost totally devoid of useful information. That's because when you put out useful information to the press, defense attorneys have a field day. We'll probably just have to put up with a few days of worrying and wondering and two-paragraph news stories putting UVA lacrosse in the front pages of news publications that would never mention lacrosse unless a police blotter was involved.

Update 2: It's still not the important thing, but I think it's the one thing that's never going to leave the back of everyone's mind: Will the season be canceled? At this point, I believe, yes, it's inevitable. It may even be that the school and/or team has already made that call. I don't know. What I do know is that the parallels to the Duke case are totally unavoidable at this point:

- A member of the team has been charged with a major and sensationalistic felony.
- The news organizations - and at this point, you're not just talking about the CDP, you're talking about ESPN and CNN - want to have the attention involved with reporting it, but aren't going to give it more time than it takes to say "A member of the UVA lacrosse team is charged with murder," much like they wanted to make sure the word "rape" was mentioned in every Duke story.

Emotions are too high for the principally affected in this case to break it down any further than that. I don't care how many differences you want to point out, the larger story doesn't have time to calmly and coolly analyze the situation from an objective angle. The only difference that matters here is that everyone on both teams knew the victim - that only makes it worse. And in this case, the victim isn't lying. I'll be operating under the assumption that there won't be any more lacrosse played at UVA this season, and I selfishly hope I'm very, very wrong. It's not up to me to decide, and let's be clear - it shouldn't be entirely up to the admin either. And I think what you'll see is the men follow the women's lead.