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.

*************************************************

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.

the games will go on

UVa lacrosse teams to continue season

I'm happy, if selfishly so, to have been wrong yesterday; as it stands now, both the men's and women's lacrosse teams will play in the NCAA tournament.

I do like to consider myself a UVA lacrosse fan, therefore I like watching UVA lacrosse better than not watching UVA lacrosse, but that's not why I think the decision is the right one. Nor do I hold any opinions on whether it's right because it'd honor the memory of the victim, or anything like that. No, here's why I think it's the right call: the article rather vaguely sources the coaches as the decision-makers here, which (to me) implies that the players also had their fair share of input. Allowing the players and coaches to decide - that makes it the right decision, whether or not they had chosen to play on.

You'll recall that it was the Duke president and administration that first suspended, then canceled the season in the wake of that so-called scandal - a hasty overreaction, as we now know. The impetus for the cancellation was a nasty email that came to light, but the whole team had been suspended for two games a week prior. The Duke administration overreacted in order to try and protect the reputation of the school; the UVA admin should be applauded for allowing cooler heads to prevail and placing the decision in the proper hands. I hate that it takes something like this to remind us that, by and large, UVA handles things the Right Way, but they deserve kudos for doing so.

Regular programming will go on around these parts, because I'd like you to keep in mind that despite what Big Media will have you believe in the coming days and weeks, UVA athletics is still about something other than a CSI case. The black background stays, however, until such time as it's appropriate to remove. Rally around your lacrosse teams as they rally around the Love family - they all need your support.

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.

the recruit: Will Regan

Name: Will Regan
Position: PF/C
Hometown: Williamsville, NY
School: The Nichols School
Height: 6'8"
Weight: 220

Rivals: 3-stars
Scout: 3-stars, #17 C
ESPN: 86, #58 PF

You maybe have noticed I don't do a whole lot of basketball recruiting stuff. I try to keep up with the ups and downs of the football process, and heaven knows I don't even do the world's best job of that; today's commitment (who I'll get to later this week) isn't even someone who's on the board, let alone in the blue section of it. But basketball? Except for the end of the process (which we're getting to today) and the big-picture stuff, I mostly ignore it. This is because I hate it. It's a shady world filled with shady characters trying to leech off of the process and the players, and the best coaches play the game and navigate the system only just enough to land the players they want and still stay clean as far as the NCAA rulebook is concerned. Football is a little different; there are a hell of a lot more players to keep track of, most of whom are no threat to endorse shoes at any point in their careers. It's not squeaky clean but at least you usually only have to deal with the player, his parents, and his school coach, and not with the added presence of a handler, wannabe agents, and AAU coaches.

Anyway, this is the point where I jump into the process: the exciting part. This is a little more exciting because Will Regan is Tony Bennett's first commitment as a Hoo, and one that goes a long way toward quelling any doubts about his recruiting ability. If you read my first Examiner.com article (warning: shameless self-promotion) you'd know I'm really, really pleased with this pickup.

The ratings are really kinda tthhbbppttt. Don't be fooled. One, Regan's due for a boost whenever they shuffle the rankings. He's performed well and made a name for himself at summer tournaments and camps, including, obviously, the NBA Camp in Charlottesville, otherwise Bennett wouldn't have pushed for him. Two, Regan's got offers from all sorts of quality places. Tournament schools like Michigan, Arizona State, Siena, Maryland. And places that have a tradition like Providence, Stanford, and St. John's. OK, so not the UNC's and Kansases of the world, but still.

And Regan dominates his high school competition. He averages a double-double, and not a chintzy one either, and turns in games with lines like, 32 points, 13 boards, 10 blocks. He joined some excellent company in winning Western New York Player of the Year honors as a junior (and by the way, last year, being the first sophomore in 14 years to be named to the first team there); how do Jonny Flynn and Christian Laettner sound as company to join in that category? Catch me if I'm getting ahead of myself, but Regan sounds ready to make the jump right now. That's probably just me drinking the Kool-Aid, but it's really delicious Kool-Aid and you should try some.

So what are the skills Regan brings to the table? One thing that jumps out at you in just about every scouting report - I'm not even going to bother linking anything because I'd have to link everything - is "fundamentally sound." Now, if you've read enough scouting reports on high school basketball players, you've probably alread picked up on the code: "fundamentally sound" usually means "slightly gumpy unskilled white guy." OK, but there's a grain of truth to the code, because there are no slightly gumpy unskilled fundamentally unsound white guys playing in a level of basketball higher than the Atlantic Sun Conference. So: plays decent defense, posts up well, makes the right passes, not going to suddenly blow by a defender and throw down a monster windmill dunk. The thing that should separate him from a lot of the competition, be his calling card if you will, is that he can shoot the three-pointer. How do we know? Because Michigan was all over Regan this winter. John Beilein will have all his guys outside the arc shooting threes. A 6'8" power forward who can knock down a three is exactly what he wants three of on the court at all times, and Michigan was recruiting him very hard. "Premiere big-man target" is high praise and that was as late as the end of March. It's a testament to Bennett's recruiting efforts that Regan spent the winter not really talking about UVA - Maryland, Michigan, and Stanford kept popping up - then somewhere between the beginning of April and end of May, we'd joined the conversation. Helped that Michigan landed a very similar player (Evan Smotrycz) ten days after that report, who blew up in a very big way shortly afterwards.

So I'm really jazzed, here. All hail Tony Bennett and whoever decided to build that wicked fancy beautiful new addition to Rouss Hall for the Comm-school, because that's where Regan will spend his classroom days. Terrific baller and zero worries about academics; there's nothing not to love about this. Great, great start to the class of 2010.

Afterword: if we could just get through one weekend without any more celebrity carnage, that'd be really awesome. The King of Pop was a shock and a half, but Billy Mays too? What did Billy Mays ever do to anyone? Cable TV is a less awesomer place for this. Commercials on ESPNUVA will never be the same again. It's a damn shame. Now there's nothing but Vince the Shamwow Guy to brighten things up. May there be a restaurant in Heaven that serves Big City Sliders and wipes the tables with OxiClean.

Here's a little YouTubeage: one for Billy (parody-style) and another for Jacko.

RIP Kevin Bradley

Sad news for the program today as former Wahoo fullback Kevin Bradley was found dead of a gunshot wound. Bradley was a little-used player, except on special teams and in the Music City Bowl in 2005, but he was only a sophomore and might have made an impact in '06 and '07 had he not left the team. According to his mother he had some medical issues, which probably led to his behavior issues, which definitely led to suspension issues, and it's all probably related to all this today, which I say in the least speculative way I can. Our prayers for the family.


OK.....the news. I said I'd have a recruiting list update, but I don't. There isn't any news, really. Oh, sure: various players are setting up official visits and even naming them, it's that time of year. But nobody's committed anywhere in the last week, nobody's named any top fives or anything like that. Even in the stalkeresque obssessive world of recruiting, everyone's got a line, and mine's located somewhere in the neighborhood of caring that somebody's visiting another school 700 miles away, which I don't. I will note, however, that Rex Burkhead and Arthur Fontaine are pretty close to being taken off the list. Fontaine is talking Georgia Bulldogs in the kind of tone that should make a Georgia fan pretty happy, and will probably commit around the time he next visits Athens, which will be soon. (So much for the line.) Burkhead is from Texas, where we don't do so hot, and has loads of offers and will be narrowing the list pretty soon, and what he's saying is that he likes the schools he's visited, and he has not visited Charlottesville. I don't see this one happening.


Along the lines of yesterday, more notes, again of the not-as-fluffy variety:

- Groh didn't know Brett Favre was traded. (OK, that one is pretty useless.)

- Jimmy Howell is likely to be the punter. (CDP, above.) I'm expecting Howell to be pretty good, so this is good news. Ryan Weigand gave us some good work from back there, but I'm still squeamish about the punter position. Lingering bad memories from a Florida State game a few years back where we lost when Florida State started a bunch of drives already in field goal range because Tom Hagan literally could not kick a football more than 30 yards. So I'm pretty convinced of the importance of having a decent punter.

- Quarterback J.C Poma will join the walk-ons as soon as NCAA rules let him. (CDP, above.) Pre-beginning-of-fall-classes roster limits are the reason he's not there now.

- The kicking job is wide open. Chris Hinkebein impressed nobody in the spring, so the job is anyone's to win between Hinkebein, Rob Randolph, Yannick Reyering, and just about anyone else who wants it. If your grandma walked on, they'd walk her out to the 25 yard line and have her give it a shot. (Mine, no. She's a wonderful spry old lady, but her plant foot had polio once upon a time, so she'd have to take a medical redshirt.)

- Sean Gottschalk is bigger. How exciting.

- The soccer team has some transfers coming in. (RT above.) Yeah, we do the "other" football here too, every once in a while. Both are defenders; Matt Weiler joins us from Kentucky and Jordan Evans transfers from Richmond. Both are most-of-the-time starters on bad soccer teams. (Richmond scored 7 goals in 19 games, which is awful even by soccer's low-scoring standards, and Evans had one of them.) Beyond that I have no idea how good these guys are. I don't even really know what makes a good soccer player. Those of you who care about this news will probably know more than I and should probably educate me. Those of you who don't care, also don't care about this news, so I'm off the hook with that crowd.