Thursday, December 06, 2007
Tech-UVa activities, outcome don't sit well with ex-Cav star
Time for new attitude, McDaniel says
Doug Doughty
Doug Doughty's UVa Insider is exclusive to roanoke.com and is posted by 5 p.m. Thursdays in season.
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Editor's note: Doug Doughty is on vacation this weekend. His UVa Insider will return Dec. 20.
Only a few weeks have elapsed since the Virginia-Virginia Tech football game, but the Hokies will have to start working if they want to surpass the display of brotherhood Nov. 24 in Charlottesville.
Now might be a good time to pick out a site in Blacksburg for the much-anticipated monument to John Casteen.
I’ll stick by my contention that nobody had more to do with Virginia Tech’s addition to the ACC than Casteen, the UVa president, not that I’m knocking a decision that was based on more than athletics. In my opinion, Tech has been a much better fit than Miami; or, at least, has had a better football team.
I can also see how some Virginia fans might not have favored a move that would help their biggest rival, and I know that many of them were disturbed by pregame and halftime activities Nov. 24 that included the presentation of a bronze football to ex-Hokies’ star Bruce Smith.
It made me think of former Virginia linebacker Charles McDaniel, who traded barbs with Smith for weeks prior to one of the Tech-UVa games in the mid-1980s. It was McDaniel whose huge image was turned into a “Wanted” poster on the front page of The Roanoke Times.
McDaniel has mellowed a bit in the past 20 years – surprise, surprise – but here’s a guy who once said that he would speed up in traffic if he saw a Tech bumper sticker in front of him.
What must McDaniel have been thinking when he saw Smith out at midfield?
“With age, you hope to mature and you hope to maybe think a little more before saying some things,” McDaniel said. “I didn’t think it was appropriate but I wasn’t up in our suite raising hell about it.”
Virginia athletic director Craig Littlepage has said that part of the planning had to do with Commonwealth Day, the first after the April 16 shootings in Blacksburg.
“It was supposed to be a special day for the commonwealth,” said McDaniel, who held UVa’s career tackles record for 11 years and still ranks second behind Jamie Sharper (435-432).
“For guys like me, for whom the game means a hell of a lot [and] who have some real, raw feelings over a number of things … you wouldn’t see that at Texas-Texas A&M or with some of these other rivalries.”
UVa officials scaled back the pregame “Cavman” cartoon in which an animated Cavalier on a horse obliterates the opposing team’s mascot. That would have been inappropriate, given events of the past year. McDaniel agreed.
“Let’s let 2007 be over with,” McDaniel said. “Hopefully, there are people moving on. I don’t know you ever move on if your family was effected. [The Cavman] decision was a touch of class.”
McDaniel, who is prominent in the Virginia Athletics Foundation, was not aware of activities that included the unfurling of a sideline to-sideline Virginia map with Charlottesville and Blacksburg highlighted. There was another mesh “Virginia Pride” banner behind one of the goalposts.
One thing is for certain. This was not a UVa football operation. It probably had little to do with the athletic department. It came from a higher source.
McDaniel cites the 1995 book “ ‘Hoos and Hokies,” co-written bv yours truly and Roland Lazenby, as an indication of the hatred that is felt for the University of Virginia in some quarters.
“It stems from a lot of different things,” he said. “It stems from a lot of people throughout the state, particularly northern Virginia, that probably should get into a state school and they’ve got damned good grades and SAT.
“There’s something wrong with that. I think we take this ‘public Ivy’ and being the best public institution [too far]. It causes a hatred that we don’t appreciate and understand.”
Tech has won eight of the last nine football games between the teams, including six of seven during Al Groh’s tenure as coach.
“I think the rivalry, unfortunately, has become more one-sided in favor of Tech,” McDaniel said. “Their support of the rivalry and their hatred for Virginia is alive and well.
“I think ours, for some people, has subsided to the point where it’s not healthy. It’s not OK to lose that game. I don’t accept us being second-tier in the state. That’s where we are right now and we’ve got to do something about it.”
That doesn’t mean recruiting one player – UVa’s current count – from Virginia.
“I don’t like that we don’t have more kids from state,” McDaniel said. “That really bothers me.
“When you play this game, you look at who steps up and it’s Virginia boys that want to kick the other team’s a--, and they’re more of them on Virginia Tech than there are at Virginia.”
