University of Virginia Library

THE
SPORTS
SCENE

By Bob Cullen

THIS IS A NEW TEAM, but they cannot escape the stigma of
men who have gone before them. It is a better team, but so far
only they know it. When they take the field against Purdue, the
first year men will sit around their radios, secretly certain that
Chris Cramer will bear the good tidings of a miracle from
Lafayette, Indiana. But the upperclassmen will not let it
interfere with their road trips. They have been burned too
often. They know what will happen.

The love affair between the students and their football team
has been a rocky one over the last sixteen years. No one can
take being jilted too often, not even a student body: And like a
jilted lover, the student cannot face the team without a flask
and the thought of the parties to come.

BUT LIKE THE WAYWARD LOVER, the football team
cannot function effectively without the support of the students.
So on Saturday in Purdue, they'll play without it, playing to
win it back. If they win, it will be a start.

SO THE TEAM WILL have to get it up for themselves at
Purdue. They have been doing this with mixed success for a long
time now. Their pride will be in themselves and not in the
school. Purdue wins football games. Maybe their personal pride
will be enough.

When you play for Virginia you have no tradition. There are
no great deeds reaching from the past to inspire you, no
deathbed messages from George Gipp. When Bart Starr has one
play left, he knows he will score, because he plays for the Green
Bay Packers, and they have always scored. When you play for
Virginia, you try to forget what has happened before, and hope
that this year will be different. Maybe it will be.

BUT YOU ARE HANDICAPPED, because if your personal
pride, and your pride in the team ever prove insufficient, you
have nothing to fall back on. The students will still be the same
in their attitude towards you. Tradition will not have been
defiled. Virginia will still be the same. Maybe you will lose, but
it will be no big thing.

Except to you. A student body can spread the of
defeat among many. There will only be forty on the plane
Friday morning. And if you lose, you can't spread the feeling
very thin: It will rankle in your hearts. But you will return to
the Grounds, and the feeling has always worn off in the past.
Maybe it will again.

We hope not. A tradition has to start someplace, sometime.
We don't believe that it is too late to start one here. That is the
challenge that Purdue poses to the Cavaliers on Saturday. A
tradition could be born in Lafayette this Saturday. If it is not, it
will in all likelihood lay dormant, waiting for another year and
another team to bring it to life.

THE CHALLENGE IS NOT FAIR. Had this been another
year, with another schedule and an easier opener, the effects of
a few victories might have brought the spirit to life gradually.
But that's not the way it worked out. Whoever wrote the
schedule did it years ago, and he bore the football team no
malice. He might as well have. Those forty men will have to cut
it against the best there is. As we said, it isn't really fair, but
that's the way it worked out.

For the coach, the stakes are even higher. Losing streaks in
the last two years have started murmurings. He has squelched
them with late season victories. But this must be the year. He
has promised that it would be. A loss that debilitates, physically
or psychologically, could be a crushing blow.

BUT FOR THE WINNER in a high stakes game, the pot is
always very sweet. A win over the Boilermakers would do more
for the football program here, and the men who comprise it,
than all the scholarships at Alabama and Georgia. Every player
in college ball dreams of national ranking and a bowl game. If
the Cavaliers can reach high enough on Saturday, if they can hit
Purdue hard enough and often enough, they can have it.
Everything.

But the spirit that would be born, that would be the greatest
fruit. The ensuing Saturdays would see a Virginia team that
would know it could win, and in all probability would sweep
the rest of its schedule. And we believe that those Saturdays
would see a stadium full of fans who supported their team like
Green Bay supports the Packers. And by November a tradition
would have been started that would bolster Virginia teams for
many years to come.

UNFORTUNATELY, we have little support to offer the
team except suppositions of what might be. We cannot say that
everyone back in Charlottesville is pulling for them, and that
everyone on the Grounds believes in them, because they don't.
They have been burned, and they will wait and see. It isn't fair
to the team, but they will have to prove themselves.

MANY PEOPLE HAVE ASKED US for a prediction on the
game Saturday, We know that the Cavaliers will be facing a team
that has better talent. We know that they will be outweighed
and out manned at every position. But we also know that Purdue
faces Notre Dame the following Saturday and we don't believe
that the Boilermakers will have the psychological edge. Greater
upsets have been pulled off by teams that wanted a game badly
enough to make their own breaks.