Jan. 21, 2009
The WVU Coliseum frightens me.
Excluding the Verizon Center, I've attended games as a visiting team fan in ten Big East venues. On the question of which is the toughest, most intimidating place to play in the conference, I've narrowed it down to two locations:
Syracuse and Morgantown.
I visited both in a two week span last winter-you can read my trip report from the Carrier Domein the Blog archives. Days after returning from End of the Universe NY, I pronounced the Carrier Dome the most intimidating venue in the Big East by a long shot. Upon further reflection, I'm not sure this is the right call.
In my recap, I wrote this of the Syracuse crowd:
The Dome offers one advantage no other college basketball facility can match--size. There isn't a chance in the world that 31,327 fans aren't going to sound loud and be visually intimidating, particularly in the face of 26-4 runs.
I was impressed by the energy of the Syracuse faithful that day. But I wasn't surprised by it. I expected walking into the Dome that I'd be greeted by 30,000+ Orange-clad folk who didn't much care for my kind. The Carrier Dome may have been intimidating, but if I were filling out its employee evaluation sheet, wouldn't I have to check the "meets expectations" box?
The Carrier Dome is the basketball equivalent of a big budget action movie. It's eardrum-splitting loud, it has a great set, all of the latest special effects, and action sequences that blow you away. In the end though, it's a decidedly superficial sensory experience. You leave the theater saying "WOW!" but the experience doesn't linger by the time you get home.
The movies that stick with me are less visual than psychological. It is as heart stopping to watch someone slowly creep up a staircase in a dark house as it is to witness a ten-minute chase scene. Explosions are awesome, but not nearly as thrilling as a well-timed dramatic silence.
31,327 fans are intimidating…but isn't it more intimidating to do the same thing with a third of the people?
If the Carrier Dome is a big budget action movie, the WVU Coliseum is a 1970s slasher film.
For one thing, it's a documented fact that every single Coliseum in the United States was built between 1972 and 1980…primarily, my late-night ESPN Classic viewing has told me, for the purpose of hosting Professional Wrestling circuits. To visit the Carrier Dome was to travel to the end of the universe, but visiting the WVU Coliseum is akin to time travel.
Morgantown is seemingly designed to disorient-winding streets, rolling hills, and fewer street lights than you'd prefer when barreling around in a tour bus at night. Everything appears as if it were from another era-coin Laundromats, vintage convenience stores with 1970s-era Coke ads in the window and 1970s pickups parked out front. I half wondered when we'd pass the turnoff for Camp Crystal Lake.
The Coliseum surprises you-like the axe murderer who leaps from the closet in the dark hallway. Once you clear downtown on Monongahela Blvd there are a few moments of darkness, of dense forest…until suddenly around the bend, a burst of light and a trail of people leading you to the single overcrowded three-way intersection at the foot of the parking lot.
Inside, it's a veritable hall of mirrors. Want to find your seats in Section 80? No problem-look for the sign for Sections 55 and 78. Or just keep going past Section 2. I still can't figure that place out.
Lastly, and I cannot emphasize this point enough--this guyhas a gun and knows how to use it. I've watched Mountaineer games for years on television, and I know sure as John Denver that the guy in the coonskin cap is going to shoot the rifle off at the buzzer of each half. And both times he did it, I jumped about three feet out of my seat.
But what really makes the atmosphere at the WVU Coliseum are the Mountaineer fans. Yes, Georgetown came into last year's game highly-ranked. Yes, the game was being televised in prime-time on ESPN. No, there isn't any love lost between the Hoyas and Mounta
ineers.
Still, if 12,000 or so fans in the Big East can be any louder for any longer, I haven't seen it. It so happens that this particular horror show built to the perfect climax (okay, if you're a Georgetown fan) and the hero (Patrick Ewing, Jr.) finally drove a dagger into the chest of the psycho killer (Bob Huggins would make a great slasher movie villain)…as the Mountaineer got in his last shot.
This didn't mean that we were all out of the woods (thank goodness we didn't have to escape by canoe). You'll recall this particular game ended with a half-dozen of West Virginia's Finest guarding the floor-the combination of the officials' no-goaltend call and Patrick Ewing's goodbye wave inflamed the passions, to say the least. Escape time. So there we went, pinballing our way through the popcorn carts and folding tables of the WVU Coliseum concourse, dodging fans hurling insults, in a final dash for the bus parked at the edge of the lot.
You'd think we'd just escaped Leatherface.
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Blog readers are aware that I currently regard two programs as Georgetown's pre-eminent Big East rivals: Syracuse and Pittsburgh.
The Georgetown-Syracuse rivalry, as you can plainly see here, is grounded in three decades of history and some of the greatest games in Big East history.
The Georgetown-Pittsburgh rivalry, I argued in a recent post, has only just begun to hit its stride, but packs as big a punch in meaningful games as any Big East matchup in the last few years.
Georgetown-West Virginia by comparison has neither history nor happenings.
The list we compiled last year of Hoya fans' ten favorite Georgetown-Syracuse games spans twenty-seven seasons. More than half the list pre-dates West Virginia's 1995 entry into the Big East conference. There are, by my judgment, exactly two Georgetown-West Virginia games over that fourteen year history that have created any kind of lasting memory…and both weren't exactly memorable games.
The first occurred on January 12, 2003 at the Verizon Center. Hoya history completists might recall it was Tony Bethel's three-point jumper with 2.1 seconds remaining that sent the game to overtime, and Mike Sweetney's 35 point, 19 rebound performance that carried Georgetown to victory.
Most Georgetown fans and YouTube viewers remember the game however for what happened after the final buzzer-the now-infamous rant in which Craig Esherick described Big East officiating as "crap" and "unfair".
The second was a blowout-Georgetown's 71-53 victory at the Verizon Center on February 12, 2008. Squeezed in between the 100th Anniversary celebration of Hoya Basketball the previous Saturday and a memorable finish at Villanova the next weekend, nobody should rightfully remember anything about this stroll in the park for the Hoyas.
Except EVERYONE in Morgantown remembers one thing:
Patrick Ewing Jr.
Early in the second half, after a hard foul near the Mountaineer bench, Ewing and then-WVU coach John Beilein engaged in the kind of mini-dustup that typically gets blown far out of proportion by college basketball fans. Shoulders were bumped, teeth were gnashed, and battle lines were drawn somewhere along the I-270 spur.
Well, Beilein flew the coup for Ann Arbor after the 2007 season, and Ewing is battling for an NBA roster spot in Reno. Most Mountaineer fans these days probably aren't sure which guy they hate more. But no doubt the "Grabby incident" will cast a shadow over tomorrow night's game. Anything to give the fans a reason.
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Washington, DC and Morgantown, WV are 208 miles and a world apart.
Hoyas-Mountaineers may not be a rivalry, but it's certainly entertaining for nothing else than the clash of cultures:
Urban vs. Rural
Football School vs. Basketball School
"Take Me Home, Country Roads" vs. The Guy Who Wrote "Take Me Home, Country Roads."
The Mountaineer Nation is probably the one fan base that truly tests my stance that I enjoy how groups of opposing fans stir the pot at the Verizon Center. Maybe this is a good thing, because it signals that at least this Hoya fan always comes a little more prepared to support the Blue and Gray against the Blue and Gold.
Georgetown and West Virginia may or may not play a memorable game Thursday night at the Verizon Center (7:00pm on ESPN/Sportstalk 980)…but it'll likely be an interesting game.
After all, who doesn't like a good slasher movie?
John Hawkes (SFS '04)
Proud Member of Generation Burton
