Author: eric-hoover

As a young Cavaliers team limped to a 5-7 record last year, Al Groh, Virginia’s football coach, made a curious announcement. Virginia, he said, was playing the 2006 schedule with the 2007 team. The news perplexed Hoos fans, who were paying 2006 prices to attend 2006 football games, and suffering 2006 heartburn as a result. Now that 2007 is finally here, there’s reason to hope the Cavs can win with this year’s team. After all, the 2008 team needs to rest up for next season.

The 2007 Cavaliers, out for their second season if you believe Al Groh, will go 8-4 this year if you believe our forecast.

A solid defense, led by Chris Long, should frighten foes and keep Virginia in every game. The offense, which couldn’t sneeze straight last year, must answer a host of questions, like, "Are we really trying to score, or just running sideline to sideline because it’s fun?" The Cavs have a soft schedule, at least until November. But look for Hoos to go no better than 8-4 unless they find a way to play the 2007 slate with the 1995 team.

At Wyoming (September 1): If Virginia can’t beat the Cowboys soundly, then something is terribly wrong. The Cavs defense locks this one down early and allows quarterback Jameel Sewell to get into a groove. W

Duke (September 8): When Duke’s basketball team comes to town, Virginia fans raise the roof. When the football team arrives, they hit the snooze button. The Cavs roll amid snores. W

At North Carolina (September 15): UNC’s got a new coach. UVA’s got road-game issues. Somehow, the Hoos find a way to lose in sleepy Chapel Hill. L

Georgia Tech (September 22): A talented Georgia Tech team baffles the Cavs. Virginia receivers can’t get free for deep passes. Groh says something that hurts reporters’ feelings. L
 
Pittsburgh (September 29): Virginia bounces back with the emergence of something called a "running game." Offensive threats Andrew Pearman and Cedric Peerman confuse everyone. W

At Middle Tennessee (October 6): A reasonable fan might ask why Virginia’s even playing this game. A more reasonable fan might remind him that the Hoos lost to East Carolina last year. W

Connecticut (October 13): Fans arrive late and leave early as Sewell racks up an insane number of passing yards. Everything clicks during this superfluous showdown. W
At Maryland (October 20): The dreaded Terps outshoot the Hoos in a back-and-forth affair. Maryland’s QB throws bombs. Maryland fans throw ice. L

At North Carolina State (October 27): Virginia guts out a tough road victory on the broad shoulders of its defense. A surprising triple-threat backfield shreds the Wolfpack. W

Wake Forest (November 3): The Demon Deacons can’t rekindle last season’s magic. Linebacker Clint Sintim can’t stop tackling Demon Deacons. W

At Miami (November 10): The Canes aren’t their usual, superhuman selves. But Florida’s still Florida, and the Cavs still can’t win in the Sunshine State. L

Virginia Tech (November 24): In the game of his career, Groh coaches the game of his life. Virginia’s tough trio of tight ends gallops through Tech’s secondary. Cups of bourbon and Coke runneth over. W

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

Dr. Jeff Lee had often found the names of sweethearts and mothers tattooed on dead mens’ biceps, but on October 26, 1998 he found something unusual. While performing an autopsy on a Charlottesville man that morning, Lee, a pathologist at the state Medical Examiner’s Office in Richmond, noted the mark on the dead man’s left arm. Printed in dark blue letters was the man’s own surname, “Calzada.” Beneath that was “Eduardo.” The initials “EC” were also tattooed on the pad of his left thumb.

But Lee didn’t make much of it. His job was not to ponder what perhaps was a clue to Calzada’s life, but rather to help local investigators solve the mystery of his death. Calzada, a 52 year-old drifter, had died the previous morning in the Charlottesville-Albemarle Regional Jail. Arrested for public intoxication, Calzada, then homeless, reportedly was uninjured when he was carried into the Avon Street facility. But when his refrigerated body arrived in Richmond, Calzada had a black eye, a scrape on his forehead, and two eight-inch bruises on his back. The wound that killed him was internal– a fracture that ran front-to-back over the top of his skull. As the pathologist later told County detectives, Calzada died of multiple brain hemorrhages caused by a blunt force trauma to the head. Lee likened the force required for such an injury to a fall from a two-story building. Initially, he suspected a homicide.

Over the next several days, County detectives questioned more than a dozen police and correctional officers who had seen or dealt with Calzada during his final hours.The investigation ended less a week later when, prompted by a tip from a single eyewitness, police officials announced that Calzada had sustained his fatal injuries before his arrest.  The fact that Calzada’s blood-alcohol level was later estimated to be .25 (more than three times the legal limit) at the time of injury seemed to support their conclusion that his death was an accident.

More than a year later, some of Calzada’s closest friends still do not believe the official explanations. Several have alleged he was brutalized by police; others have alleged that he was ignored as he lay dying on the floor of his cell. In November of 1998, Calzada’s mother claimed in a lawsuit that the City Police Department had no grounds to arrest her son; she sought $30,000 in damages for alleged assault and battery. Although that suit was later dropped, questions remain. Chief among them is how a a severely injured man managed to pass before the eyes and through the hands of a dozen people without receiving medical treatment. C-VILLE has assembled police documents and Jail logs, as well as interviews with eyewitnesses and several of Calzada’s friends. From that emerges a sketch of a mysterious, but loved, man who died because he received no attention when he needed it most.   

For the 15 years he lived in Central Virginia, Eduardo Calzada struggled against a personal undertow. Many times he calloused his hands with carpentry projects only to bail out of a job. He would stay sober for months and then binge on liquor and beer for weeks. He surfaced on friends’ doorsteps only to disappear again. “Ed was two different people,” says one of his closest Charlottesville friends. “Until near the end of his life, he was a survivor who had no time for self-pity. But sometimes, you could look over at him and see a sadness.”

Calzada was born September 1, 1946 in El Paso, Texas. Growing up, he moved back and forth between that border town and Juarez, Mexico. Although his name suggests Spanish ancestry, Calzada touted his Apache heritage wherever he went. Friends also say that he revered nature. Often, he would stop to compare Virginia sunsets, unfavorably, to those he remembered from the West. Each December, he maligned Christmas trees as wasteful. When mice showed up in friend’s house, he bought no-kill traps.

Calzada spent much of his life moving from place to place. In the early 1960s, he enlisted in the Navy and served in Vietnam. When he returned the to states, he traveled through half of them. At some point, Calzada had two children with a woman he did not marry, although he did marry someone else later. By the time Calzada arrived in Charlottesville in 1983, his friends say, his wife was dead, and he had lost touch with his children. For several years, he worked various construction jobs around the City.

According to friends, Calzada was a heavy drinker long before he arrived in Charlottesville. It was New Year’s Eve 1988 when a drunken Calzada literally  was carried into Karen Payne’s life. She was working the afternoon shift at Charter House, a drug and alcohol-treatment center, when Charlottesville Police officers brought Calzada in and laid him on a bed. They figured he might sleep off his booze. He was unconscious when Payne first saw him.

“Here was this drop-dead gorgeous Indian with jet-black hair,” recalls Payne, a resident of Crozet. “There was something about him that had an effect on me, even though he was out cold.”

Karen soon fell in love with Ed. She liked his wit, the small gifts he gave her, and the way he could repair an appliance with a coat hanger and glue. At Payne’s home, and later at apartments Calzada rented, and on occasional trips, they spent late nights gazing at stars like any other pair of lovers.

But they were caught in a triangle. From the start, Ed split his time between Karen and a bottle. That fall, the two of them moved to Roanoke where Payne placed Calzada in an intensive alcohol-treatment program. Afterwards, he stayed sober only briefly.

Payne, who had left her family behind, returned to Crozet in the spring of 1990, but her relationship with Calzada continued at its irregular pace. When he was sober, they were together; when he drank, he went off by himself. Calzada rolled pennies constantly to save for drinks. Payne bought him everything else– food, clothes, shoes, glasses, watches, cigarettes.

“They loved each other,” says a mutual friend, “but they both had their addictions. Ed’s was alcohol, and Karen’s became Ed.”

Karen was not the only person who broke the rules for Calzada. In the mid ’90s, Virginia Germino, a homeowner in the prosperous Park Street neighborhood, met Calzada after her son hired him, right out of the Salvation Army shelter, to help with odd jobs. Calzada, homeless at that point, so charmed Germino that she invited him to live in her garage for 30 days.

That became three years,” recalls Germino, an instructor at UVA’s Darden School. During that time, Germino introduced him to her circle of friends, invited him to parties and referred him to neighbors for yardwork or house repairs. On Park Street, Calzada’s sound, inexpensive handiwork became something of a minor legend.

“Ed was gallant, and he was happy when he was working,” says Germino. “Even if I could have charged him rent, I never would have. He liked feeling that he was taking care of someone.”

Germino and other friends remember that Calzada rigorously crafted his own personal, albeit inconsistent, mythology. For instance, he told them that he had no pictures of his children because, as an Indian, he mistrusted photographs; later, he would show them snap shots of himself and Payne grinning at the camera.

When, on many occasions, Calzada told people that he had stopped drinking, his words were unconvincing. Despite friends’ attempts to keep him sober, Calzada could not overcome his addiction. More than once, Calzada sold friends’ belongings to get money for beer. Germino finally asked him to leave when, after a night of boozing, he nearly burned down the garage. Throughout the ’90s, Calzada received at least a dozen citations for alcohol-related offenses, from public intoxication to driving under the influence.

In 1994, Calzada ambled into Kathy’s Produce to apply for a job. There, he met owner Chuck Lewis, who later hired him to unload and drive delivery trucks. He worked from four in the morning until two in the afternoon. Later, Calzada worked for Lewis as a carpenter, a rock-maker, and as a handyman at York Place, the mini-mall Lewis opened Downtown in late 1995. Lewis remembers Calzada as a tireless worker when he was around, but on several occasions Calzada stopped showing up for work.

I’m not very understanding of people making mistakes, but I let Ed come back a couple of times,” says Lewis. “When given half a chance to stand up, Ed was very presentable. He was what our society would call a derelict, but he was clean, polite, someone who made you feel special.”

During his last few years alive, however, Calzada frequently returned to the Charlottesville streets. A friend and homeless drinking buddy named Cecil Garlic remembers Calzada giving him some food and money one cold night. Garlic met Calzada in the early 1990s, and the two spent many nights drinking with a tight group of four or five other men. All of them would bunk out in an abandoned house on Pantops. By day, they scavenged for aluminum cans on the Downtown Mall or the UVA Grounds. Once they had filled several bags, they would take them to Coiner’s Scrap Iron & Metal on Meade Avenue to get money for booze.

“All of us guys were down-and-out, but we’d do OK together,” says Garlic. “We were like brothers. I called Ed “Cochise,” but I also called him family.”

Many people saw Calzada the day before he died, and many were assigned to watch over him as he slept. Yet up until his final moments, perhaps only one person believed he was hurt. After interviewing close to a dozen witnesses and obtaining copies of internal documents produced by both City and County police forces, C-VILLE was able to piece together a rough sketch of Calzada’s last hours.

The final part of his story begins on October 24, 1998, a festive day in Charlottesville. At Scott Stadium that afternoon, the Cavaliers defeated the North Carolina State Wolfpack and boosted their chances to play in a major bowl game. Like many locals who spent the night celebrating, Calzada guzzled his share of beer.

A City officer directing stadium traffic at Barracks Road and Emmet Street noticed Calzada, in cowboy boots, blue jeans, and a red flannel shirt, pass by with a friend in the early evening. Several UVA students apparently offered to buy dinner for Calzada and the other man. According to the officer, Calzada was glass-eyed, coughing, and smelled of alcohol. Later, another City officer patrolling the Corner spotted Calzada loitering in front of Lucky 7 on the Corner with a small group of men and women. Between seven and 10 o’clock, Calzada purchased two quarts of malt liquor at the Corner Market. At some point that night, one of the women in the group worried that Calzada, loud and intoxicated, might draw police attention. When she asked him to split, he headed toward Downtown on West Main Street.

“He was definitely buzzed,” says one acquaintance who saw Calzada on the Corner between nine and ten o’clock. “But he wasn’t staggering or out of control.”

After Calzada headed off on his own, it is unclear how he came to rest flat on his back on Main Street, just in front of the Hampton Inn. Around 10:40 pm, Christine Barnes, a Charlottesville woman, spotted Calzada from her car and stopped to see if he was alive. According to Barnes, Calzada’s eyes were open and he was pointing to his chest, patting it. His pulse felt weak, she says. She did not see any bruises or cuts on Calzada’s head. She says that he seemed injured rather than drunk.

“I was close enough to him to practically give him mouth to mouth,” recalls Barnes, “and I didn’t smell any alcohol.”

Moments later, Barnes spotted a County Police cruiser and waved it down. Officer Mark Gillispie pulled over and approached Calzada. According to statements he later gave to police investigators, Gillispie found Calzada unconscious and shook him several times before finally waking him. Barnes says she told Gillispie that Calzada needed a doctor, and that he should be taken to the hospital.

“The officer told me, ‘No, he’s just a drunk,’” says Barnes. “When I told him I was worried the man might be having a heart attack, he said the man was just drunk.”

Unlike Barnes, Officer Gillispie smelled alcohol on Calzada. An internal County police report states that the officer radioed for a rescue squad as well as for Charlottesville police. City officer Kelly Harrison, driving a police van, arrived first.

Harrison recognized Calzada instantly. Not only had he found Calzada sleeping in the abandoned house on Pantops several months earlier, Harrison had also seen him “staggering” down West Main Street perhaps 20 minutes earlier. Standing over Calzada that night, he, like fellow officer Gillispie, perceived a man so loaded that he could not even stand up. When another City cop arrived moments later, the three donned rubber gloves and lifted Calzada into the back of the van. According to Gillispie’s statements, he called off the rescue unit at the request of the City officers; Harrison says that he has no recollection of that exchange, but he doesn’t dispute it.

As Calzada lay flat on his back in the rear of the paddy wagon, his destination was never in doubt. Although police often drop off drunks at the Mohr Center– a treatment facility for alcohol and substance-abusers– officers say Calzada was too out of it to stay there. Calzada was known to many cops: City Police officers had picked him up repeatedly for public intoxication, a charge made against Calzada at least six times in the last year of his life. Calzada was going back to jail. According to statements he made to investigators, one officer asked Calzada whether he had anything else wrong with him that night. He responded, “Just drunk.”

“I didn’t see a drop of blood on him,” says Harrison, now an officer-in-training with the Baltimore City Police Department. “I was right down the street from the hospital, so it’s not like I wouldn’t have taken him there. If I had done that, I wouldn’t have had to deal with him at all.”

After 11 o’clock, nearly a dozen people laid eyes on Calzada. Officer Harrison took him first to the City Magistrate’s Office where several people stood in the same room with him under florescent lights. None of them noted any signs of injury. According to City officers, Calzada was awake at that point, but on the way to jail, he apparently passed out again in the back of the van. Close to midnight, correctional facility officers met Harrison at the prison entrance. The three rolled Calzada onto a bed sheet and carried him into the jail, a standard procedure for transporting incapacitated inmates, according to jail officials. Several officers then laid Calzada on the floor as they filled out paperwork.

Officers carried Calzada to the ground floor, stripped him naked and then changed him into jail blues. They placed him on the floor of GS-1, a special 4’x6’ cell with no furniture or toilet facilities. Before locking his cell door, officers rolled Calzada onto his side to prevent him from choking if he vomited.

With a non-recording video camera monitoring him from above, Calzada snored, but did not stir, throughout the morning. Not until almost 7 o’clock the next morning did Calzada’s unresponsiveness prompt jail officials to action. One officer had noticed a purplish color on Calzada’s right arm and a wet spot on the floor by his head. Mucus ran from his nose. At that point, another officer arrived at the cell, and both noticed bruises on Calzada’s head and right eye.

After Calzada failed to respond to several shouts, the two guards called for the nurse on duty. According to police documents and prison logs, the nurse was unable to find a pulse and began CPR on Calzada. At 7:05 am, she told officers to call 911. Paramedics were unable to revive him. He was pronounced dead in a Jail hallway at 7:30 am.

For the next week, Calzada’s death appeared to be a case of police brutality. Had officers mishandled him when they placed him in the van or carried him into the Jail? Could one or more of them have roughed him up?

Those questions ceased on October 30, 1998 when Anna Haupt called the police. Haupt, then 19, had read about the Calzada case in the “Daily Progress,” and she believed that she had seen him at the very moment he sustained his fatal injury. According to County case documents, she told detectives that, on the night before Calzada died, from her car she had seen him fall and strike his head approximately one half-hour before police picked him up on West Main Street. Recently, Haupt, a Batesville resident, gave her account of that night to C-VILLE.

“I was at the light coming out of Trax, waiting to turn left on to Main Street when I saw a man over to my left in the parking lot,” Haupt recalls. “He had been leaning over next to a car like he was talking to the people inside. Then he kind of tripped over a curb and fell backwards. His head hit once and then twice. Then the light turned green. As I was pulling away, I saw him starting to get up slowly.”

According to County police documents, Haupt told investigators that “it hurt just watching” Calzada’s fall. On a different note, however, she told C-VILLE that she did not call 911 because she didn’t think that he had been hurt that badly.

“At the time,” says Haupt, “I thought that he was just drunk.”

Haupt’s eyewitness account took the heat off investigators trying to explain how Calzada sustained the fractured skull that ended his life.  Although police subsequently called off their investigation, there was still another unanswered question: Did anyone in uniform have any idea that Calzada was hurt?

Haupt’s decision not to call the rescue squad was just the beginning of Calzada’s bad luck that night. The next person to see him thought he needed a doctor and told officers who arrived on the scene. But like Haupt, they believed he was only drunk.

Yet even though the autopsy concluded that Calzada was drunk and that his head injury was the result of a fall, the final report speculates on the other marks found on Calzada’s body. The pathologist who examined him concluded that the bruise on his elbow and the two parallel bruises on his back, for instance, formed when Calzada “struck… the curb edge, or wood or metal that may be found on a nearby construction site.” There was construction in the West Main Street area at that time, but no witness saw Calzada fall amidst any of it. But some of Calzada’s friends find the explanation for those injuries suspicious. Calzada’s black eye, according to the autopsy report, was caused by his fractured skull.

Two former inmates who were in the Jail the same night dispute the claim that Calzada did not appear hurt when he arrived there. One insists that Calzada called out for help and repeatedly yelled for a doctor throughout the night. Speaking on the condition that he not be identified, the man says that he banged on the bars to get help for Calzada, but was ignored by prison officers. The other inmate, now serving time, says that he saw Calzada “conscious and bleeding from the head” when he was carried into the cell.

Jail officers deny those allegations.

“To the best of my knowledge,” says Jail Superintendent John Isom, “Calzada never asked for a doctor and never called out for help. It’s an unfortunate thing. But he looked to everyone like any other drunk person who comes in here and falls asleep.”

County reports reveal that the night before he died, Calzada did not receive a routine medical screening. Apparently, nobody knows why. Although officers signed and dated a health questionnaire, the stapled sheets contain little actual information. On a copy of the document obtained by C-VILLE, the word “intoxicated” is written in the margin with a line extending down the side of the page where answers to medical questions would usually go. Because Calzada was unresponsive, if not unconscious, according to Isom, officers could do nothing more than examine him “visually.”

“If a guy comes in here and can’t answer any questions,” says Isom, “we just take him to his cell.”

Dr. Andrew Wolf, assistant professor of internal medicine at UVA, says that a cursory medical examination might have alerted a nurse that Calzada was not only drunk but also injured.

“There are some things that reasonably would have been major red flags,” says Wolf. “Checking for irregular breathing, a pupilary exam, a vital signs check. Over time, his prolonged unconsciousness would have been a sign, too.”

Yet Wolf says that even severe head injuries such as the type that killed Calzada often do not cause any external bleeding.

“Drunk people act the way he acted,” says Wolf. “In the early hours, the injuries he had would have been indistinguishable to the untrained eye.”

The prison log from that night offers few glimpses of Calzada’s appearance. At 1:30, officers noted that Calzada was sleeping when they checked on him. At 2:00, the logs entry reads, “heavy but still breathing,” a description that, according to some of Calzada’s friends, suggests that officers might have noticed something wasn’t right. Although most Jail employees on duty that night declined to comment on anything else they may have seen or heard, two officers say they believed something was wrong with Calzada. One who asked not be named says that he told other officers about Calzada’s presumed level of intoxication. Although he says he recommended taking Calzada to the hospital, nothing happened. Another officer on duty that night says that Calzada’s prolonged unconsciousness seemed odd.

Even if someone is really intoxicated, they will move some,” says the officer. “But [Calzada] never moved or talked. I see drunk people all the time, and something was different about the way he was just lying there.”

Strangely, that same officer says that he immediately noticed a bruise on Calzada’s forehead and a pale color to his hands. But he did not alert anyone to this because, he says, “I just didn’t feel it merited medical attention.”

According to Isom, the Jail has not established any new policies since Calzada’s death. Health screenings, he says, are given to at least “90 percent” of incoming inmates provided that a nurse is on duty at the time. Given the severity of Calzada’s hemorrhaging (as described in the autopsy report), UVA’s Dr. Wolf says that even immediate surgery might not have saved his life. Yet Wolf and several other local medical officials say there is ongoing potential that someone else might arrive at the jail who, like Calzada, is drunk and severely injured.

Shela Silverman, director of the Drop-In Center for the homeless, is one of several of Calzada’s acquaintances who speculates not that police and Jail officials hurt Ed, but that they didn’t look at him hard enough.

“Since it was a homeless person, someone police knew was an alcoholic, he did not get the benefit of the doubt,” says Silverman. “On the other hand, people who have homes have the right to get drunk and go home afterwards.”

The problem for anyone in Calzada’s situation is that Charlottesville has a shortage of places where homeless people can stay for the night, especially if they are drunk. The Drop-In Center will lend a couch to someone who needs to sleep off a buzz, but the Center usually closes at night. If someone has alcohol on his breath, he can’t get a bed at the Salvation Army, so the police officers who picked Calzada up could not have taken him there. Even the City’s only de-tox center, the Mohr Center, also may not have been an option for Calzada that night: Although City officers often take street drunks to the Center, provided there is room, employees there say they do not admit clients who are falling down loaded or unconscious.

“People in that condition need to be taken to the emergency room, and nowhere else,” says one Mohr Center employee. “Unless the person is violent or out of control, there is no reason to take an inebriated person to jail.”

Calzada left many clues to his life in Charlottesville, but most of them are nearly invisible. In Virginia Germino’s back yard, beneath a patch of ivy, he carved his name in concrete on a stone wall he once mended. At Chuck Lewis’ house, he built a rock wall. On Park Street, he planted trees that grow tall and strung Christmas lights that still hang along one resident’s garage. Ironically, Calzada even helped build the newest wing of the UVA Hospital.

Out at Karen Payne’s home in Crozet, where she still lives, Calzada painted many of the walls, repaired the dining room floor, and put moulding along the sides of her basement steps. But he might have left his most important clue in an offhand comment he made the day she asked him to explain his tattoo.

She wondered then why a man would permanently affix his name to his own body. Perhaps it was an obscure Navy tradition, the emblem of a pact with a long-lost blood brother, a reminder of a place he had been. Or maybe it was done on a whim, devoid of meaning, inspired by some excess drink, a mystery even to its owner.

“Right when we first met I asked Ed why he got that tattoo,” says Payne. “He said, ‘In case they find me dead someday, they’ll know who I am.’”

 In the spring of 1998, Pete Gillen inherited a Virginia basketball team with no stars and no pulse. Regardless, the new coach grinned. He cracked jokes. What else could he do?

   Charlottesville was then a basketball ghost town. The University had just cast out Jeff Jones, who, after coaching the Cavaliers to the Final Eight in 1995, crashed the program to hoops Hell—a losing season punctuated by a home defeat to the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. The town also had seen several players split after off-court troubles, as well as Melvin Whitaker, a top recruit who slashed a UVA student with a box cutter following an on-Grounds pickup game.

   So when the redheaded stranger from up north first strolled into University Hall, he could count few blessings besides his electric wit and his solid coaching resumé, which included a 1997 run to the NCAA regional finals with Providence. Like MacGyver rigging up an explosive from kitchen cleansers, Gillen built a competitive Cavaliers team of six scholarship players and a handful of walk-ons. In the 1998-’99 season, the scrappy mutt of a squad won 14 games and plenty of hearts. “Gillen will have better teams,” I told another fan after that hard-fought season, “but we’ll never like them as much as this one.”

   Only it was worse than that. As expectations soared, the men’s basketball team turned into an annual overhyped and underachieving enigma. Over six seasons, the Hoos won some big games, nearly all of them at University Hall. On the road, they piled up a heap of excruciating defeats: blowout losses, close losses, losses that inspired new cuss words. Throughout the Commonwealth, a generation of televisions bit the dust on game days, and Gillen went from genius to goat.

   This season, the coach who once remarked that Duke basketball was on TV more than “Leave It To Beaver” re-runs found himself trapped in the same bad episode—the one in which his team displays moments of brilliance, then ties itself to the tracks before a freight train of an ACC foe plows through it. The Hoos became a book of basketball mysteries, whose chapters included “Who Guarded the In-Bounds Play?” and “The Purloined Pass.”

   Through it all, Gillen did not give up. He coached his tonsils out in this month’s ACC Tournament, even after Duke had run away with a lead in what he knew was his final game. When he stepped down last Monday, Gillen—who received a $2 million buyout—was a much wealthier man than when he arrived in Charlottesville. But his big bag of quips was empty. The chatty coach’s last words came typed in the press release that announced his departure: “I am proud of the hard work of the players and assistant coaches I’ve worked with at Virginia…The University has always been a first-class operation and I wish them all the best.”

   A testament to the widespread opinion that Gillen was also a first-class operation came in the same press release: UVA’s president, John T. Casteen III, praised Gillen’s “compassion, personal ethics, and community leadership.” Presidents are supposed to say nice things when a coach gets the ax, but that did not mean his words were false. Casteen could have said anything about Gillen and he chose “compassion.” How many college coaches get props for that?

   In many corners of Charlottesville, people did not care about Gillen’s game-management skills, his postseason record, or that some head case of a basketball player might have been pissed off at the coach. They did care that Gillen volunteered for several charitable groups, that he took his team to visit sick kids at the Kluge Children’s Medical Center, and that he spoke to local elementary school students about character. Mac McDonald, WINA Radio’s “Voice of the Cavaliers,” says Gillen “shook every hand and kissed every baby.”

   “How many coaches,” McDonald says, “would go through a double-overtime win in December and then stand outside, in the cold, at a mall and ring the Salvation Army bell for three hours?”

   Some of Gillen’s supporters have wondered whether he was too nice to rein in the runaway egos of the modern college-basketball player. Todd Billet, the soft-spoken, sharp-shooting guard who played for Gillen during the 2002-03 and 2003-04 seasons, describes the coach as “down-to-earth” and “player friendly.” He adds that some of his younger teammates might have responded better to a disciplinarian. “Some of the players that have been in the program, they may not have been 100 percent compatible with his style,” Billet says. “You have to balance the type of player you want with your personality.”

   Billet, for one, clicked with Gillen, whom he credits for sticking up for his players when they missed shots or defensive assignments. “You didn’t feel like you were just being used for your playing time and the pushed out the door,” Billet says. “Coach cared about what your future goals would be.”

   But Gillen did not do enough of the one thing he was hired to do: win. As a coach, Gillen made mistakes that cost him both games and fans. But the program’s recent failures were not his doing alone: His players and his bosses helped, too. And Lady Luck often socked the guy in the jaw just when he needed her most. Here is a fan’s look back at the Gillen era and 15 days that doomed him.

 

March 12, 1999

Gillen loses his wisecracking, fast-talking assistant Bobby Gonzalez, who is named head men’s basketball coach at Manhattan College. The recruiting whiz kid had been instrumental in landing Gillen’s first—and best—class at Virginia, which included Majestic Mapp, Roger Mason Jr., and Travis Watson. Although Gillen later reels in some outstanding players, like Philadelphia’s Sean Singletary, the coach does not land another top-notch class. Gonzales’s exit foreshadows the departure of Gillen’s right-hand man, Tom Herrion, also a skilled recruiter, who later leaves to coach the College of Charleston. In a sport where assistant coaches play crucial roles, did Gillen lose too many sidekicks to maintain his success?

 

March 12, 2000

The NCAA Selection Committee snubs the Hoos, who finished with a 9-7 ACC record. A weak out-of-conference schedule—something that would plague UVA until the 2004-05 season—keeps the Hoos out of the big dance. Days later, the chance for a young, talented team to get some postseason chops evaporates when Georgetown University defeats the Cavs in a soul-draining triple-overtime game at University Hall. Charlottesville basketball fans, fed a morsel for the first time in years, begin to realize how hungry they are for a winner.

 

August 2, 2000

On perhaps the most fateful day of all, Mapp, Virginia’s prized point guard, tears his right ACL weeks before the start of his sophomore year at UVA. The Cavaliers lose a reliable floor leader and the program loses its potential savior. Setbacks delay Mapp’s return for two-and-a-half seasons, complicating Gillen’s recruiting plans. Without a classic point guard to run the show, UVA’s offense often turns chaotic: guards hoist shots from as far away as Ivy, big men get lost in a Siberia of zone defenses, and assists become passé at U-Hall. Mapp is not the same when he suits up again, and Gillen declines to invite the comeback kid back for his last year of eligibility. Some fans see pragmatism in that decision; others howl foul. The sentimental favorite with the sweet name and the even sweeter attitude leaves after the 2003-04 season. He takes the last blush of Gillen’s rose with him.

 

November 15, 2000

Gillen signs four high-school prospects that, he announces, “will be a great credit to our school both on and off the court.” Each flames out in his own way. Emergency point guard Keith Jenifer makes a name for himself by missing jumpers, pouting and punching an Indiana University player in the groin on national television; he transfers after an arrest for misdemeanor assault and battery. Guard Jermaine Harper leaves after numerous ill-advised shots and one DUI arrest. In his eighth semester, hardnosed forward Jason Clark drops out after academic troubles. Over four years, big man Elton Brown loses a lot of weight, but also his confidence, his infectious grin and his ability to hit free-throws. Senior Night ’05 feels lonely.

 

December 30, 2000

Al Groh signs on as Virginia’s new head football coach. While Gillen continues to elicit chuckles for his sharp one-liners, the straight-talking Groh, a UVA alumnus, speaks to fans’ inner drill sergeant. In his second season, he leads the Cavs to a surprising second-place finish in the ACC and re-establishes Scott Stadium as a house of pain for visiting teams (save those from Florida). Virginia’s gridiron success over the next three seasons coincides with the basketball team’s tailspin. In the collective unconscious of the Wahoo Nation, a troubling question surfaces: If Groh could change the fortunes of Virginia football after just two seasons, why can’t Gillen do the same for basketball?

 

March 11, 2001

Selection Sunday is unkind to the Hoos again. Fifth-seeded Virginia draws Gonzaga, a mid-major upset machine that had deserved a much higher seed than 12. Thanks to a late missed foul shot by J.C. Mathis, the Zags defeat the Cavs, who had won 20 games and seemed poised for a deep run. The premature postseason exit marks the official beginning of the Cavaliers NCAA Tournament drought, sponsored by Aquafina.

 

October 26, 2001

Virginia’s director of athletics, Craig Littlepage, extends Gillen’s contract, giving him a 10-year deal worth approximately $900,000 annually. That premature move handcuffs the University to a coach whose team begins to flounder the very same season. In a statement, Gillen says he hopes fans “will not place undue emphasis on [the contract], because there are a lot more important things in the world today, like the war on terrorism and finding cures for serious diseases.” Nonetheless, cranky sports columnists and some non-millionaire Hoos develop an outrageous obsession with the size of Gillen’s paychecks, which they link to rising gas prices, expanding waist lines and every conceivable on-court miscue by the Cavs. The pricey agreement becomes the program’s albatross, and in the eyes of some fans, turns a hard-working, hard-sweating guy from Brooklyn into a Rich Guy Who Is Not Producing.

 

January 31, 2002

Gillen has pumped excitement back into University Hall, which rocks as the No. 8 Hoos take on the No. 3 Maryland Terrapins. Orange-clad students and the usually blasé hand-sitters in the stands reach an ear-splitting crescendo as the Cavs take a nine-point lead with three minutes remaining. Then, taking advantage of Virginia’s missed foul shots, defensive lapses and turnovers, the Terrapins steal an impossible comeback victory and silence a thunderous crowd. Maryland goes on to win its first national championship; Virginia implodes. “That was devastating,” Gillen told The Washington Post last month. “It almost seems like we haven’t recovered since that night.”

 

February 23, 2002

Virginia holds a three-point lead over Georgia Tech with 19.5 seconds left when Gillen tells Jermaine Harper to intentionally foul the Yellow Jackets’ Tony Akins, who nails both free throws. On the ensuing possession, Watson whiffs from the line, one of Virginia’s four missed foul shots in the final minute. Tech makes a last-second three to win, 82-80. The coach defends his decision to foul based on the fact that the Jackets had been raining threes on Virginia, like so many teams had done before. Yet the unorthodox strategy alarms the Wahoo faithful, some of whom perceive that the perpetually animated Gillen coaches out of fear. The loss sinks Virginia’s NCAA hopes and cheapens its upset of Duke five days later.

 

March 13, 2002

A listless Virginia squad continues its postseason futility, losing a first-round NIT contest, 74-67, to South Carolina at University Hall. After the game, the normally eloquent Gillen inexplicably assures the crowd that the team would be “even better next year.” That promise seems dubious, especially after Roger Mason—the most explosive player Gillen ever brought to Charlottesville—decides to enter the NBA draft that summer. His departure leaves a scoring void that sharp-shooting transfer Devin Smith attempts to fill, but a string of injuries over the next three seasons hampers his brave-hearted efforts. The oft-hobbled Smith inspires Gillen’s frequent use of the phrase “he didn’t have his legs”—a mysterious malady that one or more UVA players develop every 1.5 games.

 

March 9, 2003

Following another disappointing run through the ACC, the Cavs upset Maryland, 80-78, on Senior Night at University Hall. After four years spent glued to the bench, center Jason Rogers gets the start, and finishes with 12 points, six rebounds and three blocked shots. Rogers’ stunning performance prompts reporters to ask why Gillen had not played him more. The coach quips, “We were saving him for four years for this moment.” The humor is lost on Gillen’s critics. Frustration with his allotment of playing time will continue to grow among fans and some players.

 

May 30, 2003

Virginia holds a groundbreaking ceremony to celebrate the construction of the John Paul Jones Arena, a basketball palace that will replace the cramped basketball outhouse once known as the “Pregnant Clam.” The $129.8 million project had taken flight after Gillen’s early success at Virginia. It had also played a large role in the administration’s decision to extend the coach’s contract in 2001. But ultimately the costly venture puts unbearable pressure on Gillen and the University to build a winner. Time and again, the Cavs crack under pressure, perhaps because, as a former player says, Virginia’s offense “relied on players making plays.”

 

January 26, 2004

On Gillen’s weekly radio show, a malcontent caller questions the coach’s use of timeouts (namely, his irksome habit of burning them up midway through second halves) and suggests that Gillen had failed to stand up for a player in the previous weekend’s game. Gillen invites the caller to “go root for the Hokies.” The coach later apologizes for the remark, knowing what a sacrilege it was to tell a Montague Hoo to cast his lot with the Capulet turkeys from Blacksburg. Nonetheless, a mortally offended contingent of bellyachers lionizes the coach-baiting caller and refuses to forgive Gillen, what with his multimillion dollar contract. The retort echoes cruelly during the 2005 season when conference-newcomer Virginia Tech squad beats the Hoos in Blacksburg, en route to a fifth-place finish for which the basement-dwelling Cavs would have killed.

 

April 20, 2004

Virginia announces that swingman Derrick Byars—once among the most promising of Gillen’s recruits at Virginia—is leaving the University. Like other key players over the last seven seasons, Byars started strong, only to fade away, prompting questions about player development under Gillen. “He was one of the most talented players I’ve ever played with,” Billet says of Byars. “Being young, he would show you signs of being an all-league player in one game, and in the next he wouldn’t show that—it was kind of a puzzle.” Byars follows a half-dozen other players who had come and gone without exhausting their eligibility with the Hoos. The loss robs Gillen of his most athletic player who, when hot, could score at will. The following season, the Cavs often lack the will to score.

 

January 12, 2005

After dropping its first two ACC contests, Virginia fails to defend its home court in a must-win game against Miami. The 91-80 loss to a beatable team digs the Cavs into an insurmountable psychological hole as the team prepares for back-to-back games at Duke (loss No. 4) and Maryland (loss No. 5). The contest exposes Virginia’s glaring flaws, particularly its hibernating defense, which allows Miami to shoot 58 percent in the second half. Thereafter, University Hall begins to resemble a morgue—a half-empty one.

 

Eric Hoover, a 1997 UVA graduate and a former C-VILLE Weekly staff writer, is a senior editor for the Chronicle of Higher of Higher Education in Washington, D.C.

The meltdown began just before 3pm. On the first Saturday in September, the visiting UVA football team was trailing South Carolina 10-7 when a Cavaliers fumble gave the Gamecocks the ball just a skip away from the end zone. The play, which sunk the Cavs, was the moment that launched a thousand quips into cyberspace.

On TheSabre.com, an independent Web site devoted to UVA sports, the football message board blistered with negativity. Dozens of fans who were watching the game at home logged on to type sarcastic praise of the Cavs’ coaches. Many of the faithful called for a quarterback change. “WORST TACKLING IN FB HISTORY,” one fan declared.

Whenever the Cavs cough one up on the field, irrationality runs wild online.

Nobody knows that better than Mike Ingalls, The Sabre’s creator and message-board moderator. Count Ingalls among the level-headed fans who applauded the players and pleaded for optimism even as other fans plunged into despair throughout the night. “Not sure why people have to sling insults and curse words after a loss,” he wrote.

Around midnight, some fans gradually turned their attention to college football’s eternal consolation: next Saturday. Yet others continued to seethe. One worried poster surmised, at 5:03 Sunday morning, that the loss would “cost us between three to six top recruits.” The players may compete for only 60 minutes a week, but on The Sabre, fans can obsess online 24 hours a day.

That the locally grown site has hooked legions of Virginia fans still surprises Ingalls, a self-taught Web designer with an orange-and-blue heart. Since the Charlottesville native turned his part-time hobby into a full-time business, the site has risen from obscurity to become the hub for Cavs fans to read about their teams and to discuss wins and losses (and everything else). The Sabre’s traffic has increased 50 percent in each of the last four years, Ingalls says, and the site now receives more than 100,000 different visitors each month.

Now, Ingalls, 37, is trying to put the company in the black for the first time. The Sabre is supported by local advertising, the sale of online merchandise and a growing number of paying subscribers to the site’s premium content, but funding from a Virginia alumni has helped float the company thus far. The plan is for the site to become a self-sustaining business in the next year, yet Ingalls is wary of discussing the specifics of the small company he runs out of his home off Rio Road. The Sabre, he says, is in competition with two wealthier Web companies—rivals.com and theinsiders.com —that court the same fan base with their own UVA sites.

“There are bigger fish out there that might like to see us fail,” Ingalls says. “We’re trying to grow under one man’s wing.”

Ingalls grew up in Charlottesville and graduated from Albemarle High School in 1984. He spent six years in active duty with the U.S. Air Force, serving as a security policeman. He was stationed in Texas and Belgium, among other places, which made keeping up with UVA sports nearly impossible. He returned to Charlottesville in 1990, the same year Virginia’s football team climbed to the top of the national rankings for the first time.

In 1996, Ingalls earned an associate’s degree in police science from Piedmont Valley Community College, but switched gears to enroll in computer-science classes at the college. One day, he bought a book on Web design to learn the basics of HTML.

The University did not have an official athletics site at the time, so Ingalls, on a whim, created a five-page site devoted to his passion, UVA football, specifically to Tiki Barber’s Heisman campaign. Ingalls wrote his first article following the team’s victory over Texas that season. Later, he composed a more critical piece about the Cavs’ receivers, who dropped crucial passes in a loss to Georgia Tech. Ingalls found sports journalism cathartic, though he figured hardly anyone was reading his work.

He was wrong. Rabid fans, who had learned of his site through word-of-mouth, were hooked. After shutting down the site before the end of the season, in an attempt to concentrate on his studies and make some money, Ingalls received a flood of e-mails from fans, all clamoring for more.

Ingalls finally decided to humor them. In the spring of 1997, he cut back his classes and worked only part-time jobs. The rest of his time he devoted to beefing up the content of his site, which he re-launched as virginiafootball.com.

Still, it was only a hobby, and Ingalls figured he would find his career after transferring into UVA’s engineering school at some point. But those plans changed the night of June 2, 1997. He was at the Yuan Ho restaurant, where he worked as a delivery driver, when a man walked in, pulled out a gun, and demanded money.

Ingalls, an expert marksman, noticed that the man before him was holding a starter’s pistol. The owner of the restaurant had opened the cash register, but Ingalls slammed it shut. “Get the hell out of here,” Ingalls yelled, then chased the man out the door.

When Ingalls stepped into the parking lot, a second man popped up from behind a car. He had a real gun, which he fired seven times, hitting Ingalls once. The bullet tore through his left bicep, punctured his lung and lodged in his back, about a half-inch from his spine—where it remains.

Ingalls spent six days at UVA Hospital. During the stay, he received 50 e-mail messages from fans of his site and a get-well card from the University’s football coaching staff.

“That really got me motivated,” Ingalls says. “When you’ve got people you don’t even know who are concerned, sending you messages, you start to realize you’ve got people counting on you.”

As he recovered from his wounds, Ingalls continued to add to the football site. That fall, responding to popular demand, he created a second Web outlet, virginiabasketball.com. By the spring of 1998, fan traffic was so heavy that Ingalls had to find a new server for the sites. To keep costs down, he asked for donations online. More than 50 fans sent checks, but none was bigger than the $2,000 that came from Mark Massey, an alum who lives in Boston.

The two soon worked out a deal that made Massey primary owner and principal investor in the company now known as TheSabre, LLC. The arrangement made Ingalls the general manager and editor of the site, allowing him to turn his hobby into a full-time job.

Since merging the two sites into The Sabre, a nod to Virginia’s crossed-sabres logo, in 1999, Ingalls has expanded the Cavalier content, contracting with writers who provide regular articles and columns about the teams. The main part of the site is free, but a premium “Edge” subscription—which includes access to recruiting information, articles and photos—runs $34.95 per year. Ingalls will not say exactly how many fans have signed up, only that there are more than 1,000.

Matt Welsh, son of former UVA football coach George Welsh and the president of The Sabre, helped start the site’s online store, The Sabre Shop. A sportswear company in Lynchburg ships all The Sabre’s merchandise—more than 300 different items—five days a week. Fans can order virtually anything Wahoo, including UVA shirts, pennants, hats, jackets, umbrellas, even a V-Sabres dog collar.

The site also features advertisements for local businesses, such as Crown Automotive, Andrew Minton Jewelers and Crutchfield. Sabre sponsors also include Advance Auto Parts, Budweiser and Geico. Some companies have offered perks to Sabre readers, including the Charlottesville-based MoneyWise Payroll, which is currently offering to make a $100 donation to the Virginia Athletics Foundation in the name of each customer who signs up.

“Part of our advertising pitch is to say, ‘Hey, we are very in tune with our user base—we will help encourage them to look at you first,'” Ingalls says. “We get a lot of feedback from users, so the advertisers can feel like they’re being a little bit more taken care of.”

While those revenue streams keep the company on its feet, the heart-beats of The Sabre are its message boards, which distinguish the site from UVA’s official athletics Web site, virginiasports.com. The latter is a rather bland public-relations vehicle that provides schedules, team rosters and video highlights, but no post-game analysis or inside information from fans in the know. On the University’s official site, a visitor can read a press release revealing that a player was suspended from the basketball team, but he would turn to The Sabre’s message boards to learn why and what the implications were. Sometimes the rumors there are true, and sometimes not.

The Sabre has separate discussion forums for football, basketball and other sports, as well as for recruiting. On the site, everyone can strategize, speculate and savor the tidbits of information posted by “gurus” with connections to the teams.

Regulars on the site include students, graduates and retirees. Many are UVA graduates, but some are not. Some of the enthusiasts admit they have become addicted to the site, a community unto itself that’s as intense as the sports world that spawned it.

Dan Heuchert, editor for UVA’s News Services, has been posting a couple of times a day for about seven or eight years.

“It’s a great place to see which way the wind is blowing among UVA fans and alumni on both sports and sports-related topics,” Heuchert says. “Like any community, it has idiots, jerks and blowhards, but you learn to avoid them. It is definitely an outlet for blowing off steam, which is good and bad. I do worry that people who aren’t familiar with the format will get a skewed picture of UVA and its fans.”

A good post, Heuchert says, is one that contains an original thought, a well-argued opinion, a nice touch of humor, a fresh scoop, or a request for information. Poor posts, he says, include “mindless rants, malicious attacks, ill-formed speculation, instant overreactions and needless repetition.

“The one thing I’ve learned is that Internet sports bulletin boards are manic-depressive, and that effect is exacerbated by herd psychology,” Heuchert says. “Once the tide turns in one direction, there is a lot of peer pressure to follow the momentum until there is some new event to reverse or divert it.”

Ingalls, who monitors the boards constantly, is well aware of his the need for civility on the site. In his own posts, he prefers to accentuate the positive. The Sabre’s terms of service bar personal attacks or insults on all parties, including athletes, sportswriters and fellow posters. Slander, obscene language and racially offensive material are also verboten. Posts that are written to anger others, known as “flames,” are often quickly removed.

“Anybody that comes in there is like a guest in my home,” Ingalls says. “If you start causing problems with anyone at the party, you’re gonna have to leave.”

Sometimes, the boards have soft sides. Fans ask for prayers for ailing family members and announce the arrivals of little ‘Hoos. Humor and wit are the coin of the realm. Pop cultural allusions are constant. Some posters have imaginative handles, like “zarathustra.” Other fans go so far as to rewrite passages from Shakespeare, turning them into pregame poetry.

While Ingalls may be a gentleman of the boards, he is no blind cheerleader. He welcomes and allows for criticism of the home team. This is sports, after all, so there must be room for heated, passionate—and occasionally pedantic—debates to continue for days.

The message boards are not intended for the faint-hearted. On a given day, there might be a post asking if Groh’s an idiot, or how much money it would take to buy out the contract of men’s basketball coach Pete Gillen, or why fans of other colleges have inferiority complexes about UVA. Following losses, the site becomes a venue for venting, an electronic therapy couch. For some ‘Hoo diehards who post regularly on The Sabre, as well as those who “lurk” there only to read, the grousing is a sport in its own right.

UVA officials were first reluctant to give the site press credentials. “There were concerns [about The Sabre] from a professionalism standpoint, from an accountability standpoint,” says Rich Murray, the athletic department’s director of media relations.

After discussions with Ingalls, though, the athletic department eventually granted The Sabre the access it wanted, allowing members full access to players and coaches enjoyed by other media outlets. That has let Ingalls take thousands of game-day photographs to give the site its visual oomph, while giving Sabre writers credibility.

Murray says The Sabre has followed the University’s guidelines, and he and Ingalls agree that the two parties now enjoy good communication. Murray does not say much about whether the message boards in particular are a concern for the athletic department, saying only that one can draw parallels between fan sites and talk radio in the sense that on radio folks can call in and express their opinions, and on a Web site, folks write in,” he says. “There’s an opportunity for an individual to express his or her thoughts” on The Sabre.

Since online anonymity can be freeing, Ingalls requires fans to create a password-protected account to post on The Sabre. To get a handle, they must submit their e-mail address to the system. That way, repeat offenders can be booted off the site permanently. But since fans still post under handles of their choosing, there’s no guarantee that they will do unto others with courtesy.

Some UVA athletes read the sites, as do their parents.

Dan Ellis, a former starting quarterback for the Cavs, says his teammates often read the message boards for mere amusement. But others, he says, seemed to think the site was a place where they could measure their performance. Ellis says he stopped reading The Sabre after his freshman year because he did not want praise from fans “to go to my head.”

But he could not always tune out the negative chatter. In 1999, Ellis suffered a concussion during a game. Because he missed a week of practices, the coaches kept him out of the following week’s contest. That night, his brother-in-law and some friends took Ellis out on the Corner to celebrate his 21st birthday. The next morning, Ellis was shocked that his evening was big news on The Sabre. Ellis says some posts, apparently from students who had seen him in bars, alleged that he had been drunk, while others questioned his commitment to the team.

“There were people on there saying that I didn’t want to play, which was absurd,” says Ellis. “I wanted to play so bad that game.” The quarterback’s uncle was so angry about the innuendo that he logged on to The Sabre to defend his nephew, asking who among the fans would want details of their 21st birthday publicized on the Internet?

On The Sabre, Ellis says, “You have complete immunity—you can bash anybody.” But the former quarterback, now a high-school teacher and football coach in Pennsylvania, once again counts himself among the Web site’s readers.

“When I want to find out something about who Virginia’s recruiting, I’ll go there for that,” Ellis says. “It’s convenient.”

Mike Benzian, a UVA alum, says The Sabre contains more “blather,” less “etiquette” than when he started reading. Benzian recently criticized some fellow posters for carping on the men’s basketball team, following yet another disappointing season. He likens the change to what happened after Charlottesville lost Dave Matthews Band to the rest of the world.

“You’d go down to Trax to see them with the guys, now you go see them in the Oakland Coliseum with 50,000 of your closest friends,” says Benzian, who lives in San Francisco. “When the secret gets out, there seems to be a loss of community.”

Nonetheless, Benzian, like many Sabre fanatics, keeps coming back for the content he can’t get anywhere else.

“It’s an important part of my day,” he says.

Most Sabre faithful are men, but not all of them. Lisa McAvoy, a 1981 UVA graduate who lives in Arlington, reads the site religiously. On a recent trip to Oakland, she excused herself from a family gathering to log on to The Sabre for a half-hour.

“It’s great because there’s this whole collection of people out there who are like me, so I can plug into a passion without being [in] Charlottesville,” McAvoy says. “You’ll see someone post ‘I’m on vacation in Italy.’ That’s the power of the Internet—connecting disparate people.”

She feels ambivalent about her “addiction,” though.

“The intellectual snob part of me is embarrassed that I’m doing this,” she says. “There are moments when I step back and realize that I spend $35 a year [for access to recruiting news on The Sabre] to follow the whims and fancies of high-school students.”

It seems that the site itself is no better or worse than any other component of big-time sports, but it does lay bare the light and dark sides of fandom like nothing else can.

Doug Doughty, who covers UVA sports for the Roanoke Times, says The Sabre simply reveals a true cross-section of fans, from the “knee-jerk reactions to the thick-and-thin” supporters. Doughty, a frequent target of criticism on the message boards, says he routinely receives angry e-mails from UVA fans, many more so then when fans had to sit down and compose a letter.

“It’s a product of the whole Net generation,” Doughty says. “A lot of times, when I type a sensible reply, I’ll get a response from someone saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t really mean that.'”

As Ingalls sees it, The Sabre, whatever its faults, has brought the fan base closer together. And that has happened at a crucial time for UVA athletics. The University is trying to grow into an expanded stadium and a new basketball arena is under construction. That requires enthusiastic fans. And millions of dollars.

When it comes to his own business, though, Ingalls is wont to discuss the finances, for fear of tipping off rival companies. He will not say how many people work for the site at the moment, though there is at least a handful of full-time staffers—a content editor, an advertising director, a store manager and a recruiting guru, in addition to part-time freelance writers.

Ingalls hopes that The Sabre can become successful enough for him to retire on. For now, there are other perks. Though Ingalls often spends between eight to 14 hours at a desk in the corner of his bedroom—his “office”—there are days when he gets to go on the field, just like the players, as part of his job. Once he was an unknown guy in a baseball cap. Now, he cannot walk into Scott Stadium or University Hall without someone recognizing him or complimenting his site.

“When I hear Coach Groh say, ‘Hey Mike, how ya doing?’ it’s like—woah. You feel respected in terms of being a media representative, in passing along information to the public,” Ingalls says. “Even though I didn’t graduate from UVA, I can still put my heart and soul into it.”

 

 

 

pointed commentary
A snap-shot from The Sabre’s football message board,Friday, September 12.

 

Poll—What was the worst moment for this board?

—Hoo98, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:20:07pm.

 

Duke loss, Curry committing to UNC, VT in 2001.

—BoardHost, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:48:03pm.

 

Learning Casteen sold out for political gain.

—TonyClifton, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:29:32pm.

 

Fred’s expansion commentary. Sorry, Fred. 😉

—26.2Hoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:13:23pm.

 

Hey now…I resemble that remark.

—Fred F., Fri Sep 12 2003 3:20:29pm.

 

I had to give you your due.

—26.2Hoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:39:09pm.

 

Coach Beamer shaking hands w/UNC’s Dick Baddour…oh wait, wrong board.

—Mad Bowl, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:11:08pm.

All good ones below—how about “keep Danny Wilmer” after Groh was hired.

—gfhoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:09:45pm.

 

1998 GT AND UGA. Two blown 21 point leads

in Hotlanta.

—Salems#1HOO, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:01:23pm.

 

When the board was pansy blue

because Boardhost lost a bet to

some ‘Heels….

—Karl Hess, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:58:36pm.

 

LOL! I can’t believe you still remember that.

—BoardHost, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:41:30pm.

 

How bad was it after the Duke (97) and

WFU (01) losses? I was at the games.

—Hoo98, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:57:18pm.

 

Learning Tek [sic] would be included in expansion.…

—hoo75, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:55:58pm.

 

Or realizing I was truly an armchair genius.…

—hoo7, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:03:52pm

 

Ellis v. Rivers debate.

—zeropointzero, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:51:38pm.

BYU 2000 fallout was real ugly.

—game time, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:39:19pm.

 

But Duke at home was the worst.

—JoeHoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:40:57pm.

 

This board has never come close to the negativity on the Hoops board.

—MrHoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:36:52pm.

 

For the last three years of Welsh’s regime, the hoops board was a bastion of sanity.

—hooba, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:53:12pm.

 

I wonder why that is.

—JoeHoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:42:32pm.

 

After Ronald Curry signed with UNC.

—SysHoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:35:31pm.

 

Yep—seemed like there were a million “My last Curry post” subject lines.

—gfhoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 4:01:31pm.

 

Bingo—a four-year hangover from that one!

—Wahoo Josh, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:42:10pm.

 

It has to be Curry. Nothing else is even close

—98Cav, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:33:41pm.

 

 

Where’s Wilk Hall?
TheSabre.com posters meet for buds, suds and the freshest tailgate parties in town

Free beer makes fast friends. It also helped turn an online community into an unlikely horde of Wahoo tailgaters. A typical wine-and-cheese contingent they are not.

The group started last year when Darren Yowell, a zealous Cavaliers fan, posted a message on The Sabre inviting other die-hards to join him for a tailgate prior to Virginia’s spring game. Yowell offered to provide the suds. About 60 people showed up. The fans, many of whom had previously only known one another only by their Sabre “handles,” could now shake hands, wolf down snacks together, and meet the wives.

Yowell, 34, extended another invitation for the season opener against Colorado State, and about 100 fans came. As the season wore on, the gatherings became more popular, perhaps drawing even heavier crowds at road games, since fans had fewer pre-game options outside of Charlottesville.

At first, the event lacked a name, but that changed when a poster who’d ordered football tickets asked an innocent question on the Sabre message board: Where was “Wilk Hall?” The UVA ticket office had told him he could pick up his tickets there, he explained. Only they’d said “will call,” of course. The Sabre collectively exploded in laughter and the tailgate found its moniker.

Unlike many pre-game gatherings, this one is socially diverse, drawing lawyers and laborers alike. “There’s an intermingling of guys that normally wouldn’t be giving each other the time of day,” says R.W. “Butch” Johnson, who works for Norfolk Southern Corporation, a railroad company, and treks to games from his home in Salem. “I’ve gotten close to a lot of people on the site that I never would’ve met in a 100 years. They’ve become part of an extended family.”

Yowell, who lives in Winchester and works for a beer distributor, recently purchased a 34-foot motor home, a gameday chariot that he loads with 15-20 cases of beer. A buddy cooks up fare appropriate for each opponent’s mascot.

While Wilk Hall is not a real place, it has become a state of mind.

“It’s all about the hardcore fans, just the fans who are committed—no bullshit,” says Yowell, who has established a Web site in honor of the gathering [www.wilkhall.com]. “It’s for the fans that are gonna go on the road, not the ones that say they’re doing all that.”

Yowell did not attend UVA, but he is a regular donor to the Virginia Athletics Foundation. He doesn’t take kindly to the idea that fans like him are diluting the traditional fan base, a view that has been espoused by some posters on the Sabre who lament the apparent decline in preppy spectators in the stands.

“I’ve got on a big orange ‘Hoo T-shirt, I’ve got a shaved head and look psycho,” Yowell says proudly.

That’s just fine with Al Groh, UVA’s football coach, who has praised the Wilk Hall crew at VAF events. As he tries to build the Cavs into a football powerhouse, Groh has been clear about what he wants to see in the stands: Maniacs.

And maniacs apparently should not look like they are going to a dinner party. That is why, at a press conference following the Duke game earlier this month, Groh congratulated the home fans for their noise, but also for their dress. “Looks like we’re in the process of trading in repp ties for body paint, and blue cotton Oxford button downs for T-shirts—orange ones at that,” Groh told reporters.

That shift Groh envisions is sartorial, but also psychological: If UVA fans look the part, they will play it better, louder, just like the fans down in Blacksburg, where there is no such thing as a semi-formal Hokie, or a subdued one.

Yowell says that UVA can fill up Scott Stadium and build more grassroots support for the team by reaching out to non-alumni like him, to “blue collar” Virginians.

“There is the image of UVA fan as being a stuffy bowtie-wearing snob—an elitist attitude that’s stuck,” Yowell says. “Joe Schmoe who’s an asphalt worker…doesn’t give a damn about that. He just wants to go see a good game and have fun.”

To be sure, UVA has started to court new fans by flexing its sports-marketing muscle like never before. The series of slick Cavalier football television and radio advertisements that aired recently in Central Virginia are part of a larger effort to attract football enthusiasts with no connection to the university, according to Andrew Rader, UVA’s associate athletic director of marketing, promotions and licensing.

“To have the support we want to have, to have the enthusiasm and energy in the stadium, we’re going to need those people…people who live in Madison County who have never been to a Virginia game before,” Rader says. “We’re trying to reach the whole demographic.”–E.H.