Many times in sports, when you lose, you really win. Such was the case Monday night when, after fighting valiantly and taking the number-one Old Dominion Monarchs into overtime, time finally ran out on our Rams as we lost 66 to 73. The loss capped a weeklong roller-coaster ride of excitement that started innocently at the Siegel Center with a comeback over UNC-Wilmington and ended Monday night at the Richmond Coliseum.
As a fan, it was all I could ask for, and more than any of us could expect. You see, as much as I love politics, I love sports. If politics is the sexy blond I love in my life, then sports are the sultry brunette.
I go to major-league sports events all the time, and the biggest lesson in life I have ever learned is that in sports, anything can happen, and only one thing is certain: someone will win, and someone will lose. As a fan, you don’t want it to be your team – and you’re going to root and hope as much as you can that it won’t be – but the nature of the game is that someone has to lose.
Understanding this is key, because you don’t want to write checks you can’t cash by running your mouth to the other team’s fans.
One of the things I try to do is to be a good sport. I get to all the games early, talk trash to the opposing teams and I don’t bother their fans (unless they bother me first). When you show up at an event to represent your university as a fan and you encounter someone from the other school, how you act is going to be how they feel about your university.
You may be the only person they encounter one-on-one from your school, so you become the face of the university. If you come off acting like an ignorant jerk, then that is the image they are going to take home about the entire university.
This is important, because some of the freshmen here don’t understand that. During Monday night’s game, with a little over ten minutes left in the second half, ODU was up by one point. Our Rams had battled back from a ten-point deficit and clearly had pushed ODU into a spot where they were vulnerable. How did these freshmen, wearing “Coliseum Crazies” shirts (a rip off of Duke’s Cameron Crazies), respond? By trying to start an chant aimed at ODU which made little to no sense – “Overrated!”
What exactly is overrated about them? I think our Rams were under-rated. Clearly, if ODU was up by one point and still winning, they don’t care if they are overrated or not. It doesn’t matter if they beat us by ten or by one; they still go to the tournament. When you have a team gasping for air like ODU was after that ferocious VCU run, you don’t want to chant ignorant things to get them fired back up.
Maybe it is the freshman in them, but when I tried to educate them that this was neither the time nor the place for that chant, they didn’t understand. If they were sitting by themselves all alone, I wouldn’t have cared what they said. But when they sit in the VCU student section and chant it, then they make us all look like ignorant idiots, and that is where I have a problem.
They were almost as bad as some of our fans who turned out early Saturday to root for Hofstra to beat ODU. I know ODU is our rival, but jumping on another school’s game to root for another team to take them out is beyond ignorant. I wanted to see us play ODU because I knew we could beat them. If there was one team in the tournament ODU knew was ready to beat them in the championship game, it was us.
All of this criticism is to educate some of our younger fans that VCU is not Cracker Jack U. We are in the big leagues of athletic competition, and while maybe in high school little gimmicks like chanting “overrated” when you are losing may be cute, but it isn’t going to fly here.
Riding the officials is not the way to make your mark as a fan, either. Yes, maybe the referees didn’t see seemingly every Ram on the floor try to call timeout with about three minutes left to play in overtime. And maybe they missed that flagrant foul call against Alex Loughton when he elbowed Jesse Pellot-Rosa in the eye. But as a fan, nothing you say or do is going to change their minds.
This is not the time to make excuses and blame it on the officials. There were many times Monday night – and throughout the tournament – that our guys could have mailed it in and given up. They battled, and this time it didn’t work out. That happens in life – the sun will still come up the next morning, and VCU Basketball will live to see another day.
That’s the thing with sports. You always want to win and always think you will. You want to lay it all out there and do your very best, but the nature of sports is one where someone has to lose. We may not have gotten the trophy this time, but we got something a little more important. Now everyone – even ODU – knows the road to the CAA championship runs through VCU.
Mike Dickinson may be reached at mdickinson2112@aol.com.