It’s 4 am. Its raining. My weather app informs me that it will be raining for the next three days. In a couple more hours Lucy will insist on being preambulated in the muck. There are seven more days left in February. If I were a Frenchman, this would Le suck. But, as it is, I am an American. Therefore, I blame it all on an unholy alliance between systemic racism and global warming. In exchange for this observation, I will earn valuable virtue points, and be hailed in some quarters as woke. Others will conclude that I am a moron. In America in 2019, it is very much a mixed bag to express an opinion.
While the rest of the country is obsessed with one of two stories right now, I would like to discuss a third. If you watch Fox News the only story that matters at the moment concerns an obscure black, gay actor who conspired to stage a racist/homophobic assault on himself by a couple of MAGA hat-wearing thugs, ostensibly to highlight how hateful that crowd is and also to earn himself even greater levels of fawning adulation than he already enjoys as a black, gay actor. If you watch MSNBC, you are horrified by a 30 year Coast Guard veteran who was arrested with a huge cache of weaponry, a hit list of liberal politicians and journalists, and a computer trail of White Nationalist sympathies. But, neither one of these stories interest me. What concerns me this morning is this...
For those of you who might not know. My alma mater is a small, liberal arts university with less than 1,500 male students. Despite this, we compete on the highest level of college athletics for basketball. Our team has had great success over the past thirty years or so, making it to many NCAA tournaments. Etc. But, we aren’t even the best team in our own city. That title has been held by crosstown rival VCU for the past ten years or so. They not only have the better team and program, but measured by fan enthusiasm and buzz, University of Richmond is like Barry Manilow to VCU’s Drake. Anyway...this billboard has popped up in recent days, giving me a shiny, gleaming new reason to be embarrassed as a Spider fan. Chris Mooney has been the head basketball coach for ten years or so. I’ve never been crazy about him, but he’s fine. But some outfit called the UR Alumni & Spider Fans has decided that the only way to “SAVE” Richmond basketball is to fire the coach. To this end, they thought it wise and worth the considerable expense involved in having this eye sore erected along Interstate 95 so that the 25,000 people who pass everyday can witness our dysfunction. To whoever is responsible for this moronic stunt, a few words...
1. It’s the University of Richmond. We have 1500 male students. We’re lucky we even have a basketball team.
2. You guys need to get a life. I’m thinking that the odds that the guy who came up with this idea has had a date in the last year are about as high as the likelihood that our next home game will be a sellout.
3. This is basketball we’re talking about here. You guys just paid God knows what for a billboard to gin up support for firing a guy who coaches teenagers to play...basketball.
4. How about a billboard that addresses the real problem at UR...Save Richmond Chemistry...Fire Professor Dunnblat.
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