You are aware, of course, that the University of Virginia’s tennis players are killing it, as they say.
How so?
The men last spring won their second NCAA title in a row and their third in four years. Women’s star Danielle Collins, who just happened to lose today in her first U.S. Open as a pro, won her second NCAA crown. (Collins lost at the Open to Russia’s Evgeniya Rodina 1-6, 2-6. Hey, you have to start somewhere . . . )
Anyway, I wrote about the U.Va. powerhouse for the U’s alumni magazine. It follows forthwith – heavily edited from my submission, but whatever. They do with it as they wish:
THE University of Virginia continues to dominate tennis.
Coach Brian Boland’s men won their second consecutive NCAA championship this year, their third in four years. Only four other programs have repeated since 1966.
For the women, Danielle Collins (Col ’16) prevailed as this year’s NCAA singles champion, as she did in 2014, becoming the seventh woman with two national titles.
As trophies, and new recruits, continue to come its way, UVA has begun plans for a world-class tennis venue. The Board of Visitors in April discussed a preliminary proposal for a 12-court outdoor tennis stadium at the University-affiliated Boars Head Inn west of Grounds, an estimated $12 million project, the Cavalier Daily reported.
Success didn’t come overnight. Boland arrived in 2002 to take over an unranked team. In three years, he led the men to the ACC title. In six, he got them to the NCAA semifinals.
Mark Guilbeau took over a women’s program in 2005 that had hit a 15-year low. Immediately he coached the team to a top-25 ranking. UVA women’s tennis reached the NCAA quarterfinals for the second time last season.
Guilbeau’s next challenge is to replace recent graduates Collins and Julia Elbaba (Col ’16), the latter UVA’s record-holder with 133 singles victories.
“They were unbelievable,” Guilbeau says. “But we might be able to be as strong in some ways because of better depth.”
Boland says that from UVA’s academic reputation to its Charlottesville setting, he’s confident the Cavs can break through the West Coast’s dominance. UCLA, USC and Stanford own 54 national titles, but only UVA has played in five of the last six finals.
“It’s hard to build a program to the top but even harder to stay there,” says Boland, twice the national coach of the year. “It’s something we talk about all the time.”
As the record shows, UVA Tennis doesn’t just talk a good game. It also plays one.
How about that Messi, huh? How about me raving about soccer, huh, huh, huh? Actually, I rave about just one play from Argentina’s 4-0 rout of the U.S. in Tuesday night’s Copa America semifinal in Houston, the free kick the great Lionel Messi rocketed into the upper right corner of the goal to give his team a 2-0 lead. It was such a feat of talent, skill and casual athletic brilliance I couldn’t believe for a while what I had seen.
You may know, if you can’t already tell, I am a very late comer to an appreciation for soccer. I dare say I am even a reformed soccer mocker. I never got it as a kid, never watched it as a young adult, never believed (and actually still do not believe) in its constantly forecast elbowing in to the American pro sports landscape on par with football, baseball, basketball, hockey, NASCAR, and even golf.
But something has happened in the last year, akin to a pixie doinking me on the head with a magic wand. Soccer strayed onto my radar of attention. It remains a blip in the distance, yes, but it is there, blinking “Come on, man, look at me!,” which I now do from time to time. Why? Because when Dee and I visited Barcelona last summer, she noticed a sign on the street teasing tickets for an FC Barcelona game a few days away and said “Hey, let’s go!”
I was sort of aware FC Barcelona, and Messi, were a big damn deal in Euro and world soccer, but that was really the extent. Camp Nou, the team’s famous cavernous stadium? Didn’t know. Didn’t really care. And yet I was nonetheless certain in my conviction when I scoffed and told her that game with Athletic Bilbao – part of the Supercopa de Espana finals — was sure to be sold out already and don’t even bother asking about tickets.
Clearly intimidated by my confidence, she strode to the ticket window anyway, the girl at the counter pointed to two upper-deck seats smack in the middle of the field, and, well, there you go. A couple of nights later we bobbed in the sea of Barcelona jerseys that streamed into Camp Nou to watch the fabled Catalans, led by the Argentinian star Messi, play their thing amid a thunder of steadily rising and falling calls and cheers.
Sure enough, Messi scored the first goal, the only Barcelona goal, it turned out, in a 1-1 tie that gave the series title to Athletic Bilbao via goal differential.
And so I was intrigued. Not quite smitten. But interested enough to learn about and follow one of the great world sports stories — of lowly Leicester City winning the Premier League. To track the evidently fading star of USA coach Jurgen Klinsmann. To get the dishes loaded and sit at the beach house in time to watch a telecast of USA soccer braying in vain against Argentinian royalty.
Even at this late date, I feel much more the global citizen for my toe-dip into world futbol. And when is that not a good thing? Thank you, Dee. Thank you, Messi.
Also …
It’s days later, OK, but here’s my take on the Dustin Johnson rules-violation fiasco at the U.S. Open perpetrated by the USGA. This suggestion goes for the PGA Tour, too.
If ever video review of a potential rules violation is required, make the reviewed player stop wherever he is. Start the clock. Review the potential violation in three minutes. Five tops. Make a final decision. Announce it to the player and to everybody else.
The NFL does it. MLB. NHL. NCAA hoops. Why is video review a Rubik’s Cube for golf?
It is a joke that Johnson was told he’d be reviewed on the 12th hole for something that had occurred on the fifth hole – his ball moving on the green after his practice strokes — and then the decision wasn’t made, or at least announced, until after the 18th In what world does all that sound like a good idea? Johnson, and the players chasing him, had to play that entire time uncertain of Johnson’s lead. Four strokes? Maybe three? That certainly is a distraction, clouds thinking and potentially affects strategy on every shot. It’s unbelievable the USGA allowed the process to unspool in that manner.
The rules of golf are the most convoluted in the world as is. Turning the review of them into a twisted and embarrassing mess as did the USGA negatively impacts the game far off its mission to grow and nurture it.
Kudos to Johnson for sticking his shots and winning comfortably, and by doing so, telling the USGA where to stick its archaic video review system.
My thoughts on Muhammad Ali’s death lead me first to March 8, 1971.
It was a Monday night. I was 12, lying in bed with a transistor radio, crazy with anticipation.
Ali and Joe Frazier, the heavyweight champion, were fighting that night at Madison Square Garden. It is hard to overstate the hype that preceded that matchup of two undefeated heavyweights. The spectacle of boxing was still huge in the country, inexplicably huge to someone like my kids, and almost hard to believe for me now. Ali was of course a mega-personality unlike any sports had known, perhaps other than Babe Ruth in his time. But Ali’s skills were rusty from his suspension for refusing military service; this was only his third bout back. And Frazier was a stalking, vicious champion with a thunderous left hook.
The fight wasn’t on television or radio. Closed-circuit TV was the medium of the era for big boxing events. It was a cash cow. Fans would buy a ticket into a stadium or another venue to watch the broadcast. So on my radio, tuned to an AM music station, the deejay broke in after every round to report the latest from the broadcast, probably Philly’s Spectrum. I have a thought that the voice was that of George Michael, who was huge in Philly and later moved on to larger fame in Washington, D.C. But even if it wasn’t, I know I hung on every urgent word.
The record shows that Ali surprised Frazier early, but Frazier bore into Ali through the middle rounds. I don’t remember the specifics of the scorecard except that Frazier was by far the aggressor. Early in the 15th and final round, that aggression paid off. Frazier bashed a left into Ali’s jaw and decked him, stunning news across the AM band. The replay I later saw of the knockdown did the word-picture justice — Ali’s right leg jackknifed, the red tassles splayed on his white boot, flat on his back.
Ali survived the round and the fight went to completion. That seems impossible for heavyweights of this magnitude. Also impossible is the event matched and exceeded its massive hype. Frazier won in a unanimous decision. Ali, of course, went on to defeat Frazier twice in two bouts, brutal affairs that contributed to the inexorable physical decline suffered by each before their deaths.
Other than being in the stadium when he lit the 1996 Olympic flame in Atlanta, I sort of met Ali once, long after his retirement and well into his struggle with Parkinson’s. He had to appear in a Norfolk court to give a deposition in a civil suit, as I recall. Word leaked that Ali would be there, and the editors quickly dispatched me and another reporter across the street to the building.
We found Ali and a small entourage waiting in the lobby outside the courtroom. Just like that, the most famous person in the world at one time, just sitting there. Ali said nothing, but probably on his word, the attorneys were good with us just hanging around, soaking in the scene.
As he often did in public, Ali quietly performed a couple of magic tricks – one with a disappearing handkerchief, another where he turned his back and suddenly appeared to be levitating. I got his autograph, certainly the only time in a long career that I broke that journalistic cardinal rule. Then, it was over, and we were on our way.
I’ve enjoyed the montages and reminiscences since his death last Friday, testimonials to his impossibly indescribable presence. This Friday’s memorial service in Louisville, scheduled to be laden with dignitaries from all walks, will be impossibly moving.
As with anything involving Ali, ever, the anticipation is thick.
Here’s something I wrote for UVA magazine about my old beat, Cavalier hoops. You might have heard they
experienced a hellacious heartbreaker against Syracuse to end their season.
This gives you an idea of the pain, but also the amazing progress the program has made under coach Tony Bennett.
So Close
Heartbreak ends Men’s Basketball season marked
with triumph
by TOM ROBINSON
It still stings a little. Probably always will.
All those victories, all those visions of a national basketball championship vanished in a haunting flash that
evening in Chicago.
MATT RILEY/UVA SPORTS MEDIA RELATIONS
Virginia’s 29-8 men’s basketball record and No. 1 NCAA tournament seeding, now bittersweet reminders of what might have been, of what almost was in the regional final, one step from the Final Four.
A grand beginning. A gruesome end: Syracuse—68-62.
“Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning,” coach Tony Bennett, quoting a psalmist, told his team immediately after the harsh defeat. The Cavaliers led by 15 points with less than 10 minutes to play.
“We will have some tough nights,” Bennett said, “because you’re so close you could taste it.”
So close, that is, to savoring Virginia’s third Final Four and its first since 1984.
So close to reaching 30 victories for the third consecutive season.
As it is, 89 Cav victories over three years is a school record.
Let that steep; 89 victories, and two regular-season Atlantic Coast Conference titles, in three seasons. This from a basketball program that, in 14 seasons preceding Bennett’s arrival from Washington State in 2009, had won 20 games just twice.
Under Bennett, the Cavs doubled their victory total—15 his first season to 30—and burnished their stubborn profile as one of the nation’s most deliberate offensive and relentless defensive squads.
The Cavaliers are careful, averaging no more than 10 turnovers the last three seasons, and tempo-controlling. In that same time, they have ranked first or second for fewest points allowed per game, and in the bottom six in fewest possessions per game.
If not a widely popular style, it is seriously efficient, and appreciated in Charlottesville. When the Cavaliers force a shot-clock violation, no arena erupts in a gleeful din like John Paul Jones.
Preaching his “five pillars” belief system of humility, passion, unity, servanthood and thankfulness, Bennett finds athletes who fit his formula. Players such as this year’s seniors—Malcolm Brogdon (Col ’15, Batten ’16), Anthony Gill (Col ’15), Mike Tobey (Col ’16), Evan Nolte (Col ’16) and walk-on Caid Kirven (Com ’16)—willing to grind away in the practice gym toward the promise of something greater.
This year, that meant finishing runner-up to national finalist North Carolina in the ACC tournament. Still, on the strength of a schedule that included an early season rout of eventual champion Villanova, UVA earned a No.1 NCAA seeding for the second time in three years.
Virginia entered the madness of March boasting the ACC’s player of the year, Brogdon, whom the Associated Press also named first-team All-American. UVA has had just one other first-teamer; Ralph Sampson Jr. (Col ’83), of course, more than 30 years ago.
This year, the Cavaliers seemed to catch a huge break when in the first round, second-seeded Michigan State, which bounced them from the last two tournaments and again loomed in their path, got bounced instead.
Virginia’s road to the Final Four in Houston became clearer: Hampton, Butler and Iowa State fell. Then on Easter Sunday evening, 10th-seeded Syracuse, an ACC rival, had all but tumbled, too.
Fifteen points up, 9:30 to play.
What happened next had never before happened.
Not to Virginia under Tony Bennett.
In the coach’s seven seasons, the Cavs had never lost a game they led by double digits at halftime. Never.
Trailing Syracuse by six early, the ’Hoos closed the half on a 33-13 run that put them ahead 35-21.
With at least a 10-point intermission lead, UVA had been 68-0, with an average margin of victory of 22 points. In fact, only seven of those 68 contests ever ended with UVA winning by fewer than 10 points.
Which illustrates something else about Bennett’s Cavaliers, besides their humility and unity. They are stone-cold closers.
“We’ve just been trained to be mentally tough,” Brogdon said a couple weeks after the loss. “Coach Bennett prides himself on having the toughest team on the floor. The most mentally tough team will be able to keep a lead and keep executing down the stretch.”
Rules have exceptions, and on this night, the Cavaliers melted in the glare of the moment and the threat of rapidly shifting momentum.
The Orange made seven consecutive shots, two of them long 3-pointers, others uncharacteristically easy drives to the hoop. Syracuse desperately pressed Virginia, and in answer the Cavs made only two shots, missed three layups and lost the ball three times.
In just three minutes and 42 seconds, the Orange erased UVA’s 15-point lead and went ahead by one.
“At that moment, all you’re thinking is, ‘all right, we need one stop,’” Brogdon said. “Get a stop and let’s score. Let’s control the next possession, because that’s all we can really control. It never occurred to us that we would lose the lead and then lose the game.”
There were still nearly six minutes to play, after all. But Syracuse’s onslaught only continued. Eventually trailing by six, UVA managed to close to within two inside the last half-minute, and had a shot to tie the game with 12 seconds left.
It missed. It was over.
“It happens to the best, you tighten up,” Bennett told reporters in mid-April. “I thought we softened up [on defense] when we could’ve buckled down and gotten stops. Against Iowa State, we started wobbling a little bit, but fortunately we hit enough big shots to get ahead.
“When you have a big lead and it starts going like that, it’s tough. Plays need to be made late in a game. But you can’t score real quick against Syracuse’s zone, you have to be patient. And then you feel the clock against you and the pressure of the score. You certainly deal with all of those emotions.”
Point guard London Perrantes (Col ’17), who had 18 points in the game, wore UVA’s failure most openly on his sleeve.
“I’m sure looking back, you’ll see it was obviously successful,” he told reporters after the game, reflecting on UVA’s season. “But right now, I don’t feel that way.”
And yet, the weeping did soon subside.
In early April, the Cavaliers assembled again in Charlotte, North Carolina, for the wedding of Gill and Jenna Jamil. Teammates Brogdon, Perrantes, Devon Hall (Col ’17) and Darius Thompson (Col ’17) served as groomsmen.
But pages turn and stories continue. As Brogdon trains in anticipation of June’s NBA draft, Bennett and his staff plan a new season to meet the program’s heightened standards.
A season expected to be anchored by the leadership of Perrantes, the rising-senior point guard, maturing returners Hall, Thompson, Isaiah Wilkins (Col ’18) and Marial Shayock (Col ’18), and a handful of intriguing newcomers.
Junior transfer Austin Nichols (Col ’17), first team all-American Athletic Conference at Memphis two years ago as a sophomore, is a 6-foot-9 forward who becomes eligible, as is Mamadi Diakite (Col ’19), a redshirt freshman.
Incoming freshman Kyle Guy, a guard from Indianapolis, is UVA’s eleventh McDonald’s All-American and its first in eight years. Recruits Ty Jerome and DeAndre Hunter also were nominated for the same McDonald’s honor.
They all will convene in August for a 10-day trip through Spain, playing five games that will offer a very early glimpse of what excitement, and collective joy, may lie ahead.
The football potentates are on fire (mostly) ripping the Philadelphia Eagles for trading up in the draft presumably to take Carson Wentz.
Wentz is a big, strapping quarterback, 6-foot-5 and 237 pounds. He is also a North Dakota native who played his college football at North Dakota State, a school that plays at what used to be called the Division I-AA level, now the Football Championship Subdivision. That’s where William and Mary and James Madison play, and where Old Dominion used to play till a couple of years ago.
Therein lies the double-edged problem that has the potentates all agitated: North Dakota, and the lower level of competition. The potentates — people in general — fear the unknown. The FBS and North Dakota are frighteningly unknown, on the scale of the FBS and say, South Dakota.
To the average American, I will pontificate that the word Dakota conjures either images of the young actress Dakota Fanning or images of great acres of nothingness. Wilderness. Wild beasts roaming the foothills and whatnot. Cowboys clomping down wooden sidewalks, spurs clacking, toward the saloon for a Sarsaparilla and perhaps a random gunfight.
Nobody has been to North Dakota. Nobody knows anybody from North Dakota. North Dakota may as well be the surface of Mars. Greater Norfolk, or what potentates around here call Hampton Roads (to my constant chagrin) has roughly twice the population of North Dakota, for cryin’ out loud.
Now, North Dakota State happens to play incredible football – at the FBS level. The Bison have won five consecutive FBS national titles. That is a record. No college football team at any level had ever won five in a row.
Wentz led the last two championship runs. Then he went to the NFL Scouting Combine and, according to a league executive quoted on NFL.com, “really blew us away when we met him. Talent is a big component, but these guys have to have intangibles if they are going to lead franchises and he’s got them. I don’t care where he played, he understands the game and it isn’t too big for him.”
Patience is always preached for rookie quarterbacks. But the idea of asking Iggles fans for patience on top of asking them not to fear the dark and to have faith in a front office that’s gone through huge recent upheaval is frying a lot of circuits in what they used to call the Greater Delaware Valley, where pro football buoys everybody’s miserable existence.
Me, I am going to lean to the under-populated (like North Dakota) opinion that Wentz (presumably the Iggles’ pick) will make sense for the Birds. And that potentates I came to trust over my sports-chronicling years, who rave about Wentz, are right to not let Dakota-phobia influence what their eyes and professional intuition have told them.
It seems like I was just here, lamenting a heart-rending loss by Virginia’s basketball team in the regional final of the NCAA tournament. A step from the Final Four, about 10 minutes of game time away, actually, the Cavaliers, known for closing big leads under coach Tony Bennett, for once could not make a big halftime edge stand up.
Jordan Spieth knows the feeling, on top of the surreal shock that tore into his chest Sunday in the final round of the Masters.
With nine holes to play, Spieth led the Masters, dominant in his defense of his 2015 championship, by five strokes. Like a machine, he had just made four birdies in a row. Standing on the 10th tee, Spieth appeared unapproachable, his lead insurmountable.
A half-hour later — more specifically, a bogey-bogey-quadruple bogey later — Spieth was behind England’s Danny Willett, destined to rally but never to catch up.
Cracks had appeared lately in Spieth’s veneer, but he had been great at patching them on the fly. He is unflinchingly honest, and he even spoke recently of coming to the practice range before a tournament’s final round unable to control the slice emanating from his swing. What? How can a top-five player suffer that kind of hacker confusion?
Who knows? All we know is it seemed as though Spieth was over his swing vexation, and then he wasn’t. It went so bad at No. 12, a par-3 over a creek. You’ve seen it; Spieth flared his tee ball high to the right, and it hit the bank and shot back into the water. Stunned, Spieth then took little time with his penalty drop and — distracted and who can blame him? — he absolutely duffed his next shot back into the creek.
Another drop, and a fifth shot over the green into a bunker. Up and down for a 7. Despite two birdies from there, it was game and quest for a second green jacket over.
That was the injury. The insult came next when Spieth had to proceed directly from the course to Butler Cabin, per Masters tradition, to slip a new green jacket across the shoulders of Danny Willett. Somehow, he sat there and listened to Willett’s winning interview with grace. He looked like a hostage, as a friend quipped to me today, but he sat and listened and congratulated Willett and then answered media questions about his unlikely, practically unbelievable, collapse so near the mountaintop.
Here is a link to that interview. Peruse it and decide if you could comport with such class at 22, with your world freshly crashed all around you on global television. It is among the reasons Jordan Spieth is s0 liked, respected and admired by golfers and golf fans.
This will pass, and he will return, and he will be back on the biggest stages poised to win again. But like U.Va.’s basketball team, scarred at the heart, Spieth’s ache will beat and pulse and inspire him, from here to whatever comes next, to whatever will be.
The University of Virginia’s basketball team lost a regional final Sunday that would have sent it to the NCAA Final Four in the worst way possible – by squandering a big lead down the stretch, 15 points in the last 9 1/2 minutes, to be precise.
Better to be blown out from the start and stare at an inevitability all game? Yep, in my book.
Tony Bennett greets supporters as his team returns to Charlottesville on Sunday. (Photo from virginiasports.com)
Losing late, with victory so close and contested, is harsh. The bigger the game, the more it haunts. Losing late, after you were practically cruising through the later stages, is agonizing. For player and for fan. Why was my kid, a recent U.Va. grad, crying in a San Francisco bar with U.Va. friends as it all came unglued? Because of her love and empathy for her school and her former peers who were so powerful all season, and then were so powerless to stop Syracuse’s winning surge.
The agony of defeat is more than just a poetic phrase.
Pundits say coach Tony Bennett has the Cavaliers poised to remain among the national elite even with the loss of forwards Anthony Gill and Mike Tobey and All-American guard Malcolm Brogdon. Brogdon is a tremendous natural leader, the kind of cool-headed and captivating presence that is not easily replaced. So we shall see about who fills that critical leadership void.
Perhaps Bennett truly has U.Va. – which was a No. 1 tournament seed for the second time in three years – to the point where it simply reloads with elite recruits where others must rebuild. Proof will come soon enough. That of course will do nothing for the seniors who endured the kind of physical letdown that leaves emotional scars.
They had it, and they lost it. Ruminating on how and why will be a lifelong exercise in angst.
The future president of the United States just was voted the best basketball player, and the best defensive player, in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
OK, maybe Virginia’s Malcolm Brogdon is just the future secretary of state.
In any event, Brogdon, the first ACC player to win both of those honors in the same season, is on the very short list of the most impressive and authentic collegiate student-athletes I had the good fortune to encounter in my few decades as a sports writer.
I got Brogdon during two of his early years at U.Va., when coach Tony Bennett was building the foundation of what has become one of the nation’s strongest and steadiest hoops structures.
From Atlanta, Brogdon was a perfect leadership vessel for Bennett both on the court and as an ambassador among academically oriented elite recruits. Bennett preaches selfless play and relentless team defense, strategies that fit Brogdon’s humility and maturity. And Brogdon is pursuing a master’s in public policy with an eye toward solving problems on a global scale.
He was honored this year with a modest room on U.Va.’s Range – i.e. the Lawn, but for grad students. Brogdon is a study in unflustered self-assurance and self-control, in measured words, bold action and higher principals.
I could quote his statistics, but they don’t really matter. Suffice to say Brogdon could have an NBA future, but that the pro athlete’s mantle is just a small part of what Brogdon is about, a la Princeton’s Bill Bradley from way back in the day.
Here’s a link to my first contribution to Distinction magazine, a really well-done local publication of which I’m proud to be a small part. There will be more contributions, which pleases me no end.
This first one is about Kent Bazemore, who was undrafted — and unfortunately tainted at the end of his Old Dominion career — but who has made himself an NBA life despite it all.
I don’t really know Frank Beamer well. I was around him a handful of times a year for a decade or more as a sports columnist. I didn’t sense a lot of spin in the guy. I thought he pretty much told it like it was, except for some schedule-padding and news-manipulating stuff back in the day when he was trying to make Virginia Tech matter. Which he did.
I sat next to him once at a banquet. We chatted and laughed a bit. He is a good fella.
The career eulogies bursting forth upon the recent announcement of his retirement as Virginia Tech’s football coach are earnest and true. Beamer was hardly glib. He was hard-boiled Fancy Gap. But he got it. He has class. Self-control. He was as professional as they come in college football in representing his school and his team on the field and in the media room.
A gentleman. Yep, he is a gentleman.
Of course it won’t be the same to see a Virginia Tech football game without Beamer on the sideline. We’ll get used to it. So will he. Sooner than he suspects, he might even enjoy being out of the snake-pit cauldron of constant recruiting, social media, message boards and instant judgments.
I hope it happens that way for him. He deserves it. He made Virginia Tech football into a thing of consistency, respect and resiliency, even if that national championship the Hokies hungered for proved too large a dream.
Tech’s stadium, and the field inside it, are already named in honor of others. But Beamer-Lane Stadium isn’t too awkward, is it? In the big picture, it doesn’t really matter. Virginia Tech knows the impact Beamer had on its national profile, its enrollment, its fund-raising, and Beamer knows, too, what he meant to his alma mater.
