Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 8, 1993 TAG: 9310080212
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-13 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RAY COX
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
My assignment is a key Seminole District game pitting defending Group AA Division 3 state champion Jefferson Forest and host Liberty.
Personally, I'd rather be in Bombay, or Bangkok, or Budapest than Bedford. Anywhere that's as far from Radford as possible.
Blacksburg High is playing football at Radford tonight. I couldn't bear to watch.
Hopefully, nobody will mention the game to me. I don't want to hear it. Tomorrow, when I awake to scan the scores from around the state in my morning paper, I purposefully will overlook the result from Bobcats Stadium.
Come to think of it, I just may pull the quilt over my head and not even get out of bed.
It hasn't even happened yet, that game between the Indians and Bobcats, and my heart is heavy as a bolt-studded safe with an anvil inside.
I'm bummed.
I'm buried alive in the blues.
I can't stand it.
Maybe this isn't it after all. Maybe this isn't the last time Radford and Blacksburg will play football. Maybe there will be a bolt from the heavens. Maybe somebody who has some political punch in Radford will conclude that something that has been of great value to generation after generation of their fellow citizens is being unceremoniously dumped in the landfill of history.
But maybe I'm a naive dreamer.
Maybe this really is the end.
How is it possible that there may never again be a Radford-Blacksburg? What sane person could conceive of autumnal Friday nights stretching forever into the future with not one football meeting between Radford and Christiansburg?
No, this is the work of rational people on the city School Board who say they have the best interests of the local high school's students, their safety and well-being, at heart. We must take them at their word.
Some don't. These doubters say something else is afoot here. This view holds that when the board would not allow Radford to play Group AA teams after it dropped to A status, a message was being sent to the supporters of reclassification, particularly the football people headed by Coach Norman Lineburg.
The doubters think that the board is saying, "You wanted to be Group A, fine. Now be Group A and live with the consequences."
If this theory is accurate, there's a name for it very similar to a card game I used to play. My grandmother, a lady of considerable refinement, taught me the game, one of her favorites. It was called Spite and Malice, a contest of skill in which mercy was not a virtue. She would smile sweetly as she ground my young tail into the Oriental rug while we played.
Lineburg doesn't need the hassles he's gone through. That guy ought to be driven around town by a liveried chauffeur for all he's done for this city. Instead, he's spent at least the last six years with a gut churning like the North Atlantic during winter because of the withering of his beloved football. He could see the same coming with the rest of the school's athletic program and that troubled him no less.
Radford athletics and particularly football have been in decline because of the numbers crunch of dwindling enrollment. If not for brilliant football coaching and courageous players, people would have noticed the decline far sooner than last year's 1-9 catastrophe.
At tortured length, they finally voted to drop.
All this is well and good. The loss of the rivalries with Blacksburg and Christiansburg is not.
Forget that this is likely to represent a severe jolt to Radford's athletic coffers, forget that it puts the screws to Blacksburg and Christiansburg, forget that this represents a further erosion of what once was a marvelous sense of community that made the New River Valley as a whole a unique place. Forget all that, as some apparently already have.
Consider only what has been lost in rivalries that date back at least as far as World War I. Consider, too, the words of a couple of coaches now retired who put a lifetime of labor into young people and football. Bill Brown spent a career at Blacksburg before he retired in 1983. Buddy Shull is an assistant principal at Christiansburg, but before that, he spent 18 years as an assistant coach for the Bobcats.
"These rivalries should never be legislated out of existence," Shull said. "There may be others reasons to do it, but that shouldn't be one."
For Brown, it's simply a matter of deeply-felt emotion.
"I don't know how they feel now, but when I was coaching, when you said `Radford,' the hair on our kids' necks would bristle."
So buy a ticket and go on down to Bobcats Stadium for what could be a last look.
Maybe you'll see a game such as the two Blacksburg played against Radford's 1971 and 1972 state champions, perhaps the two greatest teams anybody from around here has ever seen. The Indians, overmatched in almost every way, battled like fiends and lost 14-6 in the 1971 game. The year after, it was 0-0 with nine minutes to go, the Indians gambled with the blitz and got burned twice and lost 15-0.
Or maybe it will be like the 1988 game in which the Indians trailed 19-7 with 8 minutes left before scoring two touchdowns including an 8-yard pass from William Ferrell to Bill Linkenhoker with eight seconds left to win 20-19.
Perhaps it could be like the one when Tommy Edwards and company put on one of the greatest David-whipping-Goliath displays you've ever seen, Radford shut out Blacksburg, and rocketed from nowhere to No. 1 in the state. Or the time Blacksburg's James Craig kicked that field goal with no time left at Radford for a 10-10 tie and but for the mercy of God, guys like Blacksburg's Darwin Herdman or Radford's Junior Thompson didn't put somebody in the emergency room.
Buy a ticket and shed a tear.
Me, I'm going home and pulling the quilt over my head.
\ IN MEMORIAM: It's been sad in Radford this week for other reasons. Robby Wright, a tight end and place kicker who played for the state champs in the early '70's, was killed in a car crash in Knoxville, Tenn., this week. Wright, who went on to be a member of the Virginia Tech team, stayed close to Bobcats football and attended the Powell Valley game earlier this season. "He was absolutely a pleasure to be with," Lineburg said.
\ A MODEST PROPOSAL: Nobody asked me, but they ought to let the students have an input in the naming of the newly created district that resulted when the old Mountain Empire divided. The students at the various schools could submit names and the principals could decide on the best ones. Or they could be democratic about it and submit nominations and let everybody - students and faculty - vote. Just a thought.
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB