MORGANTOWN — Now the secret comes out, a small but important secret, one that helped West Virginia University beat Pittsburgh in the Backyard Brawl.
It had nothing to do with Tyler Bitancurt kicking four field goals, including the game winner from 43 yards out as the clock expired.
Or did it?
It had nothing to do with guard Joey Madsen’s block that sprang Noel Devine on an 88-yard touchdown jaunt.
Or did it?
And certainly it had nothing to do with safety Robert Sands and cornerbacks Keith Tandy and Brandon Hogan smothering Pitt’s outstanding receiving corps.
Or did it have everything to do with it?
We may never know, but here’s the story behind the story, the inside on how West Virginia differs from so many other places, about why West Virginia football is as big as the state itself.
You have to go back to Wednesday evening, the day before Thanksgiving. The Mountaineers gathered for their daily team meeting, only this time it wasn’t Bill Stewart doing the talking. Instead it was someone more important than Stewart, even though the head football coach at West Virginia University makes more money than even the governor of the state.
Joe Manchin III had come to Morgantown along with his wife, Gayle, and now they were at the Puskar Center, speaking to a Mountaineer football team that was about to play the Backyard Brawl and to a football staff that would lead it into battle.
“I do not care if you are Democrat, Republican or independent,” Stewart would say on Tuesday. “You are a West Virginian or if you are in the borders of West Virginia, that was big. For Gov. Manchin to take time, after working the morning in a soup kitchen, to share a story about that soup kitchen and the people and the love those people have for our football team was very powerful.”
Think about that for a moment. Here you have the governor of the state, not accompanied by cameras and public relations people, not caught up in the heat of a tough re-election campaign, not trying to shake off the latest scandal in his administration as how many politicians have had to do in recent years, stopping by to talk to the football team.
It wasn’t a national championship game. It wasn’t even a game for the Big East championship.
But Gov. Manchin cared.
He’s a former Mountaineer quarterback and has a zipper on his knee to prove it.
Do you think, for one moment, that his counterpart in Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, took the time to address Pitt? Hardly.
But in Pennsylvania they have the Phillies and the Eagles and the Pirates and the Steelers and the Penguins and the Flyers and Penn State and Villanova and Temple and …
Well, you get the point.
In West Virginia in November you have West Virginia University, be it football or basketball.
It is what it is … everything.
So it was, a day before Thanksgiving, and the governor spent the day ladling out mashed potatoes, cutting the turkey, digging in after the stuffing at the Union Mission in Charleston, joining two dozen other volunteers seeing that the needy were fed holiday fare.
On a normal day the mission serves 150 to 200 meals, but there were 500 people gathered around the table on this day. It was the fifth straight year Manchin had volunteered at the mission and not because it was something he had to do, not because it was something he felt he should do, but because it was something he wanted to do.
“No matter what lot of life, where you are or where you’re from, in West Virginia we try and reach out and make people feel like family,” the governor said while at the mission.
While the media knew about that visit, they did not know that he addressed the football team.
“Joe talked about one thing and hit over and over and over again, as all good public speakers do. He talked about the will to win, the will to win. He echoed the will to win, the will to win.”
Manchin actually had the West Virginia players chanting — “in a soft chant,” Stewart would say — “the will to win, the will to win.”
Did it matter, really, when it came to the game? Did it matter to Bitancurt, to Devine, to Sands or Hogan or Tandy?
Who knows, but this is what Stewart said.
“The will to win, the will to win, it echoed in my ear, it echoed in my mind,” Stewart said.
Gov. Manchin called Stewart after the game and he thanked him in private, and now he was thanking him publicly.
So now you know. It’s just one more reason why Mountaineers are proud of their state.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
Bob Herzel
HERTZEL COLUMN: WVU football as big as state itself
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