By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — Sometimes, even the great are wrong, and so it is that I humbly admit to having a mistake in the recent column praising the Mountaineer nation of fans. In so doing, it was stated that there had been no effigies since Bobby Bowden was strung up by his straw-filled neck in 1974.
Former WVU student and super fan Harry Moore, it seems, was a serial effigy hanger in the later 1970s, as he proudly admitted in an e-mail that offered photographic evidence of my gaffe.
“Oh, Contrare!” wrote Moore. “I personally made the front page of the D.A. on at least two occasions in ’78 and ’79 for hanging (football coach Frank]) Cignetti and (athletic director) Leland Byrd in effigy near Woodburn Circle. Still feel bad about hanging Leland as he was a good fellow and I had several business classes with his daughter (she never knew it was me and I never told her).”
Moore then made an admission even more startling, for indeed, it involves a rather prominent moment in the legend of West Virginia fandom.
“We also hung B.B. Flenory in effigy before a Duquesne basketball home game, after he had thrown a tantrum and a chair at the game at Duquesne that year. It made the front page and when the Duquesne team got to Morgantown and someone showed B.B. the paper he called his dad to come pick him and left without playing,” Moore wrote.
At this point we must break away from Moore’s e-mail to explain just who B.B. Flenory was, for it has been 30 years and some have forgotten and others just are too young to know.
One person who does know is West Virginia basketball coach Bob Huggins, who went against Flenory and had the pleasure of bopping him upside his head in a moment of uncontrolled fury.
Ron Cook, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist, recalled the incident a few years back and described it this way:
“The Dukes’ B.B. Flenory nearly was killed after taking an elbow to the head from West Virginia’s Bob Huggins in a 1976 game in Morgantown. Two years later, Flenory was involved in a brawl against the Mountaineers at the Civic Arena, then refused to play at West Virginia after seeing a picture of himself hung in effigy in the West Virginia student newspaper.”
That, Harry Moore, says was his doing.
“We won the game but we were bummed. We were poor college kids and had gone out to Hills Department Store and bought $25 worth of pacifiers and baby rattles to throw at the game (BaBy Flenory), since he did not play we ate that expense. You can look all that up to verify that as a true story.”
You have to understand now, Flenory was a pretty good player in his day. As a ninth-grader he had made the “Faces in the Crowd” section of Sports Illustrated … yes the same Sports Illustrated that recently ran a poll ranking West Virginia fans as the rudest in the Big East, leading to the column that disagreed with that poll, leading to the e-mail that kind of backed the results of the poll.
Flenory scored 52 points in a high school game and 48 for Duquesne against Ohio U. in the West Virginia Classic and is a member of the Pennsylvania Basketball Hall of Fame, so in a way Moore’s actions that kept Flenory from playing at WVU helped the team as much as the actions of any fan ever did.
And Moore’s zeal hasn’t worn thin over the years. Prior to last week’s Pitt football game, he sensed that the fans were expecting to lose, which led him to send out another e-mail.
“Okay, people,” he wrote, “let’s see some Mountaineer pride out there. To quote Bluto in Animal House, ‘Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell NO!’”
He then went on to give Mountaineer fans a more inspired pre-game speech than coach Bill Stewart gave his players.
“The WV DNR is offering a $1,000 reward on panther pelts this week. Are we gonna disappoint them?
“No!
“Are we gonna give up cause Pitt is ranked and we’re not? Oh we’re scared to go with ya Bluto, we might get in trouble. Well trouble is a friend of mine.”
Indeed it is, for he went on to tell the story of the stunt he had pulled off in 1984 after graduation, West Virginia about to play Penn State and beat them for the first time in his lifetime. Moore was working in Johnstown, Pa., then and over two weeks secretly ran off 500 leaflets that read:
GO WVU
BEAT PSU
He had just gotten his pilot’s license and, I suspect, you know what’s coming.
He flew up to Penn State, a 30-minute fly, circled the biggest courtyard he could find, and dropped the leaflets.
“Now I didn’t skedaddle like in the movies cause no one was shooting at me far as I could tell. I circled and circled and watched the paper blizzard slowly settle on the campus. People picked ’em up and read ’em, and more than a few saluted me with their middle digit. That’s all right; all’s fair in love and college rivalries.
“The point is I didn’t know we were gonna beat Penn State that year. I didn’t care cause win or lose I’m proud to be a Mountaineer!”
Oh, yeah, West Virginia plays B.B. Flenory’s old Duquesne school at home on Wednesday, Dec. 9.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
