CHARLESTON — In our own provincial world, we tend to exaggerate the importance of the events that most affect us.
For example, in the cosmic scheme of things, being late for dinner is hardly as bad an occurrence as your parents always made it out to be on those nights when you couldn’t get home from the playground on time.
This is even truer in the world of sports, where an ankle sprain to the star player on the team for which we root outweighs a broken leg suffered by a team not in our league or on our schedule.
That is why, as West Virginia University prepares to play Marshall — men and women — at the Civic Center here this evening in the annual “Let’s Give the Legislators a Fun Night Out Game” we tend to turn it into a matter of life and death.
It is our own state of insanity, so to speak, built up to the point that we even can’t wait for the cheerleaders to square off in their annual “Hold a Girl Aloft With One Hand” competition, one that once belonged to the Mountaineers but most recently has been dominated by the Marshalls.
True, West Virginia and Marshall is a fun evening, usually with inspired basketball before a sold-out house of politicians who on this night are neither Republican nor Democrat, but instead for Marshall or West Virginia.
We would like to think that it is as intense, as important an instate rivalry as can be, our own little athletic Hatfields and McCoy feud with nothing less than life, death and bragging rights at stake.
Certainly, with one John “Doc” Holliday’s defection from the West Virginia football program to run the Marshall team, where he already seems to have pilfered away two or three players that he recruited for the Mountaineers, the intensity of the night will pick up.
Seeing Holliday in green will be a strange sight and, rest assured, if he is on hand as expected, he will be greeted by the West Virginia faithful not as a long-lost brother but as if he were the very devil himself.
However, it is pure folly to suggest that this game, which has been named The Capital Classic, is anything like the great rivalries that there are across America.
While it may be circled on the Marshall calendar on a yearly basis, at West Virginia it is little more than a bothersome mid-season adventure away from conference play. It is intense, yes, and pride is at stake, but ladies and gentlemen, to suggest this bears any resemblance to West Virginia-Pitt and the Backyard Brawl in either football or basketball is simply untrue.
Bob Huggins, who coaches the West Virginia basketball team, knows something about rivalries — real mean, vicious rivalries.
You ask him how WVU-Marshall compares to Cincinnati-Xavier, a neighborhood battle in Cincinnati, and you get one of those “Are you kidding me?” glances.
“Cincinnati and Xavier is almost a religious confrontation,” he said.
It is a holy war with Gatorade instead of holy water.
You Google it and the first thing that pops up is a picture of an angry Huggins, a snarl on his face and his finger pointing somewhere like a loaded .44 with the first sentence, interestingly, beginning “This one is truly a backyard brawl …”
They call it “The Crosstown Shootout,” and the late Skip Prosser, who coached against Huggins while at Xavier, said, “It’s unique. I can’t imagine one being more intense.”
Huggins’ comment in this article was simply, “I think you have to live here to really understand it.”
Certainly there were moments Huggins would like to forget, twice going into the game ranked No. 1 — in 1996 and 2000 — only to have Xavier upset them.
Upon leaving Cincinnati, not of his own accord, we might remind you, Huggins migrated to Manhattan, Kan., where they have this little rivalry going with that school in Lawrence, Kansas University.
Again, you are talking a different level of rivalry.
“That goes way back,” said Huggins, aware that WVU and Marshall does not have that long or consistent a history, only 38 games having been played since the first game in 1928-29. Only 18 games have been played in the recent renewal in Charleston and it has been one-sided, if competitive, WVU winning 10 of the last 13, including the last three in a row.
All of this being said, it does not take away from the emotions that will flow once the ball is tossed in the air at center court, for in its own way, West Virginia and Marshall is a game that is good for the state and good for basketball.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
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