It's V-i-r-g-i-n-i-a-a-a-a!

It has not been quite so easy to put losing out of fashion at Yooveeay. As Bill Millsaps, a Tennessean who is sports editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, says, "It's always fascinated me to go to a Virginia football game because no matter how badly the team might be going, optimism was remarkably high. But at the same time, expectations were very low. It was the most rational game atmosphere. Virginia athletics have always reminded me of British foreign policy, with a magnificent history of honorable failures."

The Commonwealth's historical ambivalence about where it belonged made it difficult for Yooveeay to find a place for itself athletically, too. Its old traditional rival, North Carolina, got tired of smashing the Wahoos and found more practical, emotional competitions with Duke and North Carolina State. Virginia quit the Southern Conference in 1936 largely because subsidized athletics had started in earnest and many other conference schools were giving players phony jobs; Yooveeay couldn't do that and remain true to The Honor System. After World War II, as the cotton-South schools emphasized football more and more, buying players, clearly putting victory above honor, The University felt soiled by geographical association.

Then football scandals rocked two sister Virginia schools, William & Mary and Washington & Lee. Shocked, some University alumni wanted to point North, try to join up with the schools that were beginning to formalize the Ivy League. At least initial steps were taken to examine the possibility of starting a Southern Ivy, but in the end, in 1953, Virginia became the last of eight colleges to make up the new Atlantic Coast Conference. The seven other schools were delighted to have The University on board, for Mister Jefferson's school would enhance their image, while Yooveeay's athletic death wish would inflate their records.

Sure enough, Yooveeay refused to compromise, and it got clobbered more than ever. But if it was noble for The University not to overemphasize athletics, it is apparent now that the school was right for many of the wrong reasons. Nonetheless, in the years in which Virginia institutionalized defeat, it grew academically and in breadth. Maybe this wouldn't have happened if victory on the playing fields had consumed it. But now only the oldest of dodderers rail at poor General Longstreet anymore, Robert E. Lee is a citizen of the United States of America once again, and women sleep like equals in rooms along The Lawn. It's time to play to win at last. So many colleges in America have gotten into trouble in sports because they were ashamed to lose. The University doesn't have to be ashamed to win anymore.

Virginia's anti-athletic posture was made virtually official in 1952 when a faculty committee issued what was known as The Gooch Report, an analysis that criticized subsidized athletics and obsessional partying, more or less lumping together fun and games as evils to combat. The president at the time, Colgate Darden, a former governor widely recognized as The University's Jefferson for this century, was striving to advance the school academically; he had no time to fool with sports and there was nobody else to stand up as a patron for Yooveeay athletics.

In 1953 came a notably disastrous football season (1-8), and by the end of the decade the Wahoos were on their way to the record 28 straight defeats. Things became so disorganized that one time the team was penalized for delay of game for showing up late to its own stadium. Another time the team bus went to the wrong college for a game. Coach followed quickly upon coach. One, to little apparent avail, would quote Tennyson to his charges before games. Others were nearly shattered by the experience. Terry Holland remembers his feeling of watching with helpless pathos Sonny Randle, the coach in 1974 and 1975, being "destroyed as a person."

When Bestwick was deliberating whether to follow Randle as coach, Joe Paterno, his old friend, said flat out, "There's no way you can succeed there. It's impossible." The Wahoos always had bright players—19 of 22 starters made the Dean's List on one of the winless teams—and a few good ones (Henry Jordan, Jim Bakhtiar, Gary Cuozzo), but they couldn't compete when it came to depth. The euphemistically named "Student Aid Foundation," which hands out privately raised scholarship money to athletes (typical of Virginia that it couldn't face the truth, that it really is the Athletes' Aid Foundation, like it or not) fell $300,000 in debt, and of the few scholarships it could dish out, fewer still went to quality players, who were often denied entrance because of a stiff foreign-language requirement.

The football team had 15 straight non-winning seasons, one winner, then 10 more non-winners before Bestwick's team went 6-5 this past autumn—an aggregate record so woeful (79-185-3, .299) that, by comparison, the Wahoos have absolutely convinced themselves that they have enjoyed a basketball juggernaut over the years. They grow indignant with those who lump basketball and football as a joint disaster. In fact, though, the basketball squad had 16 straight losing seasons through 1970, has a losing record against all ACC opponents and has finished as high as second in conference regular-season play once in 26 years.

Basketball had no heritage in Hookville. It was too sweaty to be a gentleman's game, and it didn't lend itself to tailgate parties. For a long time, the major sport after football was boxing, of all things. A fellow named John LaRue, who ran a pool hall in town, was the prime force behind the sport, and soon the genteel Wahoos were a pugilistic power, along with the service academies and the tough coal-belt, snow-belt schools of Penn State, Syracuse and Wisconsin. But Virginia kept its aplomb, even for slugfests; at Memorial Gymnasium it was the custom that not a sound be uttered during the action, so fights were conducted in an atmosphere similar to that prevailing at tennis or golf matches.

When basketball became popular in the Southeast after World War II, it came first to prominence at North Carolina State, a cow college, and then at Chapel Hill with imported Yankees. Yooveeay viewed this development as tackier even than Southern-bought football players and treated the sport with disdain. Until 1966 it kept on playing in the cramped, chicken-wired Memorial Gym, where visiting teams dressed in a corridor, more or less, and when University Hall was built, seating was held to 9,000 because nobody could conceive of more than that many Virginians actually attending a basketball game.