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

Moreover, The University was slow to enroll black students; Ralph Sampson is really the first blue-chip black athlete to matriculate there. This situation wasn't helped either when, early in the '70s, then basketball Coach Bill Gibson was interviewed by a Carolina broadcaster. After the formal TV interview the announcer said, "How come you don't have any niggers on your team, Bill?" Gibson shot back, "Same reason there aren't any at your TV station." The cameras were still rolling and somehow the whole exchange ended up on the air.

By now boxing had been dropped as an intercollegiate sport, and except for lacrosse (and, yes, polo), there was little to cheer about. But the lacrosse coach, Gene Corrigan (who also had to assist in two other sports and be the full-time Sports Information Director), left to take a job with the ACC. Things were so depressing, Corrigan recalls, that students would boo the cheerleaders. Worse, under an aggressive president, VPI started competing seriously with the Wahoos, and some influential alumni, like Fred Pollard, a former lieutenant governor, began to see ominous implications that went far beyond athletics. "Sports are so visible," Pollard says, "that I became concerned that the legislature would start to perceive The University as a whole as a loser and shift appropriations to Tech." In a real sense, it seems, colleges simply can't afford to lose anymore.

In Hookville, all hope faded, and it was the rare top Virginia athlete who would even consider The University. Everybody threw up his hands and said it was all because of the language requirement. That was a made-to-order Longstreet that, Corrigan says, everybody could "cling to." No one in Virginia liked to recall that another reason Lee had to depend on Longstreet was that Stonewall Jackson's own men (some North Carolinians) had shot him by mistake. So it was, by now, that other colleges were not beating Yooveeay; it was gunning itself down.

Corrigan returned as athletic director in 1971, but things grew so bad that for a while he seriously wondered whether it might be best to abandon intercollegiate athletics. That might well have come to pass had not basketball become popular in 1971 with the arrival of a high-scoring guard from State College, Pa. named Barry Parkhill. Other good players followed, and in Holland's second season, 1976, the Wahoos actually won the ACC tournament. Encouraged by that and by Bestwick's arrival in football later in '76, Corrigan went to The University president, Frank Hereford, with a proposal. Essentially, Corrigan said, if we're going to keep on fielding teams, mightn't we also try to win?

Hereford (who plays tennis with Corrigan) agreed that this radical concept had some merit to it. "Our failure to achieve a more successful athletic program is a failure on the part of the entire University," he wrote to his top staff. And to Corrigan: "I remain confident—and determined—that we need not choose between excellence in academic programs and excellence in athletics. We can and must aspire to both."

Among other decisions, it was agreed to increase athletic expenditures from $2.7 million to $4.4 million by 1983-84. If a recruited athlete's scholastic record indicated he could graduate in four years, he could be accepted; accommodations were made for the language requirement; academic advisers would be hired to tutor athletes.

Buoyed by these developments and grateful for the small favors provided by the basketball team, the Virginia Student Aid Foundation now raises $1.2 million a year. The Wahoo students are beside themselves. They actually have a pep band, and not only do they not boo at cheerleaders, but they have become so vociferous, and so vulgar as well, that Corrigan had to strike a devil's deal with them. Now the students shout out code numbers that refer to dirty words. There is even the expectation of victory in the air. Last school year was the first since 1948-49 in which both football and basketball teams had winning records.

The two men directly responsible are Holland and Best-wick, and few men so dissimilar ever co-existed. As Corrigan's field generals, Holland is the dour, ascetic Stonewall Jackson figure, while Bestwick is the dashing cavalryman, Jeb Stuart, who sallied forth on his raids wearing a silk saber sash and ostrich plumes. Jackson was a philosophy professor, revealed as a tactical genius only when the battle clarion sounded. Holland, a grave, gray-flecked, 6'1" 37-year-old, is the same sort of precise personality, invariably referred to (and not unkindly) as "distant." At Davidson, where, playing basketball for the flamboyant Lefty Driesell, he led the nation in field-goal percentage, Holland never intended to apply his analytical abilities to coaching. It has been 15 years since he became Driesell's graduate assistant for one season, but he says, "I still look at coaching every year on a one-year basis."

By contrast, Bestwick, a stocky strawberry blond with flashing teeth, lights up every room he enters. He is a leader first, then an instructor, and like Jeb Stuart, who knew no life but that Of the cavalry brigade, Bestwick was only 10 when he decided that he was going to be a coach. He is a factory worker's son, but he has coached at several academically demanding schools, and he is comfortable at The University. Bestwick is a man who never got a chance at a head job till he was in his 40s. He left after two days because he could see that he and that college would not be compatible. He had the inside track to be head coach at Georgia Tech, where he was an assistant for nine years, until some powerful alumni brought in Pepper Rodgers, a name. And now, when he finally does get a chance, it's at the worst football college in America. "The trouble with this country is that there is a tendency now to accept any standard of behavior so long as it gets results—in sports or anything," he says. "I don't want to work anywhere where that thinking applies. This is a fine school, honestly run, with lots of excellent young people and some good players. That's all I wanted."

Of course, The University still remains schizophrenic, torn by the past traditions and the modern imperatives, as is the state itself. Very soon now, Virginia Beach, which had barely 8,000 residents in 1960, will be the largest city in the Commonwealth. Mike Todd's widow is the junior Senator's wife. Schoolchildren know their bumper stickers—VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS—better than their history. Charlottesville, like much of The Commonwealth, leans toward Washington and finds its identity there. Who ever would have imagined that the Confederacy would finally go away, not with a whimper or a bang, but merely as a commuter?