What's The V-T Rivalry Need?

It’s a big week in the two Bristols – Virginia High and Tennessee High play Friday night at the Stone Castle – and it can be fun to listen to folks try to describe what they think makes a good rivalry.

Does proximity matter? That’s where it starts, but there has to be more. There’s no district or conference title riding on the outcome, so, yeah, there needs to be something more.

And that something more is whether the teams challenge each other, whether the game shapes up as one that will be competitive.

When I hear fans talk about rivalries, I’m reminded of one of my former co-workers at the now-defunct King County Journal in suburban Seattle.
She and her husband were diehard Ohio State football fans. Once she discovered that I was from Michigan and had covered the University of Michigan football team for more than a decade, she took great delight in leaving me small – and sometimes not-so-small – reminders of her loyalty on my desk and computer desktop.

And it used to frustrate her to no end that I didn’t come harrumphing into her office – I was the sports editor; she was the assistant to the publisher – demanding that she stop such nonsense.

Later, when she’d stop by my desk, asking if I’d seen what she’d done, I’d just grin. Nothing else. Just grin.

And that, I supposed you could argue, was my revenge, because she never got the reaction for which she was looking. And I knew it drove her crazy.

Finally, one day, I gave her a gift-wrapped copy of the small paperback book I’d written about the history of Michigan football entitled “Stadium Stories: Michigan Wolverines.” She looked at it, and then, holding her nose, held it out at arm’s length and threatened to dump it into her wastebasket.

“What would I want to read something like this?” she asked.

I replied: “Because it will help you to know your rival better.”

Shaking her head, as if in disbelief, she asked: “Why would I want to do that?”

“Because,” I replied, “it takes two great teams to make a great rivalry.”

At which point, she suddenly smiled, as if hit by a startling revelation. She took the book home, read it, and shared it with her husband. I never found out what he thought about it, but she told me later that she enjoyed it.

It was, she said, kind of neat that there was so much about Ohio State in the book.

That’s no accident, I said. The histories of the two football programs are so intertwined that it’s impossible to discuss the history of one without including the other.

Each team helped to dedicate the other’s stadium in the 1920s. The teams have played any number of memorable games, including the 1950 “Snow Bowl” in Columbus, Ohio. The “Ten-Year War” between the programs when Bo Schembechler and Woody Hayes were the respective head coaches is one of the great chapters in college football history.

During the past two decades, the rivalry has lost some of its luster. Since Jim Tressel became Ohio State head coach in 2001, the Wolverines have won just once. In the previous 13 seasons, when John Cooper was head coach, the Buckeyes won just twice. During both stretches, fans from the dominating school, as much as they enjoyed all the wins, couldn’t help but wonder what was missing.

The answer is easy: The opponent, though hated, wasn’t quite worthy. That’s what makes a rivalry special.

Back to Bristol. It’s easy to assume, as a newcomer, that the annual V-T Game is a great rivalry, and in some respects it is. For players and fans of both teams, it’s a game they hate to lose. A win means bragging rights, good for a year.

But, the reality is, from a football standpoint, it hasn’t been much of a rivalry, because Tennessee High has dominated.
Virginia High fans hope that new coach Chris Thurman will do something to change that, and, after his first two games, the V-T Game appears to be worth the chatter.

Both the Bearcats and the Vikings struggled in their openers and then put up big numbers on Friday in their district and conference openers. On paper, anyway, the teams appear to be awfully even.

After former Louisville coach John L. Smith took over at Michigan State in 2003, he and I talked at a sports editors’ meeting about the intrastate rivalry between the Spartans and the Wolverines.

When he asked me what I thought about it, I said I thought the rivalry could be one of the best in the country – something akin to Auburn and Alabama – but it wasn’t because Michigan State didn’t take care of business.

Fans always knew what the Wolverines were going to bring to the table, I contended, but no one could ever predict which Spartans team would show up.
Smith agreed, saying it was up to Michigan State to make the rivalry a great one, and he did everything he could to do that. He never beat Michigan in four tries, but those games were some of the best ever played in the series, including a 3-overtime gem at Michigan Stadium in 2004.

What will it take to elevate the V-T Game to that level?

It’s up to Virginia High.

And no one knows that better than Chris Thurman.

JIM CNOCKAERT is sports editor of the Herald Courier. He can be reached at jcnockaert@bristolnews.com and at (276) 645-2572.