This post, by a recent University of Virginia graduate, is the best reflection on convicted murderer George Huguely I’ve so far seen. He captures the upper-crust/crapulous, gracious living/coked to the gills thing at the heart of many elite prep schools and colleges.
[A]mong athletes, lacrosse players are among the biggest partiers, according to a National Collegiate Athletic Association report published this year looking at substance use among college athletes.
… The survey found that male and female lacrosse players are more likely than any other kind of athlete to take amphetamines like Adderall, which many at U. Va., including Love, were prescribed for attention deficit disorder. And roughly 95 percent of the country’s male lacrosse players drank, the study claimed. Among women players, 85 percent consumed alcohol.
Two years ago, in the immediate wake of the crime, another college lacrosse player wrote well about his culture:
Aggression and alcohol abuse, of course, are hardly the province of lacrosse alone when it comes to men’s college athletics. But, when it comes alongside lacrosse, there’s an implied element of absolute indifference and arrogance as well.
He recalled something the lacrosse coach at Virginia said in a 1999 interview, long before his player Huguely murdered:
“Alcohol and lacrosse have gone hand-in-hand since my days at Brown [University] in the 1970s,” Starsia told The Washington Post… “Whether it is post-game celebrations or just in general, there was something about the sport and alcohol…”
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People don’t like being called arrogant and indifferent. Look at the comment thread on this Washingtonian piece.
Not the first bunch of comments; scroll down to the last five or six. These are enraged, indignant Huguely insiders insisting they did do things. They were not indifferent; they are not responsible. But as Anthony Schneck notes:
Although [the Huguely] story made national headlines in part because it seemed so shocking and unusual, the culture that allowed it to happen is not exceptional to UVA; it’s easy to protect the already privileged…
Easy; and far easier now than it was when The Great Gatsby, this culture’s iconic text (it features golf rather than lacrosse), was written. In Fitzgerald’s novel, Daisy Buchanan is protected after she kills a woman. Today’s Buchanans are vastly more Hummered up.