Well, yes. We all do.
The Bible thing allows you to differentiate between West Virginia University, where locals call Morgantown “a drinking town with a football problem,” and Baylor, which seems to have low rates of alcohol consumption, but shares UWV’s burning commitment to recruiting the best players regardless of, er, violent propensities.
At both schools there’s an unsettling conflation of football and the school’s spirit of choice (alcohol, God). And at both schools, whether they regard their players as Christian Soldiers or Frat Boys on Steroids, violence appears to be totally okay.
Goes without saying that guns and gangs (Baylor’s home, Waco, is in the headlines for biker/police shoot-outs) make up much of the rest of the social fabric at these locations.
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And don’t forget sex. Nobody competes with the University of Montana and Grizzlyville (used to be Missoula, but the football team is the Grizzlies) for broad-shouldered sexual assault. But Baylor’s in there trying.
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Anyone with the intestinal fortitude to examine the deep structure of Baylor – as in, how do you actually produce places like Baylor and Waco? – will tend to gravitate toward the school’s board of trustees, where a Bobby Lowder-like figure name of Buddy Jones seems to run the school and the town.
Buddy’s real enthusiastic about Baylor. Back in 2012, when they won a few games and all, his response was this:
“We like to use biblical analogies, and this is a year of biblical proportions,” Buddy Jones, a regent at the university, told the New York Times in 2012. “As we would say in Christendom, it’s like an early rapture.”
When his vision of the proper role of the booster was threatened by the alumni association, Jones (then chairman of the board of trustees) wrote to a fellow zealot that he couldn’t wait to
put on camp (sic) and load my weapons and go hunting for BAA game. Licking my chops.
Buddy’s official trustee statement has a rapturous boy/girl thing going to explain the nature of the school:
“Baylor’s uniqueness is her commitment to quality higher education by adapting to the 21st century, while never straying from her deep roots in God’s word and her role in his plan for mankind.”
Was Buddy the genius behind the groom’s cake at his daughter’s wedding?
[The cake was] an edible replica of Baylor’s … new stadium with a saluting bear in the middle. But perhaps the most impressive part of the cake is the video screen, which looks like it actually works. At the very least, it had a light in it that gave the illusion of working.
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So much of this comes together this Saturday night, when a match-up between two of the nation’s scummiest football schools – LSU and Bama – will feature a political candidate’s prostitutes and patriots ad. Layers upon layers upon layers.
November 9th, 2015 at 8:28PM
Lots of Baylor graduates in my family, including my wife, my daughter, my mother, and — yes — my grandmother (plus many others). I’m the black sheep of the family; I didn’t go there.
That list of 2009 regents includes TWO of my former pastors . . . .
December 16th, 2015 at 4:25PM
It’s West Virginia Univeristy (WVU), not University of West Virginia (UWV).
December 16th, 2015 at 5:06PM
WVU Grad: Many thanks. I changed it. UD