Some more insight into the scene at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte for last weekend’s UVA-WVU game came in this morning from a member of the Cavalier Marching Band, which, it sounds, didn’t have the experience that some of our fans down there for the game told me they had.
I’d heard from several people in the fan base who said the West Virginia fans that they encountered were pleasant, complimentary, wishing them good luck, the rest.
The band’s experience, as told to me by a second-year student who is a member of the CMB, was a study in stark contrast.
ICYMI
It didn’t help, from what I was told, that whoever was in charge of logistics for the event had the CMB unload in the middle of a sea of WVU fan tailgates, at what appeared to be a main entrance for the West Virginia fan contingent to enter and exit the stadium.
The police detail provided was token, at best – two officers, I was told, for the band and its support staff, a group that numbers in the vicinity of 250 people.
“Which left us wide open to a constant stream of verbal and even occasional physical abuse from WVU fans, up to and including homophobic and racist slurs, antisemitism and countless other things,” the CMB member told me.
This was the scene for the band getting into the stadium and then leaving after the game – “with continued harassment all the way through.”
“The level of abuse we received is worse than band members report from when we travel to Blacksburg, which should really say a lot,” I was told.
The student wrote to me to make the observation that “if this is the treatment we received as the official band of one of the schools, then the average ‘Hoo fan, lacking even the small protection detail we had, must have suffered just as hard.”
“There were plenty of polite and lovely WVU fans, and I don’t want to generalize, but there were at least twice as many inebriated jerks,” the kid told me.
“I honestly can’t blame many fans who chose not to come to this game.”
Editorial comment: I don’t know why anybody goes to a football game in person anymore, considering.
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Chris Graham
