
Australian Open tennis was on the TV in the home office overnight Wednesday into Thursday as I finished up my writing on UVA-SMU.
It’s habit; I need something on the TV in the background when I work.
Silence, the way my brain works, is unnerving.
OK, so, I should say, I don’t follow tennis, and I had no idea that the match, pitting João Fonseca and Lorenzo Sonego, would mean anything to me in terms of UVA Athletics, until my ears perked up when one of the announcers said this about Fonseca:
“Well, a year ago, he was meant to go to University of Virginia, where he was going to get a full scholarship.”
OK, I’m paying attention.
Again, I don’t follow tennis, so I didn’t know that the 18-year-old was a UVA commit before deciding to turn pro, which seems to have been a wise move – in the first round at the Aussie Open, Fonseca upset No. 9 seed Andrey Rublev, 7-6 (1), 6-3, 7-6 (5).
He would go on to lose the match that I had on in the background in the home office in five sets, but I’m not writing this to tell you that.
Now, I tried to track down the names of the announcers, but you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get that kind of info.
I’m 95 percent sure I know who it was, but frustratingly, the guys never said their names – back when I was doing ESPN+ broadcasts of SoCon football and baseball, I’d make sure to say my name and the name of my color commentator every few minutes, in case anybody cared.
So, I can’t tell you with 100 percent certainty who it was that said this, but this is what they said:
“I think initially he wanted to go to Stanford, but he hadn’t been doing his homework,” the first guy said.
“Oh, he didn’t have the grades? He wasn’t studying hard enough?” the second guy said.
The first guy: “That’s a heckuva university. But so is Virginia.”
Pause.
“But I guess Virginia’s admissions are a little lower than Stanford,” the first guy said.
Mic drop.
First thought: Stanford is fourth in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, Virginia is tied for 24th, but I wonder how much of that is, Stanford is a private school that doesn’t have to take poor hick schlubs from rural high schools like me that public schools like UVA have to take.
Stanford doesn’t have to take on charity cases like yours truly, is my point there.
Second thought: an interview that we did for our book on the history of University Hall, Mad About U: Four Decades of Basketball at University Hall.
Dan Bonner, the UVA alum known widely for his work as a college hoops broadcaster, was the women’s basketball coach at Virginia for two seasons, from 1975-1977.
He told us a story about how he approached Gene Corrigan, the athletics director at the time, who later served as the president of the NCAA, about how it would help if UVA would start awarding scholarships for the women’s basketball program, to aid in recruiting.
This is in the very early years of Title IX; I mention that so that it makes sense why Bonner had to ask Corrigan to give him a couple of scholarships to work with.
Corrigan, per Bonner, wanted to prioritize the few scholarships UVA would give to women athletes toward swimming and tennis, because one day, a former UVA student-athlete might make it to an Olympics or to Wimbledon, and if the TV announcers mentioned UVA in the course of talking about her background, that would be good publicity.
Uh, huh.
See the connection I made in the inner recesses of my noggin as I was writing about UVA-SMU and listening to the Australian Open in the wee hours the other night?
Corrigan, who passed away in 2020, got his good publicity from tennis, alright.