ICYMI
- UVA Basketball: ‘Hoos hold off upset-minded Wake Forest, post 75-70 win
- UVA Basketball: Wake was feisty, took ‘Hoos to the limit, in 75-70 loss
At issue: protocol for people without credentials visiting on press row, and selective enforcement of same.
My wife, Crystal Abbe Graham, who, regular readers are aware, is also an award-winning journalist and broadcaster on staff here at AFP, was the visitor in question.
Press row was a ghost town a half-hour before tonight’s game, as is usual, and after a longer-than-usual walk into the arena – UVA Athletics has a designated media-parking area, but it runs out of spaces because they let lots of folks park there, including media and others, and if you’re unlucky, you get relegated to an overflow lot about a quarter-mile away.
We were the unlucky dogs tonight, and as those reading this who live in Central Virginia would be aware, it was raining rather prodigiously; meaning, I was drenched, from head to toes, after that walk, Crystal not quite as much so, because she could at least cut through the parking garage, given that she had a ticket, tonight for a seat in the upper deck.
Routine for me pregame is to set myself up at my seat on press row – the focus: get the laptop up and running – and then, Crystal and I either hang out in the concourse above the media section, located in Section 106, or we take a walk around the arena, to see the sights.
As I was setting myself up tonight, I noticed an email in the inbox related to an interview I’ve been working to set up, with pro wrestling legend Chris Jericho, and, with the seat next to me – assigned to AFP staffer Scott German – going unused at the moment, with Scott down in the media dining room downstairs, I asked Crystal to take a seat while I emailed the PR person for Chris Jericho to get things squared away.
I noticed Bacher making his way up from his seat courtside to Section 106, and didn’t think anything of it.
Until he made a beeline for my seat at the end of Row 2.
“She can’t be here without a credential,” he said, and I told him I understood, that I was answering an email, and …
He interrupted me to say again, “She can’t be here without a credential,” and I started to get the message: that he meant, she couldn’t even sit in the empty seat beside me, assigned to my colleague, a half-hour before the game, as I finished an email.
Now, some backstory: a few years back, this Bacher guy confronted us after an early-season game because I’d reassigned our second credential for the night to Crystal, after Scott German had to beg out from covering that game because of a prior commitment; Bacher insisted to me that an unofficial practice dating to his predecessor that had been observed dating back more than 20 years allowing an editor to reassign an unused credential to another staffer had not, in fact, ever been a practice, unofficial or otherwise, and we were in violation.
What bothered me then, and never stopped bothering me: he reached inside Crystal’s shirt vest to snatch the credential from her neck.
Natural reaction: um, dude, you don’t put your damn hands on my wife, like, ever, but Scott and a small group of fellow media colleagues talked me out of reporting this up the chain, in the interest of not rocking the boat.
Fast forward to tonight, then, and all I can think is, what is the deal here?
The first incident, from a few years back, was about us covering a game, and at worst, lack of awareness on my part to a new policy being enforced internally regarding the reassignment of credentials, which still didn’t require a UVA Athletics staff person snatching a credential from the offending reporter’s neck.
Tonight was just, you know, fellow media members have visitors in the press section all the time; not naming names, but one guy has his wife sitting with him during the game when there’s an empty seat nearby, which is often enough – there aren’t as many of us in the media as there used to be, with years of industry layoffs decimating papers in Virginia to the point that, most nights, there are less than 10 of us ink-stained wretches in the upper media section.
You’d think the working policy in the media-relations office there at UVA Athletics would be: don’t go out of your way to piss off the few media members investing their time and resources into covering our games that we have left.
I’m sure this had nothing to do with:
- me being the guy writing critically of UVA Athletics over Jahmal Edrine playing the entirety of the 2025 football season while he was under investigation for rape and abduction.
- me being the guy who wrote critically last summer after UVA Athletics extended the contract of an assistant swimming coach who had, days earlier, been put on probation by a sports governing body for emotional abuse of swimmers at three previous coaching stops.
- me being the only member of the media in Virginia to raise issue with how the Trump and Youngkin administrations engineered the appointment of the questionably credentialed Scott Beardsley to be the new UVA president.
Gotta do the ICYMI thing here on those, since they decided to egg me on tonight.
ICYMI
- UVA Football player charged with rape, abduction: Who knew what, when?
- Cav Aquatics, UVA Swimming coach Gary Taylor on probation after admitting to emotional abuse of athletes
- Prof shades new UVA president: Not qualified for elite university presidency
All coincidence.
My wife just happened to be sitting where she shouldn’t have been – for a couple of minutes in an empty seat a half-hour before the game.
That’s why the head of the gestapo marched up from courtside – to enforce a rule that doesn’t seem to apply to anybody else.
If this wasn’t clear already, I don’t intend to take up space in their precious press section anymore.
It’s not long until they take that section out to squeeze a few extra dollars out of the lower bowl anyway.
Based on the number of empties that I saw on the TV broadcast tonight, they’re going to need the money.
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Chris Graham
