There’s a big story, potentially, about a scooter accident involving a UVA Basketball student-athlete, but nobody in the media is reporting on it, though everybody, it seems, is talking about it.
The details, such as there are details, are sketchy: best as I have been able to glean, the accident either did or didn’t occur a couple of weeks ago, which, best I can pin it down, would have been the week of April 29, and from the rumor mill, this accident was said to have involved a scholarship student-athlete on the men’s basketball team.
This is the story, such as it is, that is all over the interwebs, and yet, no one in the accredited media, what’s left of it, is writing about it.
Not because we’re not trying, though trying, when it comes to getting information from UVA Athletics, is like the trip to the dentist that Jay Bilas likes to reference on ESPN when he talks about teams having to prepare for Tony Bennett’s Pack Line defense.
Which is why, on stories of any importance, the last thing I do is get in touch with the sports-information folks at UVA Athletics to ask, because they’d be the last people to be willing to share what they know.
Seriously, they had me submit a Freedom of Information Act request last week when I reached out to ask about the length of time left on Bennett’s contract, which, today is the deadline for UVA to respond to me on that.
That one is a pretty simple question that should have come back with a lightning-quick answer, and yet the university is taking the legal limit of five working days to respond, because that’s what UVA does.
This, you have to remember, is the same outfit that is fighting a much more significant public-records request from the Daily Progress over the report into the Nov. 13, 2022, shootings of three UVA Football players – Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis and D’Sean Perry.
It’s pretty obvious that UVA should release that report, but UVA has more money than god, and they’re willing to spend it on lawyers to keep things it doesn’t want getting out from, you know, getting out.
Against that backdrop, a scooter accident that either did or didn’t occur involving a basketball player or somebody else or nobody else, hell naw, UVA isn’t going to concede anything.
What I can tell you is, the people that I’ve reached out to about this story, no one has told me that the details that are being speculated on are wrong.
That speaks volumes to me right there.
And it has me thinking, if there actually is a kid who was injured in a scooter accident, and the injuries are enough to keep him from playing next season, and folks are going to find out sooner or later, what’s with the pretense?
The way to do business here would seem to be pretty simple. All the PR folks at UVA Athletics would have to do is drop a leak to a Mike Barber, David Teel or Greg Madia, on background, so that it’s not attributed to anybody directly, and then, story’s out there.
Pull off the Band-Aid, basically.
A day or two later, the UVA Basketball world would have moved on from this story to whatever the next important story might be out there.
Why this isn’t done is obvious: typical UVA institutional arrogance.
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Chris Graham
