I recently ran into a Virginia Tech alum that I used to play rec-league basketball with, and was telling me about how he was going to be at the Metallica concert in Blacksburg last night.
Yes, color me jealous.
“It probably goes against your UVA principles to be there,” he said.
Actually, no. Big fan of Metallica, and I would love to see them in concert, and I assumed that environment down there in Lane Stadium was going to be wild, and from looking at the videos online, it looked iconic, in addition to literally seismic.
What I hate about it: that we UVA folks don’t have something like “Enter Sandman” as part of our fan experience.
The folks who do the gameday stuff for basketball had us hooked for a few years on “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC, but then, inexplicably, dropped that in favor of a run of placeholder songs.
Maybe AC/DC wanted more money for the rights to keep playing it before the opening tip than our billionaires were willing to pay?
I don’t know the deal there.
(I’ll assume basic incompetence; not a fan of the gameday-ops folks at the alma mater.)
Even when we were getting “Thunderstruck” at basketball games, the football gameday people have been using “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses before the opening kickoff for several years now, which, that’s fine, but it’s not ours, and it’s also not consistent.
Tech fans sing (literally sing, every word) to “Enter Sandman” wherever there are more than two of them in one place with some kind of competition about to begin.
Meanwhile, we can’t decide on a song from one event to the next.
Wisconsin has “Jump Around” from House of Pain, which reunited in 2017 for a 25th anniversary tour, but otherwise, the folks up in Madison aren’t going to get their “Enter Sandman” registering on the Richter scale moment like the Tech folks got last night in Blacksburg.
Sadly, WVU ain’t getting John Denver to sing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” live in Morgantown.
Ditto Florida, not getting Tom Petty to croon “I Won’t Back Down.”
Whatever assemblage of people calling themselves Lynyrd Skynyrd is on tour right now could do “Sweet Home Alabama” at Bryant-Denny, but honestly, I saw a Lynyrd Skynyrd show a few years ago at a county fair, so, not that big a deal.
Virginia Tech fans and alums got something with that Metallica show at Lane Stadium that literally no other fan base will ever get.
As if we couldn’t hate them any more …
(I kid. But, no, seriously. I hate them even more now.)
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Chris Graham
