OT: UVA Murder Article
...on this story than many here since my daughter is a student at UVA who lives around the corner from the victim and her alleged murderer and knows people who know both. The night we dropped her off at school last August, a Va Tech student in C'ville for a Metallica concert left the concert mid-performance without her friends and was picked up and murdered. Her body wasn't found for months later. In addition, my son will be attending Va Tech in the fall and I know many folks whose kids were on campus during the Cho massacre. As a result, I have a keen interest in the issue of campus violence.
Every time I see a picture of Yeardley Love I have to scroll or click away to avoid the tears. This is such a tragedy.
I went to the same small all-boys lax-powerhouse middle school as George Huguely. He was 2 years ahead of me so I only knew him from his dominance on the lacrosse field.
I really think the "LAX culture" is an overplayed meme. To suggest that Huguely did this because he parties with people who wear the same sunglasses and flip flops as him is ridiculous. He's an asshole and he probably would have been an asshole if he played soccer instead of lacrosse.
Thank you for changing this post's title. As mentioned above, its previous title was thoughtless.
Regardless of the back and forth, this was a good link and engendered a good conversation among the MGoBlogerati.
OTOH, it is bad form to upvote your own post. Please remember this for future posts.
As a follow-up to what I said - anyone remember the partying culture depicted in movies like "Varsity Blues"? (Granted, it's Hollywood, but there are plenty of real-life applications. Life imitates art.) This is a lacrosse thing insofar as a lacrosse player was the perp and a lacrosse player was the victim; therefore it affects the game of lacrosse. That's where it stops being a lacrosse thing; it is not the other way round. There isn't a "lacrosse culture" so much as a "17-22-year-old" culture. In Texas it's a "football culture." In Canada it's a "hockey culture," and the large point is it doesn't matter what the sport or the background or even if a sport is involved at all. I didn't need to be on the lacrosse team in college to get stinking drunk and hit on girls or be at places where that goes on, and neither does anyone else.
...to my wife and here's what she had to say:
I think what he writes has truth, but men killing the women they "love"...feeling as if they "own" them and aggression are not unique to lacrosse players or elites. Feelings of entitlement come in all flavors! He paints with too broad of a brush.
As usual, she hit the nail on the head. See chitownblue2 above for the same sentiment.
Very sad for the girl, her family and the community but it's only news because she's a white woman. I haven't watched CNN in a very long time but I'm sure Nancy Grace is exploiting her death for ratings.
My dad's take on it was just the opposite: part of the reason it's not on the 24-hour news cycle is because the victim was white and not black like the Duke girl. No hate crime or race aspect = not as interesting.
I think it's because of the oil spill and the Times Square bomb that it's not the #1 story, but hey.
Some disconnected thoughts:
First, this is a great thread. Vive Le MGoBlog.
Second, I'm somewhat torn as to what to think about the referenced article. I think it's well-written (the college-aged writers at my university's student paper don't write like that) and well-meaning, as many have said. On the other hand, I agree with Chitown et al. that it misses a larger story about male sports culture, and ends up grasping at straws a bit.
On the third hand, there is something intrinsically different about the largely wealthy, largely white, highly insular world of D1 LAX that I don't think you get in many other sports. I'm trying to think of a comparison case, and I'm coming up short. Maybe water polo? I'm not sure it matters a whole lot in terms of this case, however. Sometimes a jilted, homicidal fucker is just that.
Finally, I think the article is a great example of what happens when tragedy befalls privileged white people, especially privileged white women: explanations are needed. I'm willing to bet that the press coverage of Jasper Howard's (to take only one example) murder, both in volume and in tone, wasn't anything like this coverage, in the sense that there's no real collective cognitive dissonance when a black football player from the inner city is killed. White LAX player from the suburbs? How could this happen? Explanations are needed. It's understandable on one level, but sad as well.
This is a sad reflection of society today. Explanations are needed, largely because an incident like this isn't expected at a University such as UVA, and it isn't expected to happen to wealthy white children. And from this, it seems we shouldn't be as sad or shouldn't be as outraged when Jasper Howard was killed. I think we should have been just as sad, as a kid who had worked his butt off to get to a place in his life where he was finally "safe", he get's cut down. The disparity in reaction is disturbing, as both are tremendous tragedies.
Sorry, but I think that article wasn't very good at all. It should not have been published. At times, it came very close to offering a justification for the (alleged) murderer. It implied that his actions were somehow the fault of underlying issues which a wealthy background and lacrosse aggravated. As the father of three daughters, this is utterly offensive. He (allegedly) murdered Ms. Love with his own hands by bashing her head against a wall. Lacrosse didn't do that, he did.
The article also seems to imply that the sport of lacrosse and its "culture" is at fault, but expressly disclaims this in the article. So I guess that wasn't the point.
The author then takes a sideways shot at UVA's coach by noting a number of arrests, a suicide and this all happened under his tenure as coach. The author says we can't ignore the "connections" between these events. However, he makes no effort to actually connect these events, or to show how the coach was at fault. This is irresponsbile. If you are going to suggest a coach is to blame for arrests, a suicide and an (alleged) murder, you need to man-up and say it. And prove it.
He is at his worst when he imagines the parents meeting and suggests Ms. Love's parents would try to express their forgiveness of the (alleged) murderer. If so, they are far, far more forgiving than I. I can't (and wont make myself try to) imagine what her parents must be going through now. I do wonder why the author needs to imagnie them offering forgiveness to this rich lacrosse star.
Ultimaltely, his point seems to be that lacrosse needs a "gut check" or Ms. Love's death would be "in vain." WTF? Does he really think that her death at the hands of drunk would have meaning if it causes rich assholes to treat each other better?
If his point was that lacrosse players are assholes because they party hard and treat others like crap, then he should just say that. His efforts to extrapolate between that point and Ms. Love's death are misguided at best.
I've barely read the article, but based on your response it is apparent to me that the author doesn't have any children, so he's hardly qualified to speak for other parents especially when making such naive statements. I'm not a parent myself but this is basic common sense, plus I know better than to:
1) impose my "morality" upon others, especially when I don't understand their situation, and
2) draw such asinine conclusions that what happened is a clear result of any particular thing based on this one case study.
Now I have to read the article before I sound like any more of a hypocrite, but I think that that's what's going on there.
It may just be a young writer who wrote something with no clear point that contained alot of very naive and foolish statements. An editor should have made the author clarify what he was actually tying to say and delete the stuff about the Love family giving forgiveness, the UVA coach, etc. (FWIW - I didn't neg you - not sure why you were negged.)
Well written but I am still not buying it. This article is everything that is wrong with society in general. We are all looking for bullshit reasons to justify our own stupidity. The kid got drunk and beat this poor girl to death. Why should this be an indictment against the lacrosse culture? In every sport there is a pack mentality that leads to some macho bravado from those involved. It is as natural as the leaves blowing in the wind. You are responsible for you and you alone it is that simple.
I understand the idea that these wealthy private schools from the south somehow insulate their students from "real world issues" but lets be honest, its not the schools that insulate its their parents and their parents money. Regardless of whether they attended this private school, these kids would not be exposed to any real "life lessons" living in their gated community, driving a 40k car and attending a public school where more than likely theyll form friends with kids from their neighborhood.. No matter where you go people are going to seperate by economics, its simply unavoidable.
That being said, I feel lacrosse culture had little to do with this .. I played forJamesville Dewitt HS (#10 in that article) its public, but the same socioeconomic seperation exists. And as much as lacrosse is "a hotbed" in the south, it is an absolute religion in upstate NY (think 7000+ people for a HS Class C state title game).. That being said, I dont feel that lacrosse ever gave anyone I know who has attended a DI instituition on athletics a detachment from reality or increased barbarism.. to be honest the lax players I know were stoned 50% of the time and extremely non-violent. I think this is an isolated case of someone who happens to play a sport who wasnt taught by Dad how to control his goddamn temper and treat women. I learned lots of things the hard way from lacrosse (work ethic consequences etc) and, while I cant say I didnt enjoy some stature from my affiliation with the team, I think it is folly to assume this kid thought he was above the law or that rules did not apply. He killed this girl with brutality, something that majority of peope are simply not capable of. Does this correlate exclusively to a lacrosse lifestyle? I dont believe that to be the case
Having gone to college in Virginia with a lot of people who came from backgrounds like Huguely, I felt the article made a noble effort to convey the "culture" (even if the author did overuse that word) of the wealthy, east coast, prep school grad at college. It wasn't that different in the 80s, in my experience.
But ultimately what I can't shake is this feeling that the blogger is flailing around trying to answer a question that ultimately belies a bias: "How can we explain why a white, wealthy, privileged, ambitious college student did this?" I think there's shock surrounding this case (and ones like it) that might not be as great if his background was different, if he wasn't privileged, at a nice school, etc. So people crank up their efforts to make sense of it. To explain how a nice white boy from a privileged family could be a murderer. We unpack the baggage around wealth and prep sports and blah blah blah.
As others have said, this kind of behavior, and its tragic outcome, happens across the spectrum of class. But I think we make a bigger deal about the cases that challenge our assumptions about who the bad kids typically are, and we stretch to find "reasons" why.