Pity the West Virginia Mountaineers
I like West Virginia. Some of my closest friends hail from the mountaineer state, and they’re good-natured about its unglamorous reputation. West Virginians are salt of the Earth – loyal and decent, sports-loving, and tough in the face of adversity. The last two points go together. Sports-loving West Virginians should be able to handle adversity, because they’ve had enough practice. In a terrain where snakes are commonplace, the state seems snake-bit when it comes to athletics. There’s the plane crash that claimed the Marshall football team in 1970, of course, but also a series of less tragic events in the last decade that have tried the souls of Mountaineer fans.
West Virginian football-lovers (a virtual redundancy) were traumatized in 2007, when West Virginia University lost its treasured coach, Rich Rodriguez, to the University of Michigan. Rodriguez, a West Virginian native who had lifted the program from mediocrity to excellence, was long courted by universities in greener pastures. For months he passionately disavowed any interest in leaving WVU, something he continued to do until he suddenly announced his departure – shortly before the Mountaineers’ post-season bowl game.
The traitorous Rodriguez was replaced by Bill Stewart, whose teams won 29 games and made three consecutive bowl appearances from 2008-10. However, the powers-that-be weren’t satisfied. They hired Dana Holgorsen to be Stewart’s offensive coordinator in 2011 and to take over the head coaching position in 2012, with Stewart to assume a position in the athletic department. But last month Stewart resigned from the university following revelations that he urged reporters to dig up dirt on Holgorsen. To make matters worse, with Holgorsen set to take over, dirt on him has indeed surfaced – at least a half-dozen episodes of public intoxication.
There’s another source of pathos surrounding the Mountaineers’ football program. The band plays the school’s unofficial theme song, John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads, at every game, and the crowd sings along with gusto. Just one problem: the song is not about West Virginia. Indeed, at the time the song was recorded in 1971, neither Denver nor the songwriters (Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert) had ever set foot in West Virginia.
Yes, the song does start out, “Almost Heaven, West Virginia,” but look at the specific geographical references in the lyrics: “Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River.” These lovely places bear almost no relationship to West Virginia. The Shenandoah River passes through a tiny tip of the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, and very little of the Blue Ridge Mountain lies in the state.
So why the “West Virginia”? Two obvious possibilities present themselves. Danoff and Nivert may have used “West” as short for western, as the music works better with one fewer syllable. That would make geographical sense, as the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah River are found primarily in the western portion of Virginia. Alternatively, the songwriters may be promotional geniuses, who foresaw that the song would be ingenuously seized upon by a state longing for a proud sing-along.
In either case, it’s sadly symbolic that the long-suffering Mountaineer fans are saddled with an ersatz theme song.