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Fervor and serenity form heady mix of Hokie Pride
By ED MILLER, The Virginian-Pilot
© April 20, 2007
Take a remote, pastoral location, a town and campus so intertwined that when one exhales, the other has to inhale. Add the electricity of big-time college football. Toss in a history of being underestimated, of being the butt of jokes about farming or dirt roads or your mascot. Mix it all together and you have the phenomenon that is Hokie Pride. Outsiders can't claim to completely understand it. But for the past few days, the world has seen it on display, in the wake of Monday's shooting deaths at Virginia Tech. It has shown itself in countless Internet postings referencing Hokie Pride, Hokie Nation, Hokie Unity. In the outpouring of affection for a school so tragically wounded. In the unwillingness of many to seek out blame.
"If you listen to students being interviewed on CNN and some of those places, they get very leading questions about trying to find blame for what happened," said Rodger Pike, president of the Tidewater Chapter of the Hokie Club. "Almost to a student, they're not doing that. They're just saying, 'I love Virginia Tech and I'm not going anywhere.'"
It is not something new, this Hokie Pride. It predates the football fanaticism that was born in the early 1990s, taken to new heights by the Michael Vick-led teams of 1999 and 2000 and ratcheted even higher by Tech's entry into the ACC in 2004.
For decades, Tech students and alumni have viewed their school as a place removed, a place whose geographic isolation nurtured a sense of community, whose physical beauty exerted an undeniable pull.
"The second I walked into Blacksburg, I knew I never wanted to leave," said Chris Valluzzo, a filmmaker and 1998 graduate who is finishing a documentary called "Hokie Nation." "I love this area and have since the moment I saw it."
Many colleges inspire some level of passion among their graduates, a feeling that can grow as time passes and school years become more idealized.
At Virginia Tech, though, the feelings of pride run deeper than most, a fact acknowledged in The Princeton Review, an annual guide to colleges. In the section on the student body, a student said the unifying thread on campus is "that we are all proud Hokies."
"Being part of the Hokie nation is really special," another said.
Tech is a place where, for many, pride runs unabashed, undiluted by irony or cynicism. It's a campus known, one freshman told The Washington Post, for its "ridiculous sense of unity."
Where does it come from?
Geography plays a role. Blacksburg, a town of 39,000 located on a plateau between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains, is the classic middle-of-nowhere location.
"For four years, all you have is each other," said Rob Hurwitz, a Portsmouth native and 1977 graduate who lives in Allentown, Pa. " It's a brotherhood of people."
For students from urban or suburban locations, Tech has always offered serenity. For those who come from the small towns of Southwestern Virginia, it feels like home.
"There are no other distractions," said Wayne Campbell, a 1965 graduate who completed his doctorate at Tech in 1969 and retired to Blacksburg after 30 years in the oil industry in Texas and Oklahoma.
Campbell closes his e-mails with the signature "Living in HokieLand and Loving It!" Still, by his own admission, he was a latecomer to Hokie Pride.
"I never really had it to the same degree that students have it now," he said. "I was away for 30 years and came back and caught it. It's in the atmosphere."
Football is in the atmosphere, much more than even 20 years ago. The sport is a rallying point on many campuses, but Tech fans have become nationally known for their maroon-and-orange fervor.
"A Syracuse player once said it real well," Pike said. "He said the fans at Virginia Tech actually think they are playing."
A packed, roaring stadium is a school's most visible expression of unity, a conduit for celebrating everything fans have in common, and overlooking the things they don't. At Tech, as at many schools with agricultural roots, one of the things fans have traditionally shared is a desire to show the world they are as good as anyone else.
It's the same sort of dynamic found in other states where there are both a land grant school and a state university. In Texas, Longhorns have traditionally made fun of Aggies. Alabama fans look down at Auburn, and Tar Heels lord it over folks from N.C. State.
And, yes, University of Virginia fans have been known to make a joke or two about Virginia Tech.
"We've always been that poor little brother, that poor little cousin, compared to Virginia," Pike said. "That probably is part of it."
It is an increasingly outmoded stereotype, as Tech's stature as an academic institution has risen and as admissions have become steadily more competitive. But it's something many fans have clung to, and rallied behind.
Faced with ridicule, the response of many Tech people has been to celebrate the very things others have found amusing: the rural setting, its unusual mascot, even its maroon-and-orange color scheme.
"It's an 'Us vs. Them' thing; that's part of it," Campbell said. "You're ridiculing us because we're Hokies. Well, we're going to take pride in that."
"It doesn't have that hoity-toityness you have when people talk about living on the lawn at Virginia," said Chuck Zeitman, a Tech grad and NASA engineer who lives in Norfolk. "The down-to-earth part is what makes it accessible to anyone."
Valluzzo and his co-executive producer, Sean Kotz, set out to document that sense of pride in their film, "Hokie Nation: The Documentary," set for release in August. They interviewed more than 200 fans at football games last season and talked to thousands more off-camera.
"We developed themes throughout the movie dealing with community, respect, pride and those things that are not necessarily related to the football team," Valluzzo said.
He and Kotz are unabashed fans. Their goal was to make a movie that showed the world just how great Hokie Nation is, Valluzzo said.
This week, the world has learned in other ways, at a cost no one could have imagined. Valluzzo and Kotz began editing the film Saturday and plan to include some reference to Monday's tragedy.
"This is part of our story now," Valluzzo said.