Wednesday, 9 April 2008 15:49 by
Dave The email had, shall we say, a certain attitude to it.
“Who is this yahoo from Fairfax that won the basketball pool?” asked one of the competitors.
That would be Tim Hogan of Fairfax. The only man to pick Kansas to win two games in the Final Four. The only man to be second-guessed by his own son when he scored a mere eight points through the Sweet 16 and Elite 8. And the only man who gets bold sports predictions right once every 30 years.
For a bit more background, let me take you back to a feature done in the May 27, 1978 issue of The Roanoke Times & World News. The story was on the Virginia Tech campus radio station, WUVT, and its live coverage of Virginia Tech baseball. The story, written by Jack Bogaczyk, focused on two seniors: Dave Scarangella of Norfolk and Tim Hogan of Fairfax.
Yep, we called baseball games back in the day, graduated from Virginia Tech in 1978, and never saw each other again.
That changed last April. The Virginia Tech shootings on April 16 stunned all Hokies, and I found myself calling and hearing from former classmates all across the country. The week after the shootings, the owners of the radio station I was running (WAGE) decided to fire the staff and go all network, resulting in a few stories in area media, including the Washington Post.
One of the people who saw that story was Tim Hogan of Fairfax. So after a 29-year absence, the voice on the end of the phone said, “ Since you don’t seem to have a job these days, you think you can break away from the couch and play in a golf tournament with me?”
It took only about 10 minutes of golf before we were back needling each other the way we did in college. Three of the four golfers in the foursome were Hokies, as we made fun of each other’s lack of ability, laughed about the old times, and got choked up about the current times in Blacksburg. One of Hogan’s daughters had been friends with one of the victims, and none of us could understand the senseless loss of life.
Another month or two went by before I got an email from Hogan, asking if I would be going to the Virginia Tech football game with East Carolina, the first time Hokie Nation would be together in one place since the shooting. “No,” I said. “It’s going to be too emotional.”
A week later he called, saying he’d secured a gig for me to keep stats for the Westwood One Radio network at the Tech-ECU game, thus forcing me to go to Blacksburg. “We all needed to be here,” Tim said to me when I made it up to the press box. I sat next to Terry Bowden, wiped away a huge buildup of fluid from my eyes when they released 32 balloons in memory of the victims, kept stats, then drove home. But Tim was right. We all needed to be there.
Hogan, as I learned from the golf course, has always been good with his foot in the rough.
So that’s who Tim Hogan of Fairfax is. During our years at Tech, he was a huge fan of any D.C.-area team, and seemed to predict every year that the Washington Bullets were going to win the NBA title. In 1978, he was actually right, as Dick Motta of “it’s not over until the fat lady sings” led them to a championship.
Thirty years later, he finally got another one right.
The fat lady sings again.
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