NCAA tournament gives VCU and Richmond something in common

“It’s fun during basketball season or in competition between the schools to play up the stereotypical, you know, the elitists, or however Richmond is perceived by VCU fans, and Richmond fans see VCU folks as having earrings in their nose and blue hair and all that. But at the end of the day, I think a lot more people from Richmond and VCU are friends. I’m not going to tell you that either one are rooting for each other in the Sweet 16. But I think it’s a pretty compelling story.”

Perched on a stool at Mulligan’s The Fan, a sports bar adjacent to VCU’s campus, Ed Harrington, VCU class of ’93, took a drag off his Camel, exhaled and pondered the differences between his alma mater and Richmond. His elbows were planted on the counter, and his shirt cuffs were rolled up, revealing tattoos on both arms as he tossed back a Rolling Rock.

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The Washington Post's LaVar Arrington, Dan Steinberg, Tarik El-Bashir and Jonathan Forsythe look ahead to the round of 16 games and debate which double-digit seed is most likely to continue its Cinderella run to the Final Four.

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Harrington, a production manager at Style Weekly, the city’s alternative news publication, said he doesn’t care about basketball. He was unaware Richmond and VCU played once a season (the Rams had won six straight prior to Richmond’s 72-60 triumph on Dec. 11), but he knew the two teams potentially could meet in the Elite Eight. Bragging rights, he definitely cares about.

He offers that Richmond students are known to pop their collars and come from wealth, while acknowledging — independent of Smith’s assessment — that VCU students are known to be heavily tattooed and pierced.

“It’s almost like a community college,” Harrington said of VCU. “People take classes, but they don’t always graduate.”

A stop along the way

Identity matters in a city full of transplants. People come here to go to school or to work for the government or to work for the military or to stop by en route to someplace else. That dynamic extends to sports.

The Richmond Braves, the Triple-A affiliate of the Major League Baseball team based in Atlanta, made its home here for 42 years, before leaving in 2008 following a dispute over a new stadium project.

“This is a city that loses teams,” said Wes McElroy, an afternoon sports radio host on WRNL 910 AM. “You lose the Richmond Braves. You lose the Richmond Renegades. They’ve lost [other minor league] hockey teams before. They lose teams.”

And they lose coaches. Before Mooney, John Beilein and Jerry Wainwright coached at Richmond, and before Shaka Smart took over at VCU, Anthony Grant and Jeff Capel took the team to the NCAA tournament. All four left for higher-profile jobs in the past nine years. There is mounting unrest among the two fan bases that Mooney and Smart might soon follow suit, but those anxieties temporarily have been put on hold.

Neither team was expected to reach this point. VCU needed to beat Southern Cal just to reach the main field of 64 teams as an 11th seed. The Rams then went on to eliminate sixth-seeded Georgetown and third-seeded Purdue. Richmond took down Vanderbilt in its first game and then beat Morehead State to set up Friday’s game against top-seeded Kansas.

Tim Delano, a bar manager at Mulligan’s who moved here from Salem, Va. in 1987 to attend classes at VCU, can’t see why both sides wouldn’t pull for the other’s continued success, at least until they face each other.

“You’ve got these two teams that are in the Sweet 16 from one city, and no one would think that that city would be Richmond,” Delano said. “Why would you think that? But they’re rising to that level.”

Darien Brothers, a Richmond native, never once thought he would want to play for the school by the lake and gated houses. Now a sophomore guard for the Spiders, Brothers is helping change his team’s perception, nationally and locally.

“Usually it’s VCU that’s getting all the attention,” Brothers said. “It’s sort of like we’re putting Richmond on the map.”

And perhaps, one day, a billboard.