The top WVU sports moments of the year

BlueandGoldNews.com
Rich Rodriguez and family return to Morgantown after he was named the WVU football head coach.

MORGANTOWN — It seems unfair, really. You sit down to recapture history when you approach these year-end reviews, yet this year the ink isn’t even dry on the history of the No. 1 story of 2024 when you begin to write it, for it just happened.

Call it what you will, but the No. 1 story of the year is that Rich Rod came home.

Whether everyone wanted him to or not is debatable, but when you really sank your teeth into the main course of athletic director Wren Baker’s search for a replacement of football coach Neal Brown, you knew he had only one real choice and that was Rich Rodriguez.

There were two ways to look at the Rodriguez hire 17 years after he left WVU in disgrace but then in despair.

He had just lost to Pitt, his efforts to squeeze a new contract extension out of the school and then President Mike Garrison had gone off the rails, not necessarily because his requests were exurbanite because they weren’t, but nonetheless he was sour on the school, the school was sour on him and after a truly disgraceful performance at home against Pitt in a game that could have led to a national championship, well…

Well, indeed, Michigan was pushing him for an answer. A year earlier he had turned down Alabama, but now it was Michigan knocking and, dang it, did he really want to face his administration, his team, his fans any longer after 13-9?

So, he left. The state was in an uproar. Had he beaten Pitt not a soul felt he would lose a national championship game to a beatable Ohio State team. People were mad. No, they were irate. They wanted no more of Rich Rodriguez and most of them were happy when it didn’t work out at Michigan and then at Arizona.

But home is home and after 17 years, if you are any kind of person, you offer up the peace pipe. That is what WVU did.

Rodriguez had recreated himself at Jacksonville State in Alabama. He was a winning football coach again. The job was open. The price was right and the right people were putting the money up behind him.

In truth, it was a no-brainer.

WVU was desperate for football success. They had become a non-entity in the national picture, a .500 team with far better talent than that. They had good players, good people and were in a league where they felt all they needed was someone to kick some butt for them and no one was ever better at that than Rich Rodriguez.

And so, between the end of the regular season and maybe the most meaningless bowl game ever played by a Mountaineer team, Rich Rodriguez was announced as the 36th football coach in WVU history, welcomed home by none other the Hall of Fame coach Don Nehlen, greeted by the young people’s sports hero, Pat McAfee and his national TV show.

It was instant fame, instant credibility, instant backing by the money people.

Now all Rich Rodriguez had to do was the hardest thing any of us have done in our lives, drink from the fountain of youth.

Would it still be there?

No one knew, for sure, but what they did know was that it felt right, it looked right and anything short of taking this chance would have been wrong.

It was the No. 1 sports story of the year in West Virginia.

•••

No. 2

Jerry West dies at 86

Maybe the rebirth of Rich Rodriguez was the counter to what probably would have been the biggest story in any other year as Jerry West, the greatest athlete ever to play at the school, died.

A tormented youth who stayed home for college and was the centerpiece of the golden era of Mountaineer basketball, Jerry West took the front door of a college basketball national championship during his three years of playing between Hot Rod Hundley and Rod Thorn.

Imagine, if you can, three national basketball Hall of Famers through the 1950s and into the 1960s, each who took his career through WVU and into the NBA where they would carry their influence into the 2000s, West and Thorn as executives and Thorn as a radio broadcaster.

As great as Hundley and Thorn were, though, West was the centerpiece. Many believe he remains one of the 10 greatest basketball players of all time, yet may well have been equally as good as he built the Los Angeles Lakers into a championship team and then rebuilt them again

It started as a youth in Cabin Creek, an abused son who withdrew into himself and into a basketball court. He played his high school ball at East Bank High and was so good that when they won the 1956 state championship they actually renamed the town “West” Bank for a day.

It was the kind of fame that West never really sought out, but that he couldn’t avoid. It found him, so much so that he became the image of the National Basketball Association, his silhouette serving as the league’s logo.

And may we say it remains the coolest logo in professional sports.

His was a classic and yet sometimes tragic career. His only NBA championship as a player came at the very end of his prime, when the NBA finally found a way to match him up with Wilt Chamberlain and the two finally gave him the ring he pushed so hard to attain.

His nicknames were many from the unflattering Zeke from Cabin Creek, which he hated, to The Logo, which was far more to his liking, but the one that summed him up was Mr. Clutch.

Yet that title kept avoiding him.

He had led West Virginia to the NCAA Final in 1959 against California, yet fell a point short.

Over the years as an NBA player, one of the four of five best players in an era when every night or so it seemed on the other side of the ball was Bill Russell and the Celtics, Oscar Robertson, Wilt Chamberlain…so many great and he shined as brightly as all of them.

Finally, the 1971-72 Lakers won 69 games with him and Chamberlain and Elgin Baylor, a record at the time, including a 33-game winning streak that remains unequaled. They avenged a finals loss to the New York Knicks that season, freeing West’s soul and giving him his ring.

“The last time I won a championship was in the 12th grade” he said after scoring 23 points in the fifth and final game, an acknowledgement back to that East bank team. “This is a fantastic feeling. This is one summer I’m really going to enjoy”

As the Lakers’ general manager, West found far more success. He put together “Show Time”, gathered the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson and James Worthy to win the championship in 1985 against the Celtics, and then did it again in 1987 and 1988.

Then, in 2000, he did it again, trading for Kobe Bryant right after he was drafted and signing Shaquille O’Neill.

West left the Lakers that year but watched that group go on to win two more championships.

West was something of a physical freak in a way. He wasn’t the tallest or the fastest, but he had these amazingly long arms and a drive within him that kept him working at becoming the best in the game.

It was in the playoff when West really rose to the occasion. In that 1970 final against the Knucks, down by two with the clock taking victory further and further away he canned a half court shot to tie the game. There being no 3-point rule then, it only sent the game to overtime and the Lakers lost that game in overtime.

West was the NBA scoring champion in 1969-70 with a 31.2 average and he averaged 27 points a game for his career, which was third highest to Chamberlain and his friend and teammate Elgin Baylor when he retired.

And in the playoffs he averaged 30 points a game 7 times, including 40.6 in 1964.