Virginia Tech: Some thoughts from afar

The licensed bore and the curmudgeon both like to say that as big pictures go, sports are insignificant.

Many times I would find that a hard point to refute, never more than when considering that most peculiar of species, The Fan - and I have not a few of these in my family (how sad to see grown men and women who can barely fill the time between Sunday game day).

Of course, stacked against human tragedy and shortcoming, what really does hold its significance? It’s one of the easiest - and therefore emptiest - arguments to make, not least because the cosmic punch line has it all over us: There isn’t a breath that you and I catch and release that has a remote chance against that most clichéd of considerations, The Grand Scheme of Things.

But if you can wrest your view out of the metaphysical, you can consider the Virginia Tech golf team, who managed to win an Atlantic Coast Conference co-title with Georgia Tech, a perennial college golf powerhouse, this past weekend, after trailing significantly.

Hokie golfer after Hokie golfer spoke to the press of their determination, but they hardly needed to: The accomplishment itself stands for what it must have taken for these five men to forget why the world is talking so much about Virginia Tech these days and just play their best games.

But the point is, of course, that none of them forgot, or had any intention to do so, despite the near certainty that many, if not all, had at least a loose connection to those who died during the shooting on their campus last week, and very likely those connections were anything but loose.

And right there is something you can throw at all those sitting on the significance bandwagon. Human endeavor and accomplishment has always been two scales tipped between tears and triumph, and we often search for a balance. People died tragically at Virginia Tech. Five young men from that school still found a way to win and honor their classmates (and many of them did literally honor them). Just a game?

It’s been strange to watch the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings here, far away from the immediacy of events, with only that odd mix of compassion and criticism (gun control, people!) that Europeans can deal out. Nearly a week on from the shootings, the news of the V-tech golf team won’t reach over here, in any meaningful way at least. But there’s plenty of significance in that win, not least the reminder it can serve of how even something as seemingly arbatrary as sports can help us believe, if only fleetingly, that the Grand Scheme of Things might want those scales to rest level one day.