Let me remind you of the Notre Dame fight song which also applies to WVU. "We never stagger, we never fall, we sober up with wood alcohol." If Pankey was upside down he'd obviously been forced off the road by a lost Huntingtonian driving in the median taking his kid up for freshman orientation at the "big colligitch".
I witnessed something that has become known as the "Miracle of The Keg" some 35 odd years ago in Morgantown that should be a primer for how the Morgantown PD treats WVU athletes.
I remember it like it was yesterday, I was with some friends, a couple of them on the football team, on a Saturday night after a game. We were standing on a corner by a market when a keg came rolling down the hill, hesitated on it's rim, and then tried to make a turn into town. It was the damndest thing I ever saw.
We got it stopped and were pondering what to do next. A cop drove up. The cop asked, " Where'd you fellas get that keg?" A friend answered "It rolled there." The cop didn't believe us. He started going on about some brawl that had happened at a rich kid frat at the top of the hill and how some of us matched the descriptions given by the frat boys. We said that there were a lot of guys in Morgantown that looked like us and drunken frat boys were often mistaken. Heck, two or three of us who were very recently reformed drunken frat boys swore to the fact. Did he believe us? No.
It was obvious the cop obviously knew nothing about physics, nor Occam's Razor. We were standing on a corner downhill from that frat house, of course the keg rolled there, anyone with a brain could deduce that. There was a slight hump at the intersection that slowed it enough for us to stop it. Some of us did have scuffed and swollen up hands, which aroused Festus' suspicions, but that was only from trying to prevent that keg from making the turn, rolling into town, and causing an accident. The brick streets that prevailed in Morgantown at that time were rough on the hands. If not for us, that keg could have been found by underage children on their way to Sunday School. The knothead in blue couldn't see we were doing our civic duty. He was beholden to the sons of big money interests who had recently had their butts whupped on top of the hill and were looking for someone to blame.
By the time ol' Barney was done yelling and swiped the keg as 'evidence' we missed the late night Bible study we had on the agenda for that Saturday night. Another weekend lost to overzealous cops and frat boys who didn't know how to properly secure their kegs.
To top it off he reported the incident to the former mutton headed Michigan assistant that was coaching the football team at the time. A friend was suspended from the team for trying prevent chaos in Morgantown that night.
That's the way the Morgantown Police treat WVU athletes. They're all trying to make that big jump to Uniontown and bigger money. It's not like Huntington where they look the other way for pocket change and a Big Gulp. No sirree!
