The pandemic has dramatically altered life as we know it, disrupting our everyday routines, customs, and traditions. One tradition that a small subset of people within the Georgetown community took for granted was the annual basketball game between the staffs of The Hoya and The Georgetown Voice.
The stakes are tremendously high. It’s where women and men alike cement their legacies or forever tarnish them. The campus media business is cutthroat, and there historically is no love lost between The Hoya and the Voice. Roman Peregrino, who is currently the Editor in Chief of the Voice, said that the game was a natural extension of the two publications’ competition to break news stories first. Peregrino said that while not everyone on the staff played in the games, “Everyone wants to win.” He continued, “The Hoya and the Voice offices are right next to each other in Leavey, so you’re going to see these people, and it’s nice to have bragging rights.”
In addition, everyone involved with campus media, no matter their affiliation, harbors pent-up aggression from trying to lay out articles and edit photos on iMacs from 2003 that make more noise than a jet engine and which operate at the pace of Billy Butler legging out a double.
Where else to settle these factional hostilities and release pent-up aggression than on the basketball court? It’s not only a battle between the current staff of these organizations, but it’s also a proxy fight for the alumni of each respective publication. This is a concrete way to give one news outlet bragging rights for the year; you can just point to the box score as the final measure of one organization’s superiority.
The stakes are high, and there’s plenty of gamesmanship. I was told by a member of one of the publications, who will remain nameless, that they kept finding ways to delay the start of the basketball game one year so the star point guard would make it on time.
For former Hoya Sports Editor Dean Hampers, the annual game had profound personal and professional significance. “It was a matter of pride,” said Hampers, “a true test of superiority in the field of Georgetown news.”
When I asked Nathan Chen, current Sports Executive for the Voice, for his take on if there was a rivalry between the two staffs, he dismissed that notion.
“Well, if you’re speaking about the quality of our sportswriting,” said Chen, “then there’s no rivalry because both sides have to win, and their sports section hasn’t been doing much winning.”
In this battle between glossy magazines and hard news, hard news ended up winning more often than not. Recently, The Hoya has embarked on a run of dominance in the rivalry series, winning the last four meetings from 2017 to 2020, in addition to winning the softball game in 2019. In the last Hoya-Voice basketball game in February 2020, The Hoya won 38-31. The year before that, the Voice got as close to winning as they’ve been in the past four years. The Hoya was down by 12 with just a few minutes remaining in the second half. They decided to stop substituting in players, and with the same five on the court, the Hoya staffers eked out a two-point win.
The Hoya might share their men’s basketball game recaps on social media nine days after the game, but you better goddamn believe they showed up on game day.
The basketball court proved to be the perfect venue to settle paper beef, according to Mitchell Taylor, who was formerly a Sports Editor and later the General Manager of The Hoya.
“The Voice always talked a big game on Twitter about anything Hoya-related. It was likely a product of some sort of inferiority complex,” said Taylor. “It felt good to humble them on the court, as opposed to in the newspaper, which got boring after a while.”
Of interest relating to Taylor’s assertions of an inferiority complex is the fact that as of the fall of 2017, the Voice had a crude illustration on the walls of their office depicting a gigantic rhinoceros taking a shit, on top of a large heap of shit. Emblazoned on the rhinoceros’s body was a crudely photoshopped image of the Voice’s logo, and edited on the pile of shit was the logo of The Hoya.
When I told Chen of Taylor’s comments, he replied, “Man, they’re talking mad shit for an organization that publishes game stories 10 days after they happen.”
In a second request for comment, Taylor shot back, saying, “At least our social media team doesn’t have to endure the embarrassment of live-tweeting its loss to The Hoya each year.”
Touché.
Yep, there’s no love lost between these two publications. What happens on the court is what Thomas Hobbes envisioned when he wrote about the state of nature. Even if people are friends off the court, Peregrino said things would get chippy. “Once the game was going, there were not a lot of smiles,” Peregrino said, “and some hard fouls when you could get away with it.”
There’s sweat. There’s blood. Hell, a Voice staffer sucker-punched a senior editor of The Hoya last year. In the waning moments of the game, Jake Wexelblatt, then the Executive Editor of The Hoya, had nabbed a defensive rebound to ice the game and was holding onto the ball. Someone from the Voice, who will remain nameless, attempted to steal the ball from Wexelblatt, and when they failed, sucker-punched Wexelblatt after the buzzer. Wexelblatt said he did not retaliate, instead opting to let the team’s performance speak for itself.
“Yeah, I had let the final score do the talking,” Wexelblatt said, “We had so many people there, I let other people get up in his face instead.”
Although this story was corroborated by one Voice staffer, another one disagrees with that characterization. Peregrino said the sucker-punch was the result of the Voice staffer getting tired and frustrated with the game. As Peregrino recollects, the staffer was trying to intentionally foul Wexelblatt but the referee didn’t call it, so they started roughing up Wexelblatt. “I never saw any close[d] fist contact,” Peregrino said.
This is basketball at its purest, its most violent. This is what James Naismith dreamed of when he put up those goddamn peach baskets. Georgetown culture is getting way too unnecessarily competitive and aggressive towards your fellow students, and this annual event is the culmination of that. The Hoya–Voice game is Georgetown.
It’s a damn shame that we’re not getting another installment this year, although it makes sense. For now, staffers and alumni of The Hoya will have to hang their hats on the fact that they’re still reigning champs for another year.
As for the Voice’s perspective on things? Chen puts it this way. “They win the basketball games, we win at being a competent sports section. Can’t win ‘em all.”
Full disclosure: The author was a Hoya staffer who played in the 2020 edition of the game. He was a tremendous three and D guy, despite wearing a leg brace. In the game, he was perfect from the field and from three, scoring three points on one attempt. He would’ve had an even more proficient scoring performance if the Yates ref didn’t call a bullshit travel on a layup that was a potential three-point play due to a foul.
