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Generation Burton Graduates
By John Hawkes

Somewhere between the barbecue and the baseball this past Memorial Day Weekend, I finally got around to unpacking all the stuff I'd lugged home to Florida after four years of college. In truth, I never felt very far from the Hilltop when I was on breaks or home on summer vacation, since over the course of four years my room has become a virtual museum of artifacts from my time at Georgetown.

There's a file cabinet full of four years of photos of friends. Several walls of my room are covered with free posters from Sports Promotions and "Late Night at Leavey," and a whole bookshelf is devoted to old notebooks and copies of "The Hoya". Next to my basketball card collection I keep every ticket stub from every Hoyas sports event I attended as a student in a Ziploc bag. My diploma now lies-still in its original envelope-on my entertainment unit. There's also the Nevils Medal I won in my top desk drawer.

My most prized possession from my four years at Georgetown, though, sits in a nondescript drawer just over my left shoulder as I type this essay. It didn't come from Georgetown; in fact, my only contribution to its existence was calling my mother back home in Florida four years ago for a favor. More than any picture, newspaper, or medal, it's this single item that most reminds me of Georgetown-the school, the experience, and a certain team-at its very best.

The item: a VHS tape, labeled "Georgetown/Arkansas 3/15".

The night Generation Burton came of age.

I imagine no one on Georgetown's campus on the night of March 15, 2001 has forgotten exactly where they were or what they did at the precise moment Nathaniel Burton's layup passed through the hoop a continent away in Boise, Idaho.

Having been to every possible Hoyas home basketball game in my four years on the Hilltop, and watched nearly every televised road contest, I can safely say I never saw anything as great as that moment. That is, with the possible exception of what I saw after the game.

When CBS cut back to Greg Gumbel in the studio, my friends and I headed out into the hallway. And so did just about all of VCW 6. It was immediately evident to me from the cheering, the propped-open doors, the exclamations bouncing around the corridor. VCW 6 had never been the Hoya Blue board's dream-possibly only a quarter of us were semi-regulars at the MCI Center, certainly fewer than those who had never attended a Georgetown home basketball game. But for that one night, everyone bled Hoya Blue. Everyone had been watching the game!

Everyone watched a week later too-many of them on a giant TV screen in the Leavey Center-as Georgetown's season came to an end in the Sweet 16 against Maryland. For a fleeting moment in time, everyone on the Hilltop had basketball on their mind. Whenever I watch my tape, I never fail to remember how awesome that was.

The truth is, what I enjoyed the most about going to Hoyas basketball games for four years has little to do with specifically what happened on the court. The 16-0 start of 2000-2001, the 0-9 finish of 2003-4, it didn't necessarily matter. For me, it was about the experience of being there with a group of fans who cared as much about the team as I did, and tried their hardest to let the team (and opposing fans) know how much better we were than the other guys. It was about the student fan who dressed up as a cop for Troy Murphy, the GU Pep Band, the same 20 people on the first school bus to MCI, anyone who ever heckled Jim Burr by saying "You Suck, Higgins," and most importantly the person who throws the orange onto the court when we beat Syracuse.

These are the kinds of people, the kinds of experiences that made basketball games a lot more fun. And, for me at least, made college a lot more fun.

The night of February 5, 2004 wasn't a lot of fun.

The record books will show that Georgetown lost 75-60 to Villanova, falling to 12-6 on the season. If you look deeper into the box score, you'll find that only 7,738 people were there to see the game. And, perhaps if you were there that night, you can recall some sense of how empty the student section seemed, how dispirited the students looked (not that anyone could really blame any die-hard fans who'd shown up all year for being down on the season). However-and I say this with immense respect for every student fan in the Classes of 2005-2007-only someone who'd sat in the rows directly behind the west basket at the MCI Center during the better days of the early 2000s might have sensed a larger problem.

Sure, the basketball team was struggling mightily. But at least on that day in February, it seemed to me like the GU student section was struggling to survive.

I did something on the way back from that game that I had never done before. I let my frustration-both with the team and the shrinking student section-get the best of me, and I yelled at another fan. This particular fan and their friend got on the bus and greeted everyone with something along the lines of: "Hey, who here wants to Fire Esherick?" (Being February by this point, they got more than a few takers). Sitting directly behind me on the way back, their conversation consisted of repeated ruminations on how much the team sucked, and several attempts to start "Fire Esherick" chants. By the second or third, I was fed up, and told them (in much more colorful terms) to shut up.

It wasn't the "Fire Esherick" chant/sentiment that bugged me per se-I'd given up my allegiance to Craig prior to the season. What bugged me was the overwhelmingly negative atmosphere that now seemed to permeate the student section. It's bad enough to lose lots of games, but to have certain fans compounding the misery with negative chants, poor behavior, and outright indifference at times had made things even less bearable.

Somewhere on the way between 3/15/01 and 2/5/04, it stopped being much fun.

Of course, this thought hadn't just popped into my head in the back of a school bus on the way back from the Nova game. There were other signs that maybe GU's student section had slipped off: the drastic increase in negative comments directed at GU players during games, more than a few middle fingers from some, the visible fact that 80% of fans in the student section weren't even paying attention to the court in the second half of the Duke game, and perhaps most troubling the visible fact that the student section wasn't even close to being filled at the Syracuse game this year.

Now, it would be dishonest for me to fail to note the contributions of many anonymous Hoya student fans that have been at every game at the MCI Center this year and have tried their hardest to make it a true home court for the basketball team. These fans-the ones who really Bleed Hoya Blue-are the ones that make the student section a better place. However, I'd also be dishonest if I didn't state that there just aren't as many of these fans as there used to be. And that's a problem that needs fixing.

It wasn't always this way. One of the advantages the student fans of my class (2004) had over the other 75% of the undergraduates last season is that we'd experienced the good times-a 16-0 start, a 25 win season, a trip to the Sweet 16. We'd partied in Sellinger and Hoya Court during the NCAA Tournament, we'd rushed the court (twice), we'd overflowed the student section for…a UNLV game, and of course we were on campus to see Nathaniel Burton's layup. The main advantage, though, was that it seemed when the team needed our support, whether through a big promotional drive, a full student section, or just making some noise (sans the Samuel L. Jackson video, mind you)…the Hoya students of that day knew how to make it happen.

The problem is, the Class of 2004-the last in what I like to call "Generation Burton"-graduated a month ago.

Continued...