Wherever You May Be

Eight words, and the man who says them

Tony Caridi is not from here. Born in Lockport, New York, he went to Syracuse, came to Morgantown in 1984, and took over the radio call in 1996, succeeding Jack Fleming, the voice of the Mountaineers for the better part of fifty years. The Dominion Post summed up the arc in one line: he began as an outsider and spent forty years becoming West Virginia's professional homer.

The sentence did not arrive whole. Zach Spiker, a Morgantown kid, was Caridi's spotter in the radio booth in 1992 before he went to play basketball at Ithaca College, where the teams are the Bombers. After a comeback win at Elmira, he and his teammates said it: it's a great day to be a Bomber. He carried the phrase home, working for Caridi and later on John Beilein's staff, and pitched him the line. It's a great day to be a Mountaineer. What do you think?

The two men:

The university's own pages disagree about which came first: probably a basketball win at LSU in November 2004, per the 2020 piece, or the 2005 football season, after the triple-overtime win over Louisville, per Caridi's staff biography and every account since, when it came out as a great night. The four words at the end, the university says, were a play on how he opens every broadcast, from Weirton to Welch, from Martinsburg to Matewan and all points in between, moved from the beginning to the end, where a greeting becomes a blessing.

A phrase from a college gym in upstate New York, carried home by a Morgantown kid, finished by a broadcaster from Lockport who had spent twenty years becoming a West Virginian. The borrowing is not the point. The finishing is.

He does not say it after every win. Caridi has said the key is to use it judiciously, saved for a game that mattered enormously, an upset nobody expected, or a big comeback, and he thinks about it before the game, whether this could be one of those. The scarcity is why it lands. In his own words: “When I first began to use it, I really didn't think of the long-lasting impact or the emotion it would generate among fans. But as time has gone on, I've seen that it has become significant to people because oftentimes they mark where they were when they heard the phrase.”

When he said it

The line is remembered by the nights it was said, and the people who heard it can tell you where they were. Three of the four below are on film, in his voice, with the Play button opening a few seconds before he says it.

On the record:

Four words, and the people they are for

West Virginia is the only state in the union with fewer people at the 2020 census than at the 1950 one. We had two million people at our peak and about 1.77 million by the Census Bureau's latest estimate. The decade from 2010 to 2020 was the steepest loss of any state, three percent of us, and it cost the state one of its three seats in Congress. Deaths have outnumbered births here every year since 1997; we were the first state in the nation to cross that line.

The number that hurts most is who goes. Only one in three students who earned a bachelor's degree here in 2023 was still working in the state two years later, and a federal study found we are among the few states where the people who leave are more educated than the people who stay. We raise them, teach them, cheer for them, and watch them make their lives in Ohio and Virginia and Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Florida, nearly a quarter of a million in Ohio alone. And we say, because it is the only honest thing to say, wherever you may be.

The record, at each census:

Where they went:

The people the four words are for:

The sentence does not say come home. It has never once said come home. It says the day is good and you are one of us, from wherever you are, and it leaves the door exactly where it was.

That restraint is right, I think, because the alternative is a lie. A state that has lost its people for seventy years cannot pretend they are all coming back. What can be true, and is, is that they are still ours: the line gives the ones who left a way to stay, and the ones who stayed a way to keep them.

Where it came from, and where it went

Most of the sentence was borrowed, and Caridi has never pretended otherwise. It's a great day to be a whatever is a formula, used at LSU, at Virginia Tech, at Ithaca where it started, and now at Appalachian State too, whose teams are also Mountaineers. Even the last four words have a prior owner: Vin Scully greeted Dodgers fans for decades with a very pleasant good evening to you, wherever you may be. His wherever was a courtesy to a radio audience spread across a city; Caridi's is a claim about a diaspora, and most states do not have one. The formula is a chant. The finished sentence is a letter home.

The family tree, drawn:

It was copied from somewhere, and copied since, but what the state kept were the four words that only made sense here.

The happiest sentence, and the saddest, in the same breath

The line is true in exactly the way the state is true: glad and grieving, and it refuses to choose. The first eight words are the gladness; I have never heard them without a small lift in the chest. The last four are the grief, said so gently that most people do not notice they are grieving when they repeat them. A sentence with only the first would be a chant, and one with only the second an elegy. This one is neither, which is why it has lasted twenty years and will outlast all of us.

Tony Caridi finished a borrowed phrase with four words of his own and gave the state a way to say the hardest true thing about itself in the voice of a good day. That is a gift, and an assignment. Wherever you may be is where we are. Here is where we would like it to be.

Every number and every fact traces to one of these; the origin story is the university's own, and the population figures are the Census Bureau's. Where the university's own pages disagree about which came first, the prose says so, and every photograph and film below carries the credit and the timestamp its source gives it.