Bruins Have to Live Up to Their Words

UCLA plays Oregon State tonight in a game that probably will determine the Pacific 10 championship. To observe this festive occasion, players from both teams are putting on their game faces.

On the UCLA side, that means active faces. The mouths are moving, as usual. Just try to keep Reggie Miller from talking.

But the Oregon State players are not saying anything. The Beavers’ lips are sealed. They voted not to talk to reporters until after the UCLA game because they are upset about some of the words that have come out of moving Bruin mouths recently.

The Beavers, for instance, didn’t like it when Pooh Richardson said he was tired of hearing about Gary Payton. The Beavers also didn’t like it when Jack Haley said he was going to “make Jose Ortiz pay” for something the Oregon State center was supposed to have said earlier.

The Bruins? They don’t care what the Beavers don’t like. “They’ve got their own problems,” Miller said.

So what we have here is something less than a grudge match but still something more than a game. UCLA comes in with an 11-4 Pac-10 record, half a game ahead of the 10-4 Beavers. Whichever team wins automatically becomes the favorite to win the conference title and earns the No. 1 seeding in the Pac-10 tournament.

Both UCLA and Oregon State are coming off disappointing losses. The Bruins lost at home to Arizona State, 67-64, and the Beavers lost by 10 points at Arizona.

For the Bruins, the task ahead is straightforward. All they have to do is beat the Beavers, then Oregon and then USC and they’ve wrapped up the Pac-10 title.

“All we know is that everything is in our hands,” Miller said. “It’s a showdown. It’s what basketball is all about.”

As usual, though, there are the distracting sidelights. The first thing is about talking trash. Who said what about whom? Nobody seems to know.

Haley started the tongues wagging with a blast at Ortiz, or as Haley calls him, Jose Ortiz. When Haley refers to the Beaver, he always uses both names. Ortiz is always Jose Ortiz to Jack, which is probably an improvement over UCLA Coach Walt Hazzard, who referred to Ortiz as Cruz at his media luncheon this week.

Anyway, Haley said he was shown a newspaper article last week to which he took exception. “Jose Ortiz made the comment that the only two centers in the Pac-10 are him and Chris Welp,” Haley said. “Forget it. I’m going to make him pay for that.”

Haley said he was grateful he had been shown the article. “It let me know where Jose Ortiz’s head was,” he said.

“I don’t want to get into a mud-slinging contest with Jose Ortiz, but we’re not going up there to lose. If I have to carry the team on my shoulders, we will win the game.”

Jose?

Oh, right, he’s not talking.

Then there were Richardson’s comments to the effect that he was getting less respect for assists than Payton was for scoring. The Beavers got chapped about that. And Richardson was upset about what he said Oregon State Coach Ralph Miller had said about Reggie Miller last season.

“He sure had plenty to say and made some statements about Reggie Miller,” Pooh said.

In fact, Hazzard is not too happy with Ralph Miller, either, saying that Ralph had made a personal attack on Reggie. Hazzard said he was “surprised and shocked.”

What foul utterances had Ralph made against Reggie? After Reggie had torched the Beavers for 41 points in a 74-63 victory here, Ralph suggested that Reggie had been protected by the officials and that Reggie had committed offensive fouls on his first three shots.

Sounds like grounds for a feud in anybody’s score book.

And perhaps there’s even more ahead. “Whoever wins will be doing all the talking,” Reggie said.

As for the game, Oregon State will be trying to slow the pace, just as Arizona State did against UCLA. The Bruins, meanwhile, will be trying to slow Ortiz. That might be a problem. The first time they played, Ortiz scored 31 points and had 12 rebounds in 44 minutes, although UCLA won in overtime in Pauley Pavilion.

“We’re going to play six-on-five and triple-team him,” said Hazzard, facetiously. He did hint, though, that he would spell Haley with Greg Foster and Kevin Walker, giving UCLA 15 fouls to use on Ortiz at the center position.