Louisville Faces UCLA to End Tough Schedule : For Crum, No Cakewalk

Denny Crum, an expert on the subject, knows how to win the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. basketball championship. His Louisville team did it just last season.

Check off his advisory items:

--”Just play one game at a time.” This should not be hard, since there are no doubleheaders scheduled for teams in the NCAA tournament.

--”Concentrate and don’t worry about tomorrow.” And when tomorrow becomes today? “Then concentrate on today.”

--Have a great player. Or two, or three.

--If you have checked the previous item, forget the first two.

“Most of the teams, if not all of them, the ones that have a chance to win it, have some kind of great player who can carry them when the going gets tough,” Crum said.

So where does that leave UCLA?

“Reggie Miller can do that,” Crum said. “I think UCLA is certainly a team that has a chance to do something in the tournament.”

But first, UCLA and Louisville have to do something about finishing the regular season. They will attend to that this morning at 11:30 in Pauley Pavilion. The Pacific 10 champion Bruins will take on the Metro champion Cardinals in the last non-tournament game both teams will play.

Both teams are likely to get invitations to the NCAA tournament, although only the winners of the Metro and Pac-10 tournaments are guaranteed automatic berths.

Louisville, which lost three starters from last season and 12 games this season, has come a long way since beginning the season 0-3. The Cardinals didn’t get over .500 to stay until Feb. 2, but they’re 7-2 since and have scored more than 80 points in six of those games.

Playing a much more demanding schedule than UCLA (20-6), the Cardinals (17-12) have lost to DePaul, Indiana, Purdue, Kansas, Syracuse, twice to Memphis State and by 34 points to Kentucky at Freedom Hall in Louisville.

Because of Louisville’s schedule, Crum hopes that the NCAA considers degree of difficulty when it sends out its invitations.

“I have never been able to read the tournament committee,” he said. “I believe that playing a difficult schedule is a factor, like they say it is.”

Crum had to replace both of his starting guards, and although the front line remains strong, the Cardinals’ inexperience in the backcourt has shown, just as he said it would.

“It was to be expected,” Crum said. “We lost two senior guards (Milt Wagner and Jeff Hall) and Billy Thompson, but we’ve come a long way. I told everybody that we were a ways off, but no one believed me. They thought I was blowing smoke.

“Our schedule has got to help us,” he said. “It sure helped us get better and it will help us next year, even if it didn’t help our won-lost record this year.”

There should be an interesting contrast of styles in today’s game. While UCLA has a big stack of guards, the Cardinals use one of the better front lines in college basketball.

The Cardinals’ big three--6-foot 9-inch sophomore center Pervis Ellison, 6-7 junior forward Herbert Crook and 6-7 sophomore Tony Kimbro--do most of the scoring. Ellison is averaging 15.6 points, Crook 11.2 and Kimbro 15.2. Freshman guard Keith Williams and senior guard Chris West start in the backcourt.

UCLA Coach Walt Hazzard said he plans to use the Louisville game as a chance to “have some fun,” which is understandable since there really isn’t much riding on the outcome.

Crum also said that the real business for his team will begin with the tournaments.

“UCLA has got a lot of good, young players,” said Crum, once a UCLA assistant under John Wooden. “I think the hard part for Walt is that no matter how good he does, it’s not as good as in the past. People have got to realize that nobody will do as well as Coach Wooden did, ever again.

“There’s no difference in the talent between the national champion and the 50th-best team,” Crum said. “There are simply a lot more good players today than there ever were. You just won’t have domination, no matter how good a job a coach does.

“To win the NCAA, you have to win six games in a row against top teams. We haven’t shown an ability to do that. We can’t even win six in a row at home. But we’re capable of beating a lot of teams on a given night. I just hope we have a lot of those nights.”

Bruin Notes Channel 4 will televise today’s game, which will also be on KMPC radio. . . . Highly touted Felton Spencer, 7-1 freshman center, is averaging 12.1 minutes, 2.8 rebounds and 4.1 points a game for Louisville. . . . The Cardinals have tried 99 three-point shots this season. UCLA’s Reggie Miller has attempted 133. . . . As the No. 1-seeded team in the Pacific 10 tournament, UCLA’s first game will be at 3 p.m. next Friday against the winner of the first-round game between Arizona State and Washington State. Both of those teams have beaten UCLA this season. . . . Slightly fewer than 9,000 nine-game ticket packages at $75 apiece have been sold for the tournament. Pauley seats 12,543.

What would UCLA be without a controversy? Joe Bruin, one of two UCLA mascots, is being grounded for the Pac-10 tournament, apparently because he wore a Rambo costume at the USC game Thursday night. “I don’t think the image of a gun-toting bear is exactly what we want,” said Glen Knapp, the adviser to the UCLA Spirit Squad. Knapp said he believes only 13 cheerleaders will be allowed anyway.