NCAA MEN’S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT : Their Next Destination: Lilliput, er, Albuquerque

The giant awakens. It stretches. It yawns. It is UCLA. It is big. It is powerful. Leave it be. Don’t talk to it. Don’t mess with it. Don’t make it angry. It could step on you.

The giant is sky-high right now. UCLA won again Sunday. Four more like this and UCLA could become the colossus of college basketball, for the first time since Westwood was a land ruled by wizards. This team is very good, and quite possibly good enough. It could happen.

And the further it goes, the higher it gets. The next stop along the way is Albuquerque, where the altitude is so great--about 4,000 feet--that the Bruins’ equipment people and trainers say they already are packing extra supply tanks of oxygen, just in case.

Everybody was breathing easier after Sunday’s game here at the West Regional, where UCLA brushed aside Louisville, 85-69, with far less difficulty than certain camp-followers expected. This puts the top-seeded Bruins up against the lowest seeded teams remaining among the tournament’s Sweet 16, the overachieving Aggies of New Mexico State.

So far, so good.

UCLA has won its first two NCAA games by large margins, 20 and 16 points, and on defense is playing as skillfully and aggressively as it has all season. During the season, UCLA surrendered 72.6 points per game. During the tournament, 61.

Funny thing, though. Foes keep trying to annoy the giant with a lot of disrespectful talk. Robert Morris tried it. Louisville tried it. Tried getting UCLA’s mind off its business by giving it the needle. Tried cutting UCLA down to size.

Didn’t work. The giant lives.

Now it goes into The Pit.

New Mexico State will be the next opponent for UCLA in the tournament. The game will be played Thursday in the dungeon gymnasium of the University of New Mexico, “The Pit,” and already the Aggies are attempting to bait the Bruins into a trap.

Step A: Warn the giant where he is headed.

“The Pit is underground, remember. Some teams get claustrophobic there,” said Neil McCarthy, New Mexico State’s coach.

“Not us , but some teams get claustrophobic.”

This is a psych job. A sly one. A subtle one. Get the giant thinking. Mess with its head. The old beanstalk strategy.

Step B: Warn the giant what he will be up against.

“Hey, they’re going to have 18,000 people there cheering their heads off against them,” Aggie center Chris Hickman said. “Everybody in New Mexico will be on our side.”

Step C: Remind the giant that you have no fear.

“We play with them in the summer leagues, and some of them have the big head,” said Aggie guard William Benjamin of Santa Monica, speaking for himself and his guard partner, Westchester’s Sam Crawford. “They never let you forget that they play for UCLA.”

It’s all very common. All part of the game.

The old mind game.

I suppose opponents figure they can upset the Bruins by trying to get them upset. By giving them the needle. Gerald Madkins got ambushed Friday by players from Robert Morris who felt compelled to tell him how overrated UCLA was. Don MacLean got an earful from a Louisville Cardinal all day long.

Underdogs do have their days. But as it turns out, the 1-2-3 seeded teams are still alive in the West. So are the 1-2-3-4 seeded teams in the East. So are the 1-2 seeded teams in the Southeast.

It doesn’t mean New Mexico State can’t defeat UCLA.

All it means is that nobody is going to beat UCLA by talking a good game.

How much further will they go? Maybe not to Minneapolis. But maybe yes.

Said Madkins: “We haven’t tapped yet what we can do. I think you will be seeing some more good basketball out of UCLA.”

It’s a fair assumption.

Jim Harrick’s revised starting lineup, the one that put Tyus Edney at the point and Madkins back where he belongs on the wing, is pretty efficient. The starters scored 79 of 85 UCLA points against Louisville, and MacLean said he has noticed a marked improvement in the offense now that defenses are no longer collapsing on him and Tracy Murray out of regard for Madkins.

As for the bench, latest scoring output aside, UCLA clearly is one of the Sweet 16’s deepest teams. The subs from Tulane--eliminated Sunday--called themselves “The Posse” and got a lot of attention for it, but UCLA’s bench has players such as Darrick Martin and Shon Tarver, who know what it’s like to be starters.

“The Posse gets a lot of publicity, but I think we’ve got a Posse of our own,” Martin said.

And their intention in the Pit is to come out shooting.

That’s UCLA’s Step A:

Shoot first, talk later.