UCLA Nominated, but Indiana Wins

I can remember another Academy Award occasion like this one, 16 years ago, when actor Elliott Gould, ripping open the envelope, announced that: “And the winner is . . . Indiana, 86-68.”

It seems unlikely that there will be any similar basketball updates tonight, although nominations certainly could go to UCLA for Worst Performance by a Good Team in a Big Game. There could be jokes about the Bruins offering proof that, in some cases, neither white nor black men can jump.

On the very day Duke and Kentucky staged one of the most memorable games in the keepsakes of college basketball, UCLA and Indiana gave us a game to forget, as excruciating as a day at the dentist and as action-free as a Swedish film.

While one game was a fight to the finish--Last Team to Touch the Ball Wins--the other game was over long before it was over. Indiana’s guys out-muscled UCLA’s so totally their jerseys should have read: “Gold’s Gym.”

Never before have Bruin basketball players been treated in a tournament like 98-pounders getting sand kicked in their faces at the beach.

Their only excuse for one of the most lethargic efforts ever was that they had no zip, no zap, no pep, no hop, no skip, no jump, ad nauseum .

Indiana was a rabbit run by NC-double-A batteries, beating UCLA like a drum.

Why was UCLA worn out?

Because, while the Bruins couldn’t wait to aim and fire, pumping the basketball from anyplace beyond the three-point stripe within the boundary of the New Mexican border, the Hoosiers ran them absolutely ragged with a passing offense, Coach Bob Knight’s specialty, that inspired the scene in the Gene Hackman movie “Hoosiers” in which the coach, Norman Dale, demands that his players pass the ball at least four times each trip down the floor.

(“Norman Dale,” by the way, happens to be the name of Knight’s assistant, the former University of New Mexico coach, Norman Dale Ellenberger.)

At a high altitude--one that Knight so abhors that he is appealing to the NCAA to no longer schedule tournament games at sites such as Albuquerque--the best way to tire an opponent is to run him all over the room, playing what children used to call keep-away. UCLA’s players ran so much, their tongues drooped out like Michael Jordan’s.

Said freshman Ed O’Bannon, who has the added disadvantage of wearing a knee brace the size of a mailbox: “We’re used to teams passing the ball four or five times on a possession. Indiana passed it 11 or 12 times, sometimes more.”

And when a basketball team is technically playing a three-guard offense, as UCLA does, and has a 6-foot-8, 225-pound forward (Tracy Murray) who prefers shooting three-pointers to pressing flesh underneath the basket, staying fresh is the only way an attack can work. There is nothing more useless--in any sport-- than a small team with no speed.

If this was indeed the strategy of the one-time West Point coach whom television’s Dick Vitale ceaselessly refers to as “General Robert Montgomery Knight,” we salute him. Creating a battle plan, as it happens, is the favorite activity of Bob Knight, who studies the art of war in his spare time from the philosophy of Sun Tzu, qualifying him as the Gordon Gekko of basketball coaches.

Three top coaches and three top teams were in peak form Saturday, Kentucky scoring 103 points, Duke 104 and Indiana 106.

Heaven knows what the special Coach Ks, Knight and Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, have planned for the Final Four. Maybe 151-150, in quadruple overtime.

UCLA scored 79 points, including free throws from technical fouls, hurried jump shots from complicated angles, long-range bazooka rounds that were the only shots Indiana left uncontested and a wrong-footed, desperation, halftime-horn heave by Tyus Edney that conked the back of the rim, then the front, then the back again, then luckily trickled through.

It was not their finest hour, yet it was one of their finest years. They will lose Don MacLean, whose stature as a probable NBA lottery pick has diminished somewhat; and Gerald Madkins, who was annoyed by Red Auerbach warning UCLA that it had better defeat Indiana sooner because it sure wouldn’t defeat Indiana later.

Red doesn’t talk merely to hear himself talk, Gerald.

And that’s about all there is left to say here amid the silence of the Bruins. UCLA will not win the award for Best Team, but at least it can rejoice in being nominated. Not everybody is. Roll the credits.