Bruin Fans Stoop to New Low

Boycotting Cal State Fullerton football games is nothing new. Cal State Fullerton students have been doing it for years.

The twist this week is that Fullerton is scheduled to play UCLA Saturday night, thereby guaranteeing season-opening triumph and glory for Terry Donahue’s gutty little risk-takers--a prospect that has so rankled a band of Bruin loyalists that they have organized themselves and guerrilla-FAXed protest leaflets under the letterhead “Bruins For The Boycott Of The Cal State Fullerton Game.”

“Why this?” asks Page 4 of the nine-page manifesto. “Something so Vainglorious? So Quixotic?”

Good questions, if you’re asking me.

“This is not meant as an insult to Cal State Fullerton,” the screed continues, “a struggling program doing the best they (sic) can. . . . It is rather intended as a WAKE-UP CALL to the hardened entrenched bureaucrats of UCLA! It is the first and most visible means of demonstration that we the BRUIN family have had enough . . . and are not going to take it anymore!”

Each and every one of us, though we may be ashamed to admit it, knows a UCLA football fan. Some of us have been known to even socialize with one from time to time, in clear, public view.

We are not especially proud of this, because in the Pac - 10’s Spoiled Beyond Rotten Whine-And-Rose Bowls Division, UCLA football fans rate a close second to only USC football fans. They are not happy, well-adjusted people. They run around wearing buttons that read: “Have A Nice Day . . . And Fire Donahue, For Crying Out Loud!”

You know the drill.

If UCLA wins a bowl game, they gripe that it wasn’t the Rose Bowl.

If UCLA wins the Rose Bowl, they gripe that it wasn’t the national championship.

If UCLA goes 11-0-1, they gripe about the tie.

From the other side of the boycott fence, Cal State Fullerton Athletic Director Bill Shumard sits back and muses, “We should have such problems.” At the moment, Shumard has a football team that not only was able to pay its bills last week but also won a football game. The Titans live! The Titans win! Life is good for Shumard.

Not so, apparently, for Bruins For The Boycott Of The Cal State Fullerton Game. These Bruin rooters are mad as hell because UCLA is opening its 1992 season against Fullerton when it could have opened it against Notre Dame, in last month’s Pigskin Classic.

They want the Irish, want the Irish badly, and Gene Murphy is less than what they had in mind.

“What’s going on?” the boycotters write. “We have an on-going TWO MILLION DOLLAR deficit in our UCLA Athletic Department, and we turn down an exciting, NATIONAL EXPOSURE game at Anaheim Stadium, that would give UCLA a paycheck in the neighborhood of ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

“Instead, we replace the Cal State Long Beach cancellation on the schedule with Cal State Fullerton? (Note: Rated in ‘Lindy’s Pac 10’ preseason magazine as ‘Ugly Game of the Year!!!’) . . . Is this a twenty-two dollar a seat attraction . . . that we have to pay for?”

True, the idea of a UCLA-Notre Dame Pigskin matchup was bandied about last December, but no, it is not true that UCLA looked at Notre Dame and Fullerton as an either/or proposition. Fullerton was on the ’92 schedule regardless, enlisted as a fill-in for the open date created by Long Beach’s decision to drop its football program. Notre Dame would have been added as a 12th game.

Peter Dalis, the UCLA athletic director, says he turned down the Pigskin offer because of the date (Aug. 26), which would have required players to report to practice 2 1/2 weeks earlier, costing them a sizable chunk of vacation time.

On the surface, this would seem a reasonable reservation. The description is still “student-athlete,” not the other way around. The Bruins may have their football fans, but the Bruins themselves are big fans of summer vacation.

“Perhaps this is true,” the boycotters allow. “But, is it also a possibility that Mr. Donahue and Mr. Dalis fear the prospect of LOSING? . . . And, is it not also true that there has been a subtle shift in recent years to more and more San Diego States, Long Beach States and Cal State Fullertons?”

Here is where the boycotters finally hit some pay dirt. A career objective for Donahue, it appears, is to be the first coach to back into a national championship. Weed out the tough intersectionals, he has instructed Dalis--the Nebraskas, the Oklahomas, the Tennessees. Mow down the Fullertons instead and watch that won-lost record grow.

According to Shumard, Fullerton turned down UCLA’s initial request for a game.

“Pete called me in early December, and I told him no,” Shumard says. “My goal is to see our team turn the corner and win some games at home. That’s critical to our progress as an entire program.

“Gene (Murphy) has been asked to go play these kind of big money games a lot in the past, and they’ve taken a heavy toll on us, hurt our image here. I want to reverse that. I didn’t want to saddle Gene with any more of that.”

But then Donahue called Murphy and talked it over, coach to coach, away from the ADs, and talked him into it. Tried to talk Murphy into a three-year series, in fact--which was promptly vetoed by Shumard, who can hardly make plans for 1994, not knowing whether he’ll have a football program in 1993.

“Gene came back to me and said, ‘I really want to play it,’ ” Shumard says. “He thought the game would be a boon to our recruiting and help us financially, so I agreed. My job is to help Gene any way I can.”

So Donahue got his game. One game. Good thing for Dalis, too. Book three years’ worth of UCLA-Fullerton routs, and the boycotters will be storming the walls of Pauley Pavilion with pitchforks and flaming catapults.

“Hey, we have a juggernaut,” Shumard yelps with mock anger, noting that his Titans are un-de-feated after last week’s 28-7 shocker over Cal State Northridge.

“We’re putting all of this up on our locker room wall. We’ll teach them to take us lightly,” he quipped.

The boycotters rant on about how Donahue can’t win the big one because he won’t schedule the big one and how he has systematically lowered expectations at UCLA by playing games such as Saturday’s. These are strong charges, but not as strong as they might have been, since the boycotters refuse to identify themselves and will make themselves available for interviews “provided anonymity can be assured.”

If Donahue is a responsibility-shirking weasel, it apparently takes some to know one.