UC IRVINE NOTEBOOK / JOHN WEYLER : Bach’s Heart Is in Norway, but Love for Tennis Keeps Him Here

Watching TV seldom makes Fredrik Bach homesick, but for the last 10 days, he has been sitting on the couch and taking trips down nostalgia lane.

Bach, a junior tennis player at UC Irvine, lives a couple of hours from the sites where Dan Jansen, Tommy Moe and Picabo Street won Olympic medals.

All of those freeze-frame-go-to-commercial shots from Norway are so many postcards from home.

“I still spend every summer home in Norway,” said Bach, who lives in Porsgrunn, a small town south of Oslo, “and I talk to my friends there a lot.

“At first, a lot of people weren’t sure they wanted the Olympics because of the financial aspect. It still might be a big bust moneywise, but everyone is really excited. A lot of the events were sold out three or four months ago and we’ve had the most snow this winter since 1964.”

His parents now live in Tampa, but Bach misses his friends and countrymen, and says he plans on returning to live full-time in Norway.

“I see myself moving back,” he said. “I really like it there. It’s more quiet, more relaxed. It’s funny because people here seem more friendly. You walk down the street and everyone says, ‘Hi.’ There, they walk right by and never make eye contact.

“But I think the friendships you make there are maybe more genuine. In a tiny country up by the north pole, with only 10,000 people in your town and one house every 300 meters, you can do your own thing. You’re not forced to interact with people as much as you do here. But when you get to know people, it’s a sincere friendship.”

Bach misses the snow and the winter sports, but he knows his tennis career has a better chance of blossoming under the California sun. He was the top-ranked 12-year-old in Norway before his father, an executive with a Norwegian fertilizer company, was transferred to Hong Kong.

“There was a big sports center near where we lived and some of the best players practiced there, so it was OK,” Bach said. “I graduated their version of high school when I was 15. I felt I was too young to go to college, so I just played tennis in Norway for a year. I played a lot of international junior tennis and was ranked as high as 37th in the world, but the days were long and I was lonely.”

So Bach went to a tennis academy in Florida for a year and devoted himself to studying English and backhands. It was there he decided to go to college in the United States.

He hadn’t been a student for two years but soon found himself at home in Irvine’s classrooms and on the courts. He is a two-time Big West Scholar Athlete and compiled a 35-24 singles record in his first two seasons with Irvine, competing mostly at No. 3. He won 11 of his last 12 matches last year and his second consecutive flight three Big West singles title.

This season, Bach is 2-4 in singles, but that includes an 0-3 mark at the No. 2 position and losses to USC’s Jon Leach, ranked 43rd in the nation, and Stanford All-American Vimal Patel.

Bach is working hard to overcome his slow-court background and develop a more aggressive style of play.

“Fredrik’s on his way to developing an all-court game,” Coach Steve Clark said. “He had a great summer, was a finalist at the Norwegian championships, so his baseline game is obviously established. What he’s striving for now is developing an attack game.”

Bach says it’s more a matter of mind-set than anything else.

“I can do it and I do it in practice, but when you’re playing a match and a little bit nervous, you tend to fall back to what’s most comfortable,” he said. “But I’ve worked a lot on it in practice and hopefully, without thinking about it, it will start to seep into my matches.”

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Porous perimeter: Early in the season, you could pass it off as misfortune. Maybe opponents’ three-point shooters were just hot against the Anteaters. But it has become a trend as clear as an opposing jump-shooter’s view of the basket--the Anteaters aren’t doing much of a job when it comes to defending the perimeter.

Irvine’s conference opponents are shooting 46% from three-point range, by far the highest percentage allowed in the Big West. More important, when the Anteaters do a decent job of defending outside shots, they often win.

In Irvine’s three conference victories, Cal State Fullerton, Utah State and Nevada made 13 of 43 three-pointers. (30%).

Coach Rod Baker thinks his team is doing a better job of getting out and harassing outside shooters, but recent results aren’t encouraging. Las Vegas and New Mexico State combined to hit 15 of 27 three-point shots--a whopping 56%--last week.

That’s 45 points in 27 possessions and better than shooting 80% from two-point range.

Anteater Notes

Irvine will be host for the Big West swimming and diving championships this weekend at Belmont Plaza in Long Beach. UC Santa Barbara’s men’s and women’s teams are the defending champions. The event is Sunday through Tuesday with preliminaries at 10:30 a.m. each day and the finals at 6 p.m. . . . The women’s basketball team had a rare chance to celebrate in a snowstorm Saturday night in Reno after its last-second, 64-63, victory. The Anteaters (3-19 and 2-12 in the Big West) won for the first time on the road in 17 games. The victory completed a sweep of the Wolf Pack, Irvine’s first since the 1990-91 season.