Bruins Never Luge, er, Lose if He’s There

Let’s see. Last time I checked in on UCLA, I had the gall to write that the Bruins should be ranked No. 1 in all of college basketball, for which I was roundly hooted and ridiculed. Yeah, you know us media jerks, always being so damned positive.

Then I left the country for a month to watch Tonya post up Nancy. And UCLA lost, and lost, and lost and lost. Only nobody noticed in Norway, because over there they don’t know the Wizard of Westwood from the Wizard of Oslo.

Well, by the time I got home, people here in California were doing so much trashing of Jim Harrick’s players, I thought they might need to be recycled. I was led to believe that UCLA had been beaten by everybody but Cal State Bakersfield and the Jamaican bobsled team. Number 1 in the country?!?! Downey, you dummy! They can’t even beat Notre Dame!

So, I had no clue what to expect Sunday when the 10th-ranked-and-climbing Louisville Cardinals came flapping into town to play the 15th-and-falling Bruins. Imagine my surprise when David Boyle and Rodney Zimmerman took the floor for the opening tipoff. I turned to the guy next to me and said, “Man, Harrick really did shake up his lineup, didn’t he?”

“Nah,” the guy said. “Senior day.”

Ahhh. Senior day. This is a sweet and traditional gesture on many a college campus, the NCAA equivalent of letting every Little Leaguer spend at least one inning in right field. I like senior day. Senior day is a nice idea. Senior day is a day when somebody pins a corsage on Mom and strolls arm-in-arm onto the court with Dad, and then everybody in the crowd gets to stand and applaud. It’s so corny, even Nancy Kerrigan would like it.

The only potential downside of senior day is when the other team runs out and mops up the floor with your seniors before you can give them the hook back to the bench. Which is pretty much what happened to Harrick when he got that “why me?” look on his face and saw on the scoreboard that his team was getting the stuffing kicked out of it by Denny Crum’s bunch, 9-0.

Boyle is a nice young man whom I hadn’t seen since he was hustled into the Michigan game at last year’s NCAA regionals with one tick of the clock left in overtime, so he could hurl the basketball as far as he knew how to Ed O’Bannon from out of bounds. He is probably one of those college players who could have averaged about 31 points per game for Bakersfield and gone on to play CBA ball for the Rapid City Rapid Transits or the Albany Cartoons, or whatever they’re called. The young man does have ability.

Unfortunately, he missed a breakaway layup to open Sunday’s game, and by the time his coach was able to hurry George Zidek and Charles O’Bannon over to the scorer’s table, UCLA was in big trouble. When Boyle and Zimmerman went to the bench, 2:38 into the game, the Bruins still did not have a point. After 3:48, the Bruins still did not have a basket. After nearly 5 1/2 minutes, the Bruins had a total of five points.

“You know what?” I said to the guy next to me. “I think I hate senior day.”

Luckily, everything turned out OK.

Ed O’Bannon, who is one fine player, let me tell you, led a big, big comeback. Brother Charles was in there, too, chucking in 17 points and 11 boards. Shon Tarver, who got off exactly as many shots before halftime as David Boyle, contributed a much better second half. Zidek drew a big, big foul with 40 seconds remaining and put the game on ice with a free throw and a rebound. And UCLA was a winner, same as I remember from January, 75-72.

Afterward, all the idiots who got on UCLA’s case were called, pretty appropriately, I thought, “idiotic” by Louisville’s Crum, who seemed more annoyed about that than he did about losing.

“All you people that are knocking the Bruins, you don’t know anything about basketball,” went Denny’s grand slam.

“SC on the road, Cal on the road, Arizona on the road . . . to be critical of UCLA losing to those kind of teams is idiotic.”

Yeah. So support UCLA and don’t be an idiot.

Harrick had his own way of putting it.

He said, “The road is ugly and nasty.”

Yeah. More food for thought, you critics.

“Critics are only in the mind of the beholder,” Harrick said.

Yeah. So let me close by saying that UCLA still looks to me like it might be the No. 1 team in the country.

Of course, I don’t spend all that much time in this country.