COLLEGE BASKETBALL / GENE WOJCIECHOWSKI : The Crow Wasn’t Nearly as Tasteless as Some of the Phone Calls

Just spent the last seven hours listening to my office voice mail. That done, I want to thank the always classy Bruin fans for their kind words, some of them actually longer than four letters.

You might recall that I picked Arkansas over UCLA in the Final Four championship game. If you don’t, I can give you the number of the Bruin enthusiast who suggested something I might do with a basketball. My only question is, pumped or unpumped?

Anyway, here’s the voice-mail breakdown:

Of the 486 messages, nearly half the callers mentioned a meal of crow. Fair enough. I’ve dined on it before, I’m sure I’ll dine on it again. With enough soy sauce, it doesn’t taste half bad.

About a quarter of the callers were “lifelong Bruin fans,” which means they started rooting for UCLA about the same time Tyus Edney’s last-second shot against Missouri fell through the net. Before that, they thought Jim Harrick ought to be coaching a junior high team in Huntington, W. Va. Now they bleed blue and gold.

Most of the remaining callers--and here’s a surprise, they didn’t leave return numbers--resorted to the time-honored tradition of attacking ancestry, name-calling and creative uses of obscenities (and by the way, sir, I didn’t know you could do that with a crowbar).

One gentleman simply said, “You’re an idiot--maybe an educated idiot--but you are an idiot.”

Whew, for a moment there I thought those 11 years at barber college were wasted money.

Then there were a few who were smart enough to understand my grand plan. A sixth Bruin sense allowed them to see the true meaning of my choosing the Razorbacks over their beloved UCLA team.

For example, this from a UCLA fan who said, “I know just being from L.A. means you don’t have to write a pro-L.A. article. Nonetheless, I hope they faxed your story up there so the Bruins could use that as bulletin board material.”

And then there was caller Steve, who noted, “What I’m figuring is, maybe you were trying to psych up the Bruins because maybe they needed to be a little pumped going into the game.”

Uh, yeah, that was it. I was trying to psych up Ed O’Bannon, who bruises brother Charles’ chest cavity every time they do one of those pregame belly bumps. And Toby Bailey, who was counting the nanoseconds until the Arkansas game, really needed my words of inspiration. And George Zidek didn’t have enough incentive, what with facing All-American Corliss Williamson. And Cameron Dollar, who replaced an injured Edney in the lineup, was a mess until he saw my prediction. And Harrick didn’t have too much to prove until he could wave a copy of the column in front of his team.

Nope, UCLA is the 1995 national champion because it did what few people, except the Bruins, thought it could do. Not only did UCLA defeat the late, great Razorbacks, but they did it without their team MVP, Edney.

One of the great things about basketball is that its numbers rarely lie. The statistical checklist:

--UCLA killed Arkansas on the offensive boards, 21-12--a huge factor.

--UCLA got the game it needed from one of its freshman, in this case, Bailey, who scored 26 points, collected nine rebounds, had three assists and two steals.

“(Sunday) night as a staff, we started talking about the possibility of Tyus not playing,” Bruin assistant coach Steve Lavin said. “We knew one of our freshmen had to have a good game.”

--UCLA scored 27 points on second shots.

--UCLA committed 20 turnovers, but it also forced 18.

--UCLA held Arkansas to 35.1% shooting in the second half, 43.1% overall.

--UCLA, specifically, the sometimes maligned Zidek (me again), held Williamson to the worst shooting performance of the Arkansas star’s season--three for 16.

“This was one game that I think Corliss would wish never happened,” said Razorback Coach Nolan Richardson.

Oh, really?

--UCLA, thanks to Dollar, kept finding ways to break Arkansas’ press. The Razorbacks suddenly found themselves subjected to 40 minutes of Bruin hell.

“Tyus Edney would have broken the press himself,” UCLA assistant coach Lorenzo Romar said. “Cameron broke the press, but he used other people to help him do it.”

--UCLA, thanks to Harrick and his assistants, did a remarkable job, slightly altering their game plan moments after warm-ups, when Edney told the staff that his sprained right wrist hurt too much for him to play.

So I was wrong about Arkansas. Big whoop. All that really matters, especially to those Bruin followers with speed dial, is that UCLA was right.

And by the way, do you serve red or white wine with crow?