Bruins Face Bear of an Obstacle

The way Coach Terry Donahue has it figured, when he addresses his UCLA players before today’s game against California at the Rose Bowl, he doesn’t have to use the Pacific 10 Conference race to inspire them.

Or stress the importance of maintaining the momentum generated by the team’s three-game winning streak. Or remind them that California, despite a 2-5 record, is coming off a victory over Oregon State.

No, the way Donahue figures it, one sentence will suffice for a pep talk.

The coach will simply tell his players: “Not one of you in this room has ever beaten the California Bears.”

Through good seasons and bad, home and away, the Bears have beaten the Bruins five in a row after having lost 18 in a row to UCLA. No team has beaten the Bruins six times in succession.

“We need to end this streak,” Donahue said. “It’s been a painful streak for us.”

Even though UCLA (5-2, 2-2 in the conference) will be missing leading receiver Kevin Jordan, who has a knee injury, and still won’t have linebacker Donnie Edwards six weeks after he suffered an upper back injury, this might be an opportune time for the Bruins to end the streak because these are dark days for Cal football.

Things have been so bad in Berkeley that the university’s student senate recently passed a bill advocating the firing of Coach Keith Gilbertson. The school’s athletic director, John Kasser, termed that legislation “inappropriate.”

Gilbertson himself went in to see Kasser about his future after the Bears got off to an 0-2 start.

“I’ve had three different athletic directors, three different bosses here,” said Gilbertson, now in his fourth season at California. “I have a new boss and went in and asked him if he was comfortable with me being the football coach and the direction of the program. That was what that was all about. It [the meeting] was grossly overstated and blown out of proportion.”

Did Gilbertson get a vote of confidence from Kasser?

“Yes, I did,” Gilbertson said with conviction.

It was one of the few uplifting moments for Gilbertson in a season of struggle. Even a victory has been no guarantee of a day free of frustration and anxiety.

Take last week’s 13-12 victory over Oregon State, for example. Trailing, 12-6, with just under seven minutes to play, Cal tied the game on a two-yard touchdown run by quarterback Pat Barnes. But Barnes got carried away in the ensuing celebration and was penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct. Because it was his second such penalty of the game, he was automatically ejected.

And the Bears were penalized 15 yards on the extra-point attempt, turning a 20-yard kick into a 35-yarder.

“I didn’t even look,” Gilbertson said.

It turned out all right. Kicker Ryan Longwell succeeded, despite the extra distance, and California hung on even without Barnes.

But that’s the way it has been going this season.

The Bears are ninth in the Pac-10 in total offense and dead last in rushing, averaging only 98.9 yards a game. The team’s leading ballcarrier is tailback Reynard Rutherford, who has gained 464 yards, averaged 4.5 a carry and scored four touchdowns on the ground. But there’s a big drop-off after that.

Even if the Bears find a running game, that doesn’t solve what figures to be California’s biggest problem today--blacking out the daylight when the other team is running the ball.

UCLA is second in the conference in rushing with an average of 213.3 yards a game, a season total of 1,493 and a conference-leading 17 touchdowns rushing.

Of that total, tailback Karim Abdul-Jabbar has accounted for a conference-leading 995 yards and nine touchdowns. A junior, he is coming off a 42-carry, 261-yard, four-touchdown game against Stanford. Having rushed for 1,227 yards last season, the former Sharmon Shah is off to the fastest start for a Bruin with the highest rushing total in school history after seven games.

And today, he will carry the ball against a defense that is giving up 170.9 yards a game on the ground.

Does Gilbertson have any ideas on stopping Abdul-Jabbar?

“Have him kidnaped before he gets to the stadium,” the coach said.

Wishful thinking aside, Gilbertson is expected to use an eight- or nine-man front and dare UCLA to beat him with freshman quarterback Cade McNown.

This is McNown’s first exposure to the losing streak against California, but he has gotten the message.

“That’s terrible,” he said. “It’s time to throw that thing out the window.”