L.A.’s Ultimate Turf War

Frederick Corzine put on women’s underwear, climbed on top of his desk at a Wilshire Boulevard sales office and began to sing.

Corzine had not lost his mind, he’d lost a bet.

The USC alumnus had wagered a colleague, a UCLA graduate, that the Trojans would beat the Bruins in the annual big game last fall. In the aftermath of a 48-41 double-overtime loss, he insists that the humiliation of wearing lacy undergarments could not compare to the horror of singing the rival school’s fight song.

“Left a bad taste in my mouth,” Corzine said.

Every year at this time, the cross-town rivalry expands beyond the respective campuses into offices and homes across Southern California. With an estimated 250,000 USC and UCLA graduates in the area, and tens of thousands more who have pledged their allegiance to one team or the other, adversaries are constantly butting heads.

No matter that UCLA is heavily favored to win Saturday’s game at the Coliseum. No matter that USC has struggled through an inconsistent season.

In a city as relatively new as Los Angeles, where ancient history could be described as the time before Technicolor, an annual game has significance. It carries the weight of heritage, of tradition.

Or maybe it goes deeper than that, to primal instinct.

“This is animal behavior,” said Dallas Willard, a USC philosophy professor. “In playing, members of a pack of wolves establish and reestablish a ranking order. It gets into the function of sports in society.

“As a spectator, the need to see one’s team be successful ties directly to one’s sense of well-being.”

That need can make a Los Angeles City Council president crow on the record or make a group of Tarzana doctors vandalize one another’s consultation rooms. It can make teachers at a Woodland Hills high school behave like teenagers, toilet-papering their principal’s office.

“There’s that element of the special occasion,” said Roderic Gorney, a UCLA clinical professor of psychiatry. “For some people, that makes it OK to do things that would be verboten at other times.”

At the start of the 1990s, the Trojans had won or tied five of the previous six games and their fans were feeling cocky.

City Council President John Ferraro, a former USC All-American, would quip about the rivalry during meetings. And when the Swedish-based furniture store Ikea proposed to build a warehouse in Carson, the Planning Commission found the company’s blue and gold color scheme incompatible with an adjacent mall.

Carson Community Development Director Patrick Brown, a USC graduate, had a suggestion.

“How about cardinal and gold?” he asked.

But in 1991, UCLA embarked on its current six-year winning streak. And to the Bruin fans have gone the spoils.

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At Taft High School in Woodland Hills, Principal Ron Berz bears the brunt of post-game celebrations.

“I come in on Monday morning and my whole office has been toilet-papered in blue and gold,” Berz said.

Normally, he would suspect students. But Berz is a solitary Trojan amid a faculty and staff rife with Bruins. Chief among them is Linda Zimring, a college counselor.

“Guilty as charged,” Zimring said, adding: “He always pulls the stuff down before anyone can see it.”

Others have not had it so easy.

At the Sunrise Rotary Club of Westlake Village, the losers have had to serve breakfast to the winners after each game.

“It’s been hard to live with those misguided Bruins the past six years,” said Tom Waite, a club official whose grandmother attended USC in 1872. “They are such bad winners because they haven’t had much experience with it.”

And at a Tarzana medical building, Dr. Bud Zukow knows the USC-UCLA football game is drawing near when he finds packets of Trojan condoms on his office door.

“The pharmacist downstairs,” said Zukow, a UCLA alumnus. “He went to USC. Big Trojan fan.”

The building where Zukow is a pediatrician erupts in adolescent high jinks each November. An anesthesiologist is known to sneak around with a can of spray paint. Doctors find their offices festooned with balloons in the rival school’s colors.

Even patients get into the act.

“They manage to make appointments the day before the game,” Zukow said. “They dress their kids in that horrible cardinal and gold.”

None of this sounds like good-natured fun to Gorney, who suggests that fans are swept up in the hoopla because they were not adequately nurtured as infants.

“If the deprivation is strong, the result is a pervasive need for revenge,” Gorney said. “The things we do with athletic competitions are a desperate attempt to channel revengeful feelings into a vein that won’t be destructive.”

Far from a healthy release, this behavior “does harm by stimulating rather than trivializing aggression,” Gorney said.

For Chris and Kim Westhoff, the struggle to keep such aggression at bay is a daily challenge during football season.

There is a catch in Chris’ voice when he recalls his freshman year at UCLA in 1967, when O.J. Simpson broke a 64-yard touchdown run to beat his beloved Bruins. Kim speaks fondly of attending USC games with her sorority sisters.

The Glendale couple met 14 years ago. They courted through the spring and married at summer’s end.

“We never actually dated through football season,” Chris said. “If we had, it probably wouldn’t have worked out.”

The assistant city attorney is wont to sulk after losses and gloat shamelessly after victories. Kim, a private attorney, insists she is more mature.

Yet, without provocation, she launches into an invective against the Bruin mascot, “that stuffed animal they have running up and down the sidelines. I prefer the stately white horse. Now there’s an animal.”

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And when her husband becomes unbearable, refusing to kiss her because she is wearing a USC shirt, she has a ready comeback.

“If UCLA is so great, why couldn’t you find someone to marry there?” she asks. “There were obviously no women of the quality and abilities that you wanted.”

So it seems that with the tradition and pageantry, the instinct and ego, the USC-UCLA football game is as much about put-downs as it is about touchdowns. Apparently, the taste of victory is sweeter when used as ammunition around the water cooler.

“The sports rivalry can often degenerate into degrading remarks,” explained Willard, who has witnessed such attacks.

The philosophy professor recalled a particular episode at a game some years past, as the Trojans were beating the Bruins.

“People can do awful things,” he said. “Someone in the stands actually commented on how UCLA had more Nobel Prize-winners than USC.”