Irvine No Match for Well-Rested Cal

UC Irvine played Division II Western Washington in its first game back from a 10-day layoff. California played Irvine in its first game after an 11-day layoff.

Such is the college basketball food chain. Everyone--except possibly UCLA--wants a tomato can to ease back into play after finals.

The Golden Bears gobbled up Irvine, 88-61, Saturday in front of 10,319 in Haas Pavilion.

Sean Lampley and Donte Smith both scored 16 points. But it was the Bear defense that turned the game into a root-for-your-favorite-scrub event.

California reserves Ryan Meyers and Ryan Forehan-Kelly pushed. Both scored four points in garbage time.

Other numbers don’t lie.

California shot 52%, the Anteaters 38%. The Bears also had a 41-29 redound advantage. Irvine turned the ball over 21 times.

“We thought maybe we could make a run the first five or six minutes of the second half,” Coach Pat Douglass said. “They went to a zone and we couldn’t hit our shots.”

Still, this was a game the Anteaters believed could be theirs. They had, after all, played well on the road against Oklahoma, a team that had pounded California.

“The Oklahoma game showed us that we could compete on this level,” guard Jerry Green said. “I’m not saying we are going to win every time, but we can compete.”

Of course, beating California might not have shocked the world, but it may have rattled the neighborhood a little.

In the last decade, Irvine has been more like a little brother being bullied by his older sibling when it came to playing Pacific 10 schools. Since beating UCLA in the 1988-89 season, Irvine is 2-15 against the Pac-10.

The Anteaters have lost the last eight, including the last five by an average of 31 points.

“We didn’t come from Irvine to Berkeley to do nothing,” Green said. “We wanted to gain something.”

They went home with little except an interesting story.

The renovated Haas Pavilion--a work still in progress--was evacuated 15 minutes before the scheduled tip-off when fire alarms went off. As a result, the game started 27 minutes late.

“It came right in the middle of my best pregame speech of the year,” Cal Coach Ben Braun said.

A similar situation occurred before Cal’s last home game, when the smell of burning popcorn tripped an alarm. This time, the problem was a malfunctioning alarm.

The Bears, too, needed to work the kinks out after not having played in 11 days because of finals.

Once the Bears got rolling, though, there was little the Anteaters could do.

The frustration showed. Douglass picked up a technical foul in the first half. J.R. Christ was called for an intentional foul in the second half.

By then, the Bears had shaken loose the cobwebs.

“I was very concerned about the layoff,” Braun said. “I think it showed.”

Irvine made its first three shots, all layups. When Marek Ondera dropped in a 17-foot jumper, the Anteaters had an 18-17 lead with 10 minutes left in the half. It unraveled quickly.

Ondera picked up his third foul a minute later and was not a factor after that. Greg Ethington, Irvine’s starting center, played little because of the flu. It left Irvine weak inside.

The Anteaters went scoreless for six minutes. They made only three of 12 shots and turned the ball over five times in their last 18 possessions.