DRESSED FOR SUCCESS

Who are those people?

The question is asked by those walking into a UCLA women’s basketball game, looking up into the stands, startled by what they see.

Who are those people?

There are two of them, sitting side by side, wearing silly Dr. Seuss hats trimmed in blue and gold.

They sometimes do funny cheers that sound like, “Whoooooo.”

They sometimes sing the UCLA fight song, only they don’t know the words, so they substitute, “Dah-dah-dah.”

For three years they have been there, at nearly every game, home and away, loud voices amid relative quiet.

They cheer when nobody else will cheer. They show up in places nobody else shows up.

Really now. Who are those people?

“They’re my parents,” UCLA standout Maylana Martin says. “And I think they’re very cool.”

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This is a story for all the moms and dads who have devoted their lives to their children, sometimes at the expense of decorum and common sense, and wondered if it was worth it.

This is story for every child who has fidgeted under the weight of that devotion and wondered if it was worth it.

It is.

UCLA’s best women’s basketball player is proof.

You can see the dynamic family tonight at the Sports Arena, where UCLA plays Colorado State in the NCAA West Regional semifinals.

On the court, junior Maylana Martin will be the quick and powerful 6-foot-3 force, the Pacific 10 Conference player of the year, the strong-shouldered one.

In the stands, Lowell and Mary Martin will be the funny ones.

Afterward, Maylana will walk out of the locker room and join them, surprising bystanders who can never believe the star is related to the Seusses.

They will talk, they will go somewhere for dinner, Mom and Dad will buy, they will talk some more.

Finally, sometime after midnight, Maylana will return to her apartment, and Mom and Dad will climb in their truck and drive two hours back to their farmhouse on five acres in the small Riverside County town of Winchester.

The itinerary will not change regardless of the final score. In Mom and Dad’s mind, this is not about winning or losing. It’s about being Mom and Dad.

“We always thought, if you make the commitment to have kids, you’ve got to make the commitment to finish the job,” said Lowell Martin, a landscape architect.

You’ve probably heard that before. You’ve probably also seen somebody like the Martins before.

They are the parents driving the scratched van that smells like fast-food hamburgers and looks like a department store, filled with sporting goods and musical equipment.

They are the parents who accompany their children to every lesson, every game, every event, sitting in the stands with a book, cheering while holding a crying baby.

These parents are not very glamorous. They are not always dressed well. They often look tired and confused, bouncing wearily at the end of a string pulled by some half-pint.

But with any luck, that 5-year-old eventually becomes a 20-year-old who understand and appreciates.

And those parents become heroes.

Thank goodness Maylana Martin has taken the Bruins to a place where we can see that.

“If you don’t spend time with your kids, you don’t know them,” said Mary Martin, who also brags about daughter Laurie, 19, and son Ernest, 16.

They should know their children well. They’ve been following them for years, up the coast and overseas and to cheap hotel rooms for AAU tournaments where Mary packed a futon if she wanted a bed.

But it never gets any easier.

They leave work early for the 137-mile drive to a couple of dozen UCLA women’s home games, even though one of their cars has 250,000 miles and another once dropped its transmission while exiting the Santa Monica Freeway.

They made the drive this year even when Maylana was sidelined because of migraine headaches against Washington and Washington State.

She spent the game in bed with a sickening headache, listening on the radio. Her parents showed up at halftime bearing her favorite fudge and spent the rest of the game sitting on the bed with her.

“They have made it so easy for me because it’s like, they’ll be there no matter what,” Maylana said. “That takes so much pressure off. They love me for me, not because I’m No. 13.”

In return, she has to endure some kidding from teammates who catch her singing the words to songs from Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio.

Those were the tapes her parents played when they drove Martin and her two siblings all over creation growing up.

“She called and told me the kids were laughing at her, but said it was OK, because the songs reminded her of growing up,” said Mary Martin, a sixth-grade teacher. “I was very touched.”

Maylana also takes a little razzing about those hats, particularly her mother’s, which is festooned with feathers and buttons and reads, “MAMA 13.”

“She told us when she gets to the WNBA, we have to tone it down a little bit,” said Lowell, laughing.

Countered Mary, “No, it isn’t that she doesn’t like the hats. She just doesn’t want to wear one.”

Maylana settled it by saying, “I have never been embarrassed by my mom and dad. They have done goofy things, but they’ve always had my best interests at heart.”

Maylana now understands that this includes the time her mother yelled at the coach of her 9-year-old soccer team for not playing her.

She told her parents to let her handle her sports problems, and her parents never tried to coach her again.

“They are just, like, there,” Martin said. “It’s so unconditional.”

So the hats stay.

So does the blue “13” jersey that Maylana gave to her grandmother last summer, just before her grandmother died of breast cancer.

Because her grandmother never got to put it on, the family brings the jersey to each of the tournament games, either holding it or wearing it.

When Maylana Martin steps on the Sports Arena floor tonight, she will look for that jersey, and those hats, and her parents.

“Maybe it will be during a timeout, or walking down the floor for a free throw, but I always sneak a little look,” she said.

Funny, she says, but she can’t remember a time when they weren’t there.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.