No Underachieving for This Bruin

It has been a season largely highlighted by a nucleus of gifted yet underachieving athletes, of a team that after five months of trying, still can’t find a way to bind together and win games that must be won. And now they’re at the end of their rope.

Only two games remain, both on the road, and the UCLA women’s basketball team that so many saw last November as the class of the Pacific 10 is fighting for a fourth-place finish and an invitation to the NCAA tournament.

Despite the disappointing season, however, one UCLA player has cast a bright light, illuminating ways injured athletes can recover from not one but two devastating injuries.

Her name is Takiyah Jackson, a 6-foot-1 senior who walks around the UCLA campus with the sound of a snapped pencil never far from her consciousness.

“That’s what it sounds like, when you pop your [knee’s anterior cruciate ligament],” she said, “just like when you snap a pencil in two.”

She knows the sound well. She has heard it twice. Two of her five years at UCLA were spent in rehab. No one would have blamed her if she had packed it in.

Instead, she redesigned her game.

As a Seattle high school All-American, she played a soaring, in-the-air game. She could knife through zones and score on acrobatic drives, or find teammates with no-look passes.

She signed with UCLA. Then, playing in a Seattle summer league game in 1995, she heard the pencil-snap sound. A year later, rehab completed at UCLA, she found she had lost something off her vertical jump. Playing minutes were few.

Another year went by. Then, in the third minute of the first day of practice in 1997, it happened again, the pencil-snap sound. Same knee. Same injury. This time, the tendon from a cadaver was put in her knee.

“A lot of friends started worrying about me, asking me if I was being smart about this, trying to play again,” she said. “But quitting was never on my mind. I took it like I was being tested. I worked harder at rehab than the first time. I just love to compete, that’s all. That’s what this is all about. I’d feel the same way if it’d been tennis or soccer.”

In her second comeback, with her mobility further reduced, she began designing a new, improved Takiyah Jackson.

“I decided to get really good at blocking out inside, getting more physical, helping us get more rebounds,” she said. “If I have my player blocked out properly, it doesn’t matter if she’s 6-5. I also worked much harder at steals.

“I always had good anticipation, but after the two knee surgeries I worked really hard to put it to use.”

With only about a third of the playing time of steals leader Maylana Martin, Jackson, the third player off the bench, has half as many steals.

And now, at the end of her UCLA career, mission accomplished. She’s a new, different player.

“In high school, I relied entirely on my athletic ability,” she said. “I could use my speed to run by or my jumping ability to go over people. Now, I feel I’m a much smarter player, one who works hard on the little things that I never did when my knee was sound. In that sense, it’s all been a positive.”

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Oregon, Stanford and Arizona are all in the hunt for the Pac-10 championship before this final weekend.

Oregon (13-4) can clinch at least a tie by beating Oregon State (10-7) on Friday.

Stanford (12-4) can grab a piece of the championship by beating both Arizona (11-5) and Arizona State (7-9).

The Wildcats can win their first title with a Bay Area sweep but need Oregon State to beat Oregon too.

If there’s a tie, co-champions will be declared and head-to-head records will be used to determine NCAA tournament seeding. The second tiebreaker, if necessary, will be comparative records of the next highest finishing team in the Pac-10.

The highest UCLA (10-6) could finish is a tie for second.

The tournament will be seeded Sunday at 2:15 p.m., on ESPN.

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Those two 6,000-plus crowds UCLA had for Stanford and California on Thursday and Sunday enabled the Bruins to set a season attendance record, 3,713, topping last season’s average of 3,220.

Now it can be told: In 1996, when Stanford Coach Tara VanDerveer was making a home recruiting visit to Martin’s home in Perris, she hadn’t been forewarned that Martin maintained a minor zoo at home. She sat down on the family couch, glanced left and found herself eyeball to eyeball with Martin’s four-foot boa constrictor.

“I never saw a woman move so fast in my life,” recalled Martin’s father, Lowell, recently.

Recalled VanDerveer, “It was an adrenaline rush of a lifetime. Absolutely scared me to death. I even remember the snake’s name. It was Corky.”

Martin, incidentally, is the fifth Bruin, male and female, to surpass 2,000 points. The others: Denise Curry, 3,098; Don MacLean, 2,608; Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, 2,325; Reggie Miller, 2,095, and Martin, 2,047.