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Amazed @ E-mail of the Bruin Species

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The angry e-mails keep landing in her inbox.

“They are super-hostile,” the recipient said. “They’re just awful.”

It doesn’t matter that her specialty is building design, not diagraming plays. Or that she has never been to Pauley Pavilion to watch a game.

She shares the same last name, first initial and employer as UCLA basketball Coach Steve Lavin, and the only difference between his e-mail address and that of professor Sylvia Lavin, chair of the UCLA architecture department, is one word on the right side of the @ sign. That has been enough to give her an up-close view of the wrath of Bruin basketball fans who don’t quite get the address right.

She isn’t related to the coach. She doesn’t even pronounce her last name the same way (for her it’s LAY-vin, not LAV-in). She never watches the Bruins, has no idea what Steve Lavin looks like and can’t understand the reason behind the hatred.

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“Is he bad at what he does?” she wondered. She might be the only person in Westwood who doesn’t have a quip ready for that question. By her own admission, she isn’t qualified to judge Steve Lavin.

“I know nothing about sports,” she says.

But through those wayward e-mails intended for the coach she’s learning plenty about what Bruin fans don’t like about him.

“There certainly are a lot of complaints about his substitutions,” Sylvia Lavin said. “And for a plain, old regular academic, it really is astonishing to me to see what kind of language sports fans find acceptable and appropriate. I’ve never seen people use so consistently that kind of ugly, invective, personal language.

“They really take it seriously. It’s barbaric. It makes me think of those scenes in the ‘Gladiator’ movie. My heart goes out to this man, whoever he is, that he has to deal with that kind of stuff all the time.”

She might get four or five e-mails a day.

“It’s not just Monday-morning quarterbacking,” she said. “They come in all the time. They tend to come in waves after a big game.”

And it isn’t all bad.

“He gets some nice fan mail too. The proportions are probably not what he would wish.”

Sylvia Lavin, an architectural historian and theorist who has taught at UCLA for 10 years, first noticed the negative e-mails about five years ago, which would coincide with Steve Lavin’s second season as UCLA coach. His Bruins went to the Midwest Regional final of the NCAA tournament in his first season after taking over for the fired Jim Harrick, but life hasn’t been that good for Steve Lavin since. Not even four trips to the Sweet 16 in a span of five years could quell the Lavin-haters.

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Sylvia Lavin has some clerk at Ellis Island to thank for those unwanted e-mails. Her grandfather immigrated to the United States from Ukraine in the early 20th century. His name was “something like Lehayvitch,” she said. Because he couldn’t read or write, he didn’t know how to spell it. So it went into the books as Lavin. (That has led to another batch of mistakenly addressed mail; Lavin is also the name of an Irish clan.)

Sylvia Lavin’s parents were art historians, so you can guess where the emphasis was in that household; certainly not on sports. But she did attend a couple of Harlem Globetrotter games in Rome when her family lived in Italy.

When Sylvia Lavin was a student at Barnard she fell in love with an architect, which soon led to a love of architecture. She received her graduate degree from Columbia and followed the pathway to the ivory tower.

“I exemplify the classic academic,” Lavin said. “Except I don’t wear glasses.”

She hasn’t had too many brushes with athletic stars. “I sat next to Keith Hernandez on the subway once,” she said. She recognized the baseball player from posters that a friend, an avid Met fan, had on her wall.

She also developed a fondness for the New York Knicks in the mid-1990s. She liked Patrick Ewing and Anthony Mason and preferred Pat Riley’s coaching approach to the Zen style of Phil Jackson and the Chicago Bulls.

These days she’s too busy raising her two young children to devote any free time to sports. Besides, there can be plenty of competition in the world of architecture. She’s married to architect Greg Lynn, whose group was among the six finalists for the redesign of the World Trade Center.

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She used to think the academic world was populated by mean and petty people -- “We’re quite awful to each other,” she said. Then she got an insight into the sports community. “I didn’t know how bad bad can be.”

At least she won’t have to see it up close for too much longer. Steve Lavin might as well start packing up his office now, because he won’t be on the job past the conclusion of UCLA’s first losing season in 55 years.

“Is that right?” Sylvia Lavin said. “It’s going to be over?” Obviously, she hasn’t been reading the sports section.

But she has been reading those e-mails.

“You’ve got to feel bad for the guy,” she said, “and how much they hate him.”

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com.

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