As a college sports fan, it’s one of the most gratifying
phone calls to make and one of the most annoying to receive. In the
past few years, Oski from Cal, the Stanford tree and even Tommy
Trojan have been tying up the phone lines around this time of year,
calling into Westwood to painfully remind Joe Bruin of things that
are already blatantly obvious.
Tommy Trojan: Did you see that game? Hahahaha!
Joe Bruin: Shut up.
Tommy Trojan: I can’t believe Dijon Thompson missed the
first free throw and made the second one!
Joe Bruin: I have to go study. Later.
It’d be nice to dismiss these irritating calls as ones
from students who just don’t have people from their schools
to celebrate with. Lacking friends to high-five or toast victory
shots with, poor Tommy Trojan has to scroll through his cell phone
directory for that old high-school buddy who got into a better
school.
Unfortunately, the reality is that UCLA students are just as
guilty for making these trite and irksome calls. Or at least they
would be if they had more opportunities to do so. But with the
Bruin basketball team coming out of a two-year hibernation while
its rivals struggle, UCLA students are already looking through
their phone directories for potential targets to needle.
“I definitely feel like I’m going to be making some
phone calls in the future,” fourth-year Jason Gaulton said.
“Hopefully to Cal and Stanford people, especially if
we’re playing well and I want to talk about our
team.”
During basketball season, these conversations can be more common
than a phone call to home. Working in a sports office, I’ve
learned there’s an etiquette about how to broach the subject
and how to keep friends on the line when they’re essentially
just taking jabs.
“When I respond, I’m definitely angry, especially
when people are blatant about it,” said Gaulton, who admits
that he has been known to hang up the phone rather than listen to
his friends gloat. “I’d be more coy about it unless it
was USC. Then I would cuss them out until I was tired.”
Still, I can’t help but think that there are better ways
to celebrate a big win than to waste cell phone minutes on friends
who would be nothing but buzzkills in conversation. Let the losing
fans wallow in their own misery for a while.
Discussions with them inevitably leads to listening to excuses
that shouldn’t be made, or having to revisit a previous game
that should get buried in the past. Wouldn’t it be nicer to
force the losing fans to keep their frustrations bottled up inside
rather than giving them an open outlet to complain? Shouldn’t
a winning fan have better things to listen to than a friend’s
hackneyed defense of his team’s loss?
“You come up with something like “˜we’ll get
you next year’, or play it off by saying “˜our football
team beat yours,” Arizona student Blake Pomeroy said of how
he handles phone calls from gloaters, though I doubt he has much
experience using the latter quip as a Wildcat football fan.
At a school that appears to be resetting its winning ways in
basketball, UCLA fans should get a little more creative in how they
poke fun at their friends from other schools. For instance, Pameroy
recalled a newspaper clipping he received from his ex-girlfriend at
Arizona State, in which she highlighted every a, s, and u from an
article that reported the Sun Devil’s victory in the football
rivalry game.
While a forwarded newspaper article may not be the most clever
idea in the world, it’s at least a little more unexpected and
can’t be avoided as easily as a cell phone call. It’s
also a lot less annoying for the receiver to deal with.
And because the receiver will inevitably be a caller down the
line, that can only be a good thing.
E-mail Finley if you have something interesting to talk
about at afinley@media.ucla.edu.