I half-expected Vitamin C to start playing.
Standing in the lower student section after the game, I was finally forced to face the fact (and yes, that’s four words starting with “˜f’ in the space of six words) that UCLA’s victory over Stanford would likely be my last home game as a UCLA undergraduate.
More than walking across a stage in June (or not, depending on how Murphy Hall feels about giving me another couple of quarters), this felt like my graduation.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss a home game in my entire time at UCLA (there may have been a game against Humboldt or something that is lost to memory) and now there will likely be no more.
I probably stood there for a solid 20 minutes after the game was over, long after “Rover” was done playing, long after Arron Afflalo had left the floor of Pauley Pavilion for perhaps the last time.
We chanted “one more year” at him for a solid five minutes as he was interviewed by Fox Sports Net after the game, and while I hope he took our chants to heart, I don’t think the guy is going to stay.
I didn’t really care when Jordan Farmar left early last year. Farmar never endeared himself to anyone, and I honestly thought, with my tremendous foresight and keen analytical sense, that Darren Collison would be better and make this team a much smoother team offensively. It felt like we lost every game in which Farmar was looking for his own shot or ended up being our leading scorer, so I wasn’t too upset to see him go.
With Afflalo, it’s different.
This guy was Ben Howland’s first recruit when he came to Westwood. As much as Howland, he has been the leading force in turning UCLA into a defense-first, fundamentally sound basketball team.
My first year at this school coincided with Howland’s first year, and watching him trying to coach a bunch of Lavin players, you knew that he needed a certain kind of player to play his brand of basketball.
With Afflalo, he found that player.
I still say his best game as a Bruin was the game at Cal last year, when the Bruins were down at the half and he came out like an assassin in the second half to basically will UCLA to victory and a conference championship.
I guess what I’m taking a long, maudlin route to say is that I really hope Afflalo wins it all this year. While about 95 percent of that hope comes from pure selfishness because I really want to see a basketball national championship, there is a fair bit there that just wants to see Afflalo win it because he deserves it.
He and Howland have brought about a resurgence of UCLA basketball when there were some who thought that Steve Lavin had done irrevocable damage to the program.
Afflalo deserves to have his name in the hallowed company of Ed O’Bannon, Bill Walton, Lewis Alcindor, and the other greats of UCLA basketball; not because he’s just as good as them, but because he has meant just as much to the program.
When UCLA brings a 12th banner home from Atlanta when they beat Kansas in the national championship game, it will be the perfect ending to Afflalo’s career at UCLA. Staying after that would be an anti-climax of epic proportions and his draft stock would probably never be higher than right then. Staying another year would probably be a foolish, foolish choice.
But I still hope he does.
E-mail Woods at dwoods@media.ucla.edu if you are playing the world’s smallest violin for him right now.