The best rivalries in collegiate sports are those that are sustained by proximity: The campuses of Duke and North Carolina lie eight miles apart on Tobacco Road; the Holy War between Utah and BYU encapsulates Salt Lake City and its surroundings; and, of course, the UCLA-USC rivalry divides Los Angeles multiple times a year.
Recently, however, UCLA has managed to foster mini-rivalries with a number of schools, and it all has to do with timing.
Whether or not they were intended to be this way or not, the Pac-10 schedules have unfolded in such a manner that facilitates a weekend showdown with another school in a variety of sports. Last weekend, for example, UCLA faced Cal in football, men’s water polo, ice hockey, and both men’s and women’s soccer.
Three weekends ago, a similar situation arose between UCLA and Stanford. The Bruins and the Cardinal faced off in football, men’s water polo, women’s volleyball and ice hockey.
Coincidence? If so, then the schedule-makers out there need to make this a staple of the conference calendar. If not, then they deserve a Nobel Prize or something.
In the perpetual debate on the advantages of college sports over the professional ranks, one of the key elements that those in the collegiate realm have going for them is the rivalry factor.
Sure, there are rivalries between professional teams, but when you have one school competing against another school across multiple athletic platforms, you have the epitome of college athletics.
The UCLA-Cal rivalry dates back to the times when we improved upon Cal’s fight song, developed a superior mascot and Jackie Joyner-Kersee’ed our way past the Bears in terms of athletic success.
These days, however, rivalries like this struggle to really manifest themselves due to the constraints of distance. Until now.
Berkeley-ites converged on the UCLA campus in full force this last weekend with the football, water polo, men’s soccer and ice hockey matchups all happening in the Los Angeles area. Although the gridiron showdown at the Rose Bowl was undoubtedly the main course, the Friday night water polo and soccer matches proved to be tasty hors d’oeuvres and the hockey games an appealing side dish.
In fact, the men’s soccer game proved to be the culmination of the intense and emotional elements of the rivalry. At the conclusion of the match, things came to a head when a Cal player came in with a late slide tackle into the ankle of UCLA midfielder Kyle Nakazawa, a play that the Bruins considered dirty and that sparked a benches-clearing brawl between the two teams. With a rematch between the two squads set for Friday in Berkeley (since when is Nostradamus a Pac-10 scheduler?), things are bound to be heated.
“We’re going to use that play to motivate our fighting spirit,” Nakazawa said. “There’s no reason for that kind of play. We’re keeping that one in the back of our minds.”
If this trend of mass weekend series continues, college sports will benefit. While the idea is definitely not to encourage extra-curricular fisticuffs, the more intense the rivalries become, the more popular college sports will be.
You can have your Yankees-Red Sox, your Maple Leafs-Canadiens, even your Lakers-Celtics. I’ll take my six Bears-Bruins showdowns over the course of one weekend, and I’ll be a more fanatical sports fan for it.
With reports from Brantley Watson, Bruin Sports senior staff.
If you think Eshoff should storm the offices of the Daily Californian singing “Sons of Westwood,” e-mail Eshoff at reshoff@media.ucla.edu.