Every Tuesday and Thursday morning on the Wooden Center’s Collins Court, a diverse group of basketball players take the floor.
Their styles range from low-top Nikes to stiff high-top ankle braces, their hair from long dreadlocks to white, short mops. Some possess tenure, others sport tattoos.
This isn’t a casual pickup game – it’s a time-honored tradition. The faculty game – referred to by its players as the NBA, or “Noon Basketball Association” – contains all the components of a real competition: emphatic shouting, trash-talking, play calls, pick-and-rolls and the occasional expletive.
Since before 1970, UCLA faculty and staff from across all disciplines and departments and ranging in age from early 20s to late 70s have met every week on Collins Court for a round of pickup basketball.
“We’ve got guys who work on the dock, we’ve got guys who work in the hospital, we’ve got professors, we’ve got administrative assistants, we’ve got students,” said Professor Emeritus Val Rust, who works in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.
In between no-look passes and blocked shots, the men substitute themselves in and out of the game, only allowing newcomers to join if there aren’t enough players.
Some players were members of high school and even college teams, while others found the sport as a hobby later on in life. Despite their different backgrounds, ages and professions, each person competes at the same level of intensity.
“We pay no attention to anything except if you can play ball,” Rust said.
Rust is the most veteran player on Collins Court, having played in the faculty game for its 45-year history. A high school basketball player, Rust continued to play the sport through college and even at the club level in Germany while working on research following his achieving a doctorate.
While Rust boasts vast experience in the sport, not all noon basketball players share his long history with basketball.
“My favorite thing is when you have five guys who have never played before, and all of a sudden it’s like a jazz band and they all start working together for a common goal and playing together and passing,” said Dr. Gary Green, who used to work as a team physician for UCLA Athletics.
While all participants of the faculty game are associated with UCLA in some capacity, most of them have never met before joining the Noon Basketball Association and hold basketball as a sole common interest.
“It’s one thing when you have a team, where people practice together, but we never practice together and you don’t know who you’re going to play with,” Green said.
The faculty game offers consistency in the inconsistent field of pickup basketball. Without fail, the noon basketball players take the court at 11 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday, ready to play.
“It’s cool getting to know the guys and just having a group that is consistent,” said Stephen Hop, a recent UCLA graduate now working for the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship on campus. “We look out for each other. No one’s trying to get hurt, we just have fun out here.”
Fun is the main objective of the faculty game, despite its competitiveness. It’s not the competition that keeps the players coming back, but the camaraderie.
This connection sets them apart from the rest of the athletes at Wooden and stems from a shared love of the sport that has kept them coming back to Collins Court for more than 45 years.
“I play because I love it,” Green said. “I think if it ever gets to the point where I don’t hurry to get to the game, then I’ll probably stop playing.”
With either the willfully blind approval or the willful ignorance of the judiciary the right has killed & stolen several of my pets and routinely shoot energy weaponry at me and my pets. Recent harm to animals include: two kittens from a pregnant stray i took in were killed a few days ago. The remaining two, just 3 weeks old, shake their head as government operatives shoot them with energy weaponry. They shot the eye out or removed the eye of a large really good natured stray at the port, hobbled another cat at the port, shooting it with energy weaponry, and routinely kill and leave dead animals in my path. A few years ago one of them threatened, prophetic, ‘we’ll just kill a cat every so often’, in so many words. This has continued despite my calls to the police, the FBI, Congress, and my petitions in court. In the usual case, it appears that the right goes to a judicial crony for a ruling permitting them to harm animals to retaliate against me for my free speech. There’s no serious argument but that they interfered with my personal life and economic options for 3 decades, so their solution to my noting it is to kill animals. Makes perfect sense right? It does if you’re a sociopathic criminal, criminally stupid, and hawkish. Invariably their lies are exposed and the wrongfulness of the harm is clear to everyone, though not until the animals have been maimed or killed. There is really only one solution, and that’s to disempower them politically.
Typically operating through Puppets–including puppets in the judiciary–the right wing has for decades been committing crimes and trying to classify them to cover them up, a move explicitly forbidden by the Code of Federal Regulations. The right has accomplished its political objectives by presenting a fraction of the evidence to judicial officials who, having seen the pattern dozens of times before, could not help but realize that they were being presented with incomplete and inaccurate information.
If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth, right? the Democrats’ great accomplishment is producing the political equivalent of a Rodney King video, clearly demonstrating the lies of the right, the right Hilary Clinton correctly identified as a vast conspiracy. Confirm by examining Central District of California Cases, 01-4340, 03-9097, 08-5515, 10-5193, US Tax Court 12000-07L –though I think you want to view my US Tax Court Appeal to the 9th Circuit for a good account of their day to day assaults, a few month time slice indicative of a decade of assault, and 9th Circuit case 11-56043.