In final home games, Knight ready to fight

  DANIEL WONG/ Daily Bruin Senior Staff Senior center
Dan Gadzuric is one of several Bruins about to
play their last games at Pauley Pavilion.

By Dylan Hernandez
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Billy Knight’s basketball career is coming to an end.

Two more games and he can’t go home again. Two more games
and no more Pauley Pavilion.

All season, Knight has tried to prepare himself for his
inevitable departure from the Bruin basketball program and from
UCLA, but the thought of it still scares him.

“It’s so easy here,” Knight said. “The
only thing you have to worry about is good and bad games. That and
grades.”

But Knight concedes, there’s nothing he can do to prevent
the culmination of his fifth and final season at UCLA, after which
he will no longer be a campus celebrity. He will, for the first
time in his life, have to find work to feed himself.

A conversation with former Bruin football player Freddie
Mitchell last weekend only reinforced those fears. Mitchell,
currently a wide receiver with the Philadelphia Eagles, told him,
“There’s nothing like college. You have a good game,
come to school and everyone talks to you about it. After school,
that never happens.”

So, as the unranked Bruins (18-9 overall, 10-6 Pac-10) prepare
for their final two home games of the season ““ one tonight
against Oregon State (12-15, 4-12) and the other Saturday, which is
Senior Day, against No. 13 Oregon (20-7, 12-4) ““ Knight is
just trying to savor every remaining second that he gets to spend
with his teammates.

“I’m just cherishing the moment,” Knight said.
“I’m enjoying practice. It’ll probably go by
really fast though.”

Similar sentiments are probably being felt by center Dan
Gadzuric, forward Matt Barnes and reserve guard Rico Hines,
although none of them are quite the orators that Knight is and
haven’t expressed their thoughts as well.

Last home games or not, however, this week is of great
significance for the Bruins. After these contests, all that remain
for them are the Pac-10 and NCAA tournaments.

Up-and-down, peak-and-valley, rollercoaster, Jekyll and Hyde
““ even UCLA’s most casual of followers, at some point,
have heard the Bruins described with the various terms synonymous
with “inconsistent,” which they have been.

Last week, they followed a ghastly outing on Thursday at Cal
with an electric performance on Saturday in a road win over
Stanford.

It is conceivable that the Bruins drop their game tonight to
OSU, which they drilled 70-48 on Feb. 2, then beat Oregon, which
butchered them 91-62 on Jan. 31.

As for which Bruin team shows up this week, no honest person can
offer a reasonable guess ““ except, perhaps, the coaches
and players.

Bruin head coach Steve Lavin said he fully expected his team to
experience the numerous setbacks it faced throughout the season,
especially since it was starting a freshman at point guard in
Cedric Bozeman.

“On the discouragement scale, 10 being the highest, I have
been at 8.5 or 9 in other seasons,” Lavin said “This
season, I’ve never been past 4 or 5. When Cedric got injured,
it put us back six weeks. The point guard is like the central
nervous system of the team.”

The Bruins, who will continue to run the simple motion offense
they employed against Stanford en route to scoring 95 points, think
that Bozeman has finally adjusted, that the team will not relapse
back into mediocrity.

“It’ll carry over,” Hines said of the momentum
it gained in Palo Alto. “What you saw against Stanford is
what you’ll see the rest of the year.”

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