Their success defined a university. From the baby boomer
generation to the Y2K scare, it was a constant. And all of a
sudden, it was gone.
The UCLA men’s basketball team was the benchmark of
greatness for so long that when the program completely bottomed out
three years ago, a whole community lost its identity. And all of a
sudden, it was back.
UCLA’s 2006 graduating class witnessed the biggest
four-year turnaround in the history of the men’s basketball
program. This year’s class entered the university only to
find the most storied college basketball program in the country
shaken to its athletic foundation.
Steve Lavin was in the last of his seven tumultuous seasons as
coach. In Lavin’s final season from 2002-2003 he guided UCLA
to a 10-19 (6-12 Pac-10) record. It was the worst basketball season
since Wilbur Johns led the program to an 8-16 record in 1945-1946,
three years before John Wooden began his mystical 27-year tenure in
Westwood.
In Ben Howland’s third season at the helm, the Bruins won
the Pac-10 regular season and tournament title in the same year for
the first time in nine years. The NCAA title game appearance was
their 13th overall, but only their second in the last 25 years.
UCLA’s graduating class this year has watched the Bruins
come full circle. If other UCLA alumni offer any indication, this
year’s class will only become more attached to the basketball
program, as it becomes many graduates’ strongest and most
memorable tie to their alma mater.
Dirty Laundry
From afar, they are merely a couple of T-shirts. The powder blue
with the gold trim, worn by UCLA students who ache for the
nostalgic basketball history they weren’t even alive to
experience.
On closer inspection, one of the T-shirts symbolizes the darkest
days of the UCLA men’s basketball program. The other one
seems to carry all the unabashed optimism that has returned to the
program in three short years.
In the spring of 2002, Mehran Ebadolahi was a first-year
political science student who had an idea. Ebadolahi, who graduated
fall quarter 2005, was a lifelong Bruins fan who grew up in Irvine,
and his high standards for the UCLA basketball team were not being
met.
Along with five of his friends, Ebadolahi created the
“Lose Lavin” T-shirt. The shirt was a walking
advertisement for the Web site loselavin.com, where people could
gripe about why they were upset with Lavin’s coaching.
“The shirt was made to give Bruin fans from all eras a
chance to say, “˜Hey, this is our program too, and we have
expectations,'” Ebadolahi said.
By the fall of 2002, the shirts became more and more popular.
Upward of 2,000 had been sold. While Lavin was stumbling through
his last season in Westwood, Ebadolahi was receiving e-mails from
alumni swearing they wouldn’t donate to the program until
Lavin was ousted. Ebadolahi even claims that basketball players on
that year’s team would congratulate him on making the
shirts.
“Everybody thought I had a good time making those
shirts,” he said. “But it wasn’t fun. That was
the low point for us as fans. We were so bad that year, we had to
just make fun of the situation.
“I never thought (a turnaround) would happen while I was
still a student.”
Ebadolahi has since caught on to a new shirt that is
representing a whole new feeling around the basketball program. In
January 2006, Johnny Cheng and Edmund Lee developed the
“Moute kicks boute” shirt. Cheng and Lee, both UCLA
graduates of 2001, still live in the Los Angeles area and have UCLA
basketball season tickets. They created the shirt to help usher in
a new era of Bruin basketball, cleansed of the bad blood splattered
all around Pauley Pavilion.
The shirt is a way for Cheng and Lee to pay homage to their
favorite current player, Pac-10 Freshman of the Year Luc Richard
Mbah a Moute. The shirt is accompanied by a Web site,
princeofwestwood.com, which is a reference to Mbah a Moute’s
royal lineage as a prince of his native village in Cameroon.
Cheng and Lee sold the shirts for $10 each before the UCLA
athletic department informed them that it infringes on the
university’s licensed logo, so it could no longer be
distributed.
But that was secondary. For Cheng and Lee, the shirt was a way
to show that the program has turned the corner.
“You never really stop being a part of the UCLA program,
so when they lose you can take it personally,” Cheng said.
“But the shirt was just a way to show appreciation and say
that we as former UCLA students are proud again.”
As for Ebadolahi, he has even bought a couple of the
“Moute kicks boute” shirts. Every once in a while he
still sees people in Westwood with the “Lose Lavin”
shirts, reminding him of where the program has been.
The Afterlife
Richard Meng is one of a number of UCLA students who attended
each of the Bruins’ NCAA Tournament games. It was a
postseason run that took Meng down to San Diego, up north to
Oakland and east to Indianapolis. For some the trip may have been
an unnecessary distraction during finals week of winter quarter,
but Meng had watched too many UCLA losses during his first two
years at school to let this opportunity pass through his
fingertips.
Meng, a graduating political science student who will attend USC
Law School in the fall, grew up as an Arizona Wildcats basketball
fan. He hails from Phoenix, Ariz., but made the official conversion
to UCLA fandom upon his entrance here. So when the Wildcats, then
No. 2 in the nation, drubbed the Bruins 87-52 in Pauley Pavilion in
January 2003, Meng walked out of the pavilion in shock.
“I was a freshman at one of my first games, and
didn’t know what was happening,” Meng said. “I
had always grown up hearing about the UCLA basketball team, and I
was let down.”
But Meng believed in the aura that surrounded the program. Maybe
it was just something the fans had concocted to build false hope,
but whatever it was, there was a sense that things would turn
around.
Meng said that he learned to be patient through his first two
years, so much so that he was still willing to go to Pauley
Pavilion in Ben Howland’s first season. Knowing that the team
had little chance to win, he wanted to support the new coach
anyway.
So call the 2006 NCAA Tournament a little bit of vindication for
Meng and so many other students.
“I made that trip with my closest friends in
college,” he said. “And it is probably the best moment
of my last four years here. And I know there are others who feel
the same.”
Meng will be one of nearly 200,000 UCLA alumni who still live in
the Los Angeles area. Although he will also be a USC graduate
student, he is looking forward to a UCLA afterlife where he will
continue to attend basketball games.
“I just hope (Jordan) Farmar and (Arron) Afflalo stay for
one more season,” Meng said.
Alumni Roots
The class of 2006 is graduating after a memorable run in the
NCAA Tournament, but now they must find their niche as alumni
supporters. It is this alumni base which has typically been a
strength of UCLA. There is the same fervor for the sports
dynasties, especially basketball, among alumni as there is among
current students.
Richard Bergman attended UCLA from 1972-1975 and attained his
degree in accounting from Cal State Northridge. At the time, UCLA
didn’t offer this field of study, so Bergman got his CSUN
diploma. But he always considered himself a Bruin, so much so that
years after his graduation he helped Harold Demsetz develop what
became the business-economics department at UCLA.
From 1997 through this year, Bergman was the chairman of
Campaign UCLA for the UCLA College. Over the summer, he will hold a
position on the search committee for the dean of the Social
Sciences.
Despite all of his work with the academic leadership of UCLA,
Bergman’s fondest memories come as a Bruin basketball
fan.
He attended his first UCLA basketball game with his older
brother, Daniel, when he was just a junior in high school in 1970.
And like any die-hard Bruin fan, he has his John Wooden story.
After Wooden’s NCAA record 88-game winning streak was
snapped by Digger Phelps’ Notre Dame in January 1974, Bergman
passed by the Wizard of Westwood at the Los Angeles Airport. It was
an exchange that lasted a moment, but he can still describe the
slightest eye twitch by Wooden on that day 32 years ago.
“We are on passing escalators at LAX, and I look at the
coach and he looks at me,” he said. “I just smile and
shrug my shoulders to say “˜what are you going to do.’
He shrugs his shoulders back at me, with a little grin.”
Wooden briefly passed by a college student who would go on to do
great things, but it was that moment that defines UCLA for Bergman,
and it is why he thinks the basketball program means so much to its
alumni.
“There is an excellence and character that the program
defines for us,” he said. “But it is also where we
build so many memories of our time at school at a certain age.
“That’s why people are so passionate about the team
and have such high expectations.”
Bergman thinks of when he sat with his friends in the cold early
in the morning to buy basketball tickets for a quarter a piece or
when he met his wife Barbara as a UCLA undergraduate.
He thought of those moments when he made the trip to Oakland and
sat in the stands for the game where UCLA came back against Gonzaga
to win at the last second, or when he flew to Indianapolis to watch
his alma mater in the Final Four.
For Bergman, there remains something special about having been
in Westwood during that pocket of time when John Wooden was hanging
banners in Pauley Pavilion and making UCLA a brand name.
“It isn’t just about putting a ball through a
hoop,” he said. “The term “˜UCLA family’ is
a trite one. But if it ever applies to alumni, it does for the
basketball program.”