Your complete basketball fan’s experience begins at Fatburger.
You sit down with some onion rings and a cheeseburger with everything but onions, without even realizing the irony of what you just ordered. It’s 1 a.m. on Friday night. There will be no more roll calls at the Pauley Pavilion campout, and electing to sleep in your own bed instead of on a cold chair is an easy choice. A burger on the way back is a no-brainer.
With ESPN nationally broadcasting SportsCenter and College GameDay from Pauley six hours from now, you can rest easy.
There’s only one small hitch.
Three of your friends are going to go full throttle for the game the next day. That means jumping, screaming and a whole lot of chest paint.
And they need an “L.”
After a few minutes making up your mind over their fries, you reluctantly agree. You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into.
With Bob Marley’s “Stir It Up” playing on the jukebox, you collectively realize one thing: You have no paint. A trip to Rite Aid disappoints, and all CVS has is a couple of five-ounce bottles of finger paint, the likes of which you haven’t seen since your days at Wildwood Elementary.
It’ll have to do.
After sleeping for what seemed like 20 minutes, you stumble down to Pauley with a couple of your roommates at 5:30 in the morning. It’s still dark outside. You decide to save the finger paint for the game and are fortunately fully clothed.
You make a couple posters, get them approved by GameDay’s censorship committee and head inside.
After finding respectable seats a few rows up from the floor on the alumni side, the ESPN commentators trickle in: Digger “I Made My Career by Beating the Bruins” Phelps, Jay “East Coast Bias” Bilas, Hubert “I Picked Arizona” Davis and Rece “No Relation to Hubert” Davis.
Digger gives a short speech to the few hundred students that are there, reminding them of his own history, intertwined with UCLA’s. In 1974, as Notre Dame’s head coach, he was responsible for ending the Bruins’ NCAA record 88-game winning streak ““ a point of fact in which he takes ceaseless pride.
The commentators do their show, with plenty of eight-claps and cheers from students in the background. They make their predictions for the day’s games, and Hubert gets soundly booed for his pick of the Wildcats over the Bruins.
A sneaky GameDay employee confiscates the “Fire Lavin” sign right out of your back pocket.
They take your “Fire Lavin, Again” sign, too.
At one point, Jay ““ who now has become “The Man” Bilas ““ heads into the stands, gets a good laugh out of you and your friends’ posters and tapes a short segment with you in the background.
You quickly make a “Jay, sign my baby!” sign and get that on TV, too.
Seven hours later, you’re walking back down to Pauley for the game with a layer of finger paint covering your arms, chest and back, with a giant “L” in the front. Surprisingly, you get a few weird looks.
The only thing is that 10 ounces of blue split between four people doesn’t get too far. As it starts to dry, you begin to resemble some kind of peeling Smurf.
Paint problems aside, you get in line just as some guy approaches you. Apparently he’s the chair of the UCLA Rally Committee and you are just not blue enough. He’s tells you to buy Den shirts. They’re sold out. Tough luck.
The Rally Committee Chair and his collective are just not going to let you into Pauley Pavilion.
You cross your fingers, promise to put on a shirt and finally manage to get inside.
There you get second row seats, jump in front of the camera a few times and lay witness to what Bilas calls a “beat-down from the very first minute.”
You watch as the Bruins put on their most dominating performance of the year with an 82-60 win, a perfect ending to an experience that will stick with you, and on you, for a long time.
E-mail Feder at jfeder@media.ucla.edu.