Trojans stake real claim on city throne, just for now

  Jeff Agase Agase remembers when the
biggest celebrity at the Forum was Jack Nicholson and not Daily
Bruin basketball writer Dylan Hernandez. He welcomes your comments
at [email protected]. Click
Here for more articles by Jeff Agase

INGLEWOOD “”mdash; This thing is getting big.

On a night when unranked and unheralded USC was clearly the
better team, No. 11 UCLA hung on, desperately clutching whatever
remained of its city dominance in basketball. At the end of a
near-comeback in a rough, spirited rivalry game, however, the 81-77
USC win firmly entrenched the Trojans as legitimate contenders to
the city throne.

A raucous crowd of 15,903, most of which was clad in cardinal
and gold, rocked the Forum throughout a game that was supposed to
be about respect, about staking a claim of legitimacy.

All week long, UCLA players and coaches had heaped praise upon a
USC team that had lost 13 of its last 14 to the Bruins, Los
Angeles’ traditional college basketball hegemon.

“USC is way in front of us in the way it is playing as a
team,” UCLA head coach Steve Lavin said after a narrow UCLA
win over Washington State last weekend. “We’ve got a
long, long way to go.”

But it was hard to tell whether the Bruins’ words
represented a confident challenge to USC or genuine fear. After the
game, it was just as unclear.

“This is just one game,” senior forward Matt Barnes
said. “I just look at this as one game. I’m not looking
at it like it’s any kind of turning point.”

Barnes, Billy Knight and Jason Kapono did their best in the
final two minutes of the game to maintain the L.A. basketball
status quo with yet another win over USC, but it was the
Trojans’ night.

It was the night for the return of a rivalry.

The Bruins finally encountered a team that could hold off the
kind of late-game flurry that had become so customary in clinching
lackluster wins over inferior opponents.

Unfortunately, the team was USC, which is now (gulp) the
undefeated leader of the Pac-10.

“I think we’re trying to change the trend,”
USC senior Brandon Granville said. “Do we believe we can win?
Yeah.”

It was a wake-up call, plain and simple. And perhaps in some
way, Lavin wanted it to come. His team had been performing with
chronic inconsistency and at times appeared to be sleepwalking
through games.

USC head coach Henry Bibby, on the other hand, had seen his
squad blow out conference opponents by distributing the ball,
hustling for rebounds and playing as more of a team than UCLA
had.

Right now, like it or not, USC is the best college basketball
team in Los Angeles. Gone now is the infamous J.R. Henderson quip,
“It’s only ‘SC.”

Now there’s only ‘SC. The Bruins can make good on
this frustrating evening by returning the favor next month at
Pauley Pavilion.

It’s tough right now to see dominance slip away, and as
USC students poured onto the court in celebration, the rise in
blood pressure felt by every Bruin fan felt a little strange
““ at least after a basketball game.

That’s what losing to a rival feels like. And that’s
what this is, once again ““ a rivalry. Once again, this means
something.

“It was everything I expected and more,” UCLA
freshman guard Cedric Bozeman said after his first UCLA-USC game.
“If you’re a USC fan, you hate UCLA. It’s a hate
thing.”

The hate thing’s always been there, but a real rivalry
hasn’t. After all, both teams need to win with some
regularity to constitute a rivalry.

The hate thing was there tonight, as evidenced by a creative, if
not entirely sensical sign that said, “Bin Laden is a
Bruin” and an irate Trojan driver yelling at me while I
jayran, “Public school trash!”

But, now that USC has made this thing big again, those juvenile
insults actually have something substantial behind them.

Bruin fans and players won’t have to wait long to respond
and take back what had been exclusively theirs.