Poor performance is eyesore for fans

  Jeff Agase The game was so bad that
Agase is actually enjoying the WWF that’s on the Daily Bruin
television. E-mail him at [email protected]. Click
Here for more articles by Jeff Agase

THE DAILY BRUIN SPORTS CUBICLE “”mdash; What was it they used to
say about the NBA?

Deny everything ““ it’s not your kid.

No, not that. It was that the final minute is all that
matters.

For the first 39 minutes of UCLA’s 82-79 win over Arizona
State last night, I was for some reason glad to be at the Daily
Bruin office and not in Tempe for the game. The frenzied final
minute salved my two hours of pain a bit, but the damage had
already been done.

If you’ve ever been in the Daily Bruin office, seeing how
it takes all of two minutes to break into a cold sweat would give
you an indication that we don’t exactly have the kind of
budget to send a lowly columnist to away games in Arizona.

So I watched the game on television, making sure to apply an
extra layer of deodorant.

The Bruins had won 24 of their last 25 games against the Sun
Devils, but UCLA faithful know never to count their team’s
opponents out ““ especially with a Saturday game against
Arizona looming.

Surprisingly, the game started with a 7-0 UCLA run, and I
figured I might at least be in store for the kind of back shed
whipping that makes Steve Spurrier grin. That would be kind of
entertaining. There were even five or six people in our little cube
watching the game with me.

When freshman Cedric Bozeman threw the ball away just over three
minutes into the game, the tone was set. It was a tone only the
tone deaf could love.

The two teams dribbled off their knees, feet, ACLs, just about
anything that wasn’t the floor. They missed dunks. As usual,
UCLA was playing down to its competition, but its competition was
somehow playing lower.

“Sometimes you have to win ugly in conference,” UCLA
head coach Steve Lavin said. “We won’t be able to win
at Arizona with the level of concentration and effort we had
tonight.”

ASU started the game shooting three-for-15. Included in two of
the 15 was a sequence where freshman Jason Braxton missed a dunk, a
Sun Devil pulled down a nice rebound, then proceeded to kick it out
for an airball.

Not to be outdone, Bruin forward T.J. Cummings later grabbed a
beautiful board and threw up an airball.

Yep, it was that kind of game, at least for 39 minutes. With
five minutes left in the first half, I could taste my Rubio’s
burrito dinner.

I was now watching the game alone, and actually looking forward
to watching USC. It was that bad.

I rushed back from Rubio’s at halftime, not to make sure I
didn’t miss the start of the second half, but because my
burrito was getting cold. Maybe Billy Knight’s steal and
layup to end the half would turn things around, I thought.

Not a chance. Not in this game. During some stretches, I
honestly thought I was writing a volleyball, or maybe even a
Greco-Roman wrestling column. It was that bad.

The Bruins maintained the five- to nine-point cushion they
typically have against overmatched foes like ASU. And yes, they
held on for an important win. As far as an opening act for the
Arizona game, though, it had all the fluidity of the Beastie Boys
opening for Madonna in the mid-1980s.

And as if being at the office wasn’t bad enough, this is a
dry campus, so that option was gone, too.

Even after the Sun Devils made it a game, their fans were hit
with a technical for throwing debris at the garbage game they had
to see.

“We have to play every game as if it’s our
last,” Matt Barnes said.

Fans deserved their last rites after this one.