the columnist wrote:
Impressive, 100 championships certainly are. That's a nice round number. Then again, so is zero — the roundest of them all, in fact — and also the total number of football championships won by the Bruins since 1955.
Isn't that the real way colleges are compared on the sports pages, by who beat who on Saturday and who outranked who on Sunday? Especially in this town, where everyone knows the name of USC's backup quarterback even as the Bruins themselves struggle to name their starting quarterback?
Sorry, UCLA boosters. Sorry to mention the four-letter word USC in a story about Bruins brilliance. But it's hard to escape the shadow of Trojans football, especially with the season opener lurking only 108 days away.
the article was so filled with hate that my knee-jerk reaction was anger. then, i just laughed. because the columnist apparently is a fan of u$c and couldn't contain his jealousy, he ended up sounding petty and jealous of ucla's accomplishments in sports....
in addition, he sounded like a hater of title 9 and a hater of anything not involving u$c football when he diminished the accomplishments of ucla's female and male athletes who played on non-football teams. he said:
The Bruins have been more successful than any other school in sports that don't make headlines or money. But that's not the worst development, particularly when mixed with 11 men's basketball championships and that whole Wooden Era thing.
Someone has to win men's volleyball (UCLA has 19 times), men's tennis (UCLA has 16 times) and softball (UCLA has 10 times). So three of the school's past five titles have come in women's water polo. That's better than not winning three championships in a row.
what he doesn't understand is that these "non-money making" or "non-headline making" sports produce world class (female and male) athletes that make every american proud. think of those women gymnasts and softball teams winning medals in the olympics; think jackie robinson; think arthur ashe; think jackie joyner. i guess, to this guy, they don't count and were "the worst development."
considering that ucla swept u$c in basketball, football and baseball in the 2006-2007 season, i suddenly found the article funny. i also remembered that ucla has the longest winning streak against u$c in football (8 years). that made the article funnier.
by the way, i did not misquote the columnist when he said, "Sorry to mention the four-letter word USC in a story about Bruins brilliance." (emphasis added.) then, i laughed some more.
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