Tuesday, February 25, 1997
OPINION:
Commentator’s bias against Bruin team earns him harsh wordshope
that once and for all, Dick Vitale learned his lesson.
The best part of Sunday’s game against, excuse me, victory over
Duke was not that it put us back in the top 10, gave us a high seed
in the NCAA tournament, or gave our players a headache due to crowd
noise.
The best part was that it gave Dick Vitale a dose of
reality.
This man, this representation of East-Coast-favoring,
UCLA-hating, biased commentary, got to see first-hand just how
wrong he is, has been, and will be.
This game made Dick Vitale shove his foot in his mouth on
national television.
For those of you who don’t know why ol’ "Dicky V" is so reviled
in Westwood, a hatred that resulted in his being heartily booed,
denied an 8-clap, and told to go home, here is the reason.
In that illustrious year of 1995, when I was a wee freshman and
UCLA won the national championship, this balding, hyperactive man
with chronic verbal diarrhea took it upon himself to bash,
undermine, and pick against our beloved Bruins whenever
possible.
He picked UConn in the Final Eight, Oklahoma St. in the Final
Four, and Arkansas in the championship game, all the while implying
that the Bruins were an out-classed team that had no right to be
among such company. He even picked Joe Smith over Ed O’Bannon as
his player of the year.
Idiocy really does cloud your judgment, you useless
prognosticator.
This man, whose on-air favoritism toward his beloved Dukes,
Kansases, and Arkansases is stuff of legend, was forced to watch
the Blue Devils get beaten in a game he was a commentator for. What
sweet justice for this man, who fawns over Mike Kyrezhdsyew
(whatever) and the Cameron Crazies, to have to describe a UCLA
victory and then watch our painted minions charge past him to
celebrate.
No Dick, we didn’t charge the floor to pay respect to Duke, we
did it to pay respect to our team and to each other. To celebrate
not only the team’s performance over the past few weeks, but our
effort as some really crazy fans.
The UCLA fans leapt into the national spotlight as some of the
loudest, craziest, most artistically inclined fans in the country.
This sort of notoriety does not come easily  it takes a
national television audience, a packed house, and vast amounts of
either drug abuse or testosterone.
The spectacle on Sunday, with its painted bodies, resonating
8-claps, and players fighting to get through a seething mass of
humanity to get off of the court, gives a firm reminder that the
word fan derives from "fanatic."
Our fans and our team gave the nation one tremendous spectacle
and one huge wake-up call.
Best of all, we got to shove all of Vitale’s misguided rants,
both from 1995 and the present, right up his back porch.
Because I was at the game, screaming and jumping until I almost
had an aneurysm, I missed his color analysis. But I would kill to
hear him say, just once, "these Bruins are awesome, baby" because I
know how much it would hurt him.
I went in search of this vilified blabbermouth after the game,
when the Bruin hoards were milling around on the court, to see if
he would say exactly that.
His proverbial bus engine must have been warmed up, because he
was gone.
Shapiro is a Daily Bruin staff writer and the beat writer for
men’s tennis. E-mail responses to [email protected].
ucla.edu
Mark Shapiro