With last weekend’s national championship victories by the
men’s volleyball and women’s water polo teams, I
couldn’t help but think that UCLA is becoming less a
“basketball school” and more a school for the Olympic
sports.
With the five national championships this year all from Olympic
sports (with the possibility of at least three more), and the
basketball and football teams’ slumps, it’s time that
the public took note of what the athletic department itself already
knows: at UCLA, the Olympic sports are as good as any.
It’s true, UCLA has always been a basketball and football
school and the two sports always lent some type of distinction to
the campus. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was Bruin basketball
and the legacy of John Wooden. In the ’80s and ’90s
Terry Donahue’s football teams won eight straight bowl games
and displayed utter dominance over USC. But at the turn of the
millennium, the Westwood campus looks more like an Olympic village
than the home of Pauley Pavilion.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling for an all-out
panic over the two major sports. Basketball is only five years
removed from their national championship victory and one tumultuous
season for football can’t be called the downfall of a great
program. The basketball team did make it to the Sweet Sixteen this
year, and both teams are perennial contenders for Pac-10 and
national titles.
But while football and basketball have their occasional
stumbles, there are always five or six Olympic sports that are
ready to make a championship run. That doesn’t mean UCLA is
an Olympic prep school or that football and basketball have taken a
fall, but that the school’s sports tradition is that
well-rounded.
This is not an emerging trend. UCLA has always prided itself on
dominance in all sports. Consider that 90 of UCLA’s record
103 national championships, or 87 percent, come from sports other
than basketball and football.
Even John Wooden’s dominance has been equaled by someone
in the Olympic sports, in this case men’s volleyball head
coach Al Scates. The volleyball team’s thrashing of Ohio
State last weekend gave Scates his 18th title since 1970. The
men’s tennis team had won at least two titles in every decade
from the ’50s until the ’90s and came within a point of
getting its 16th championship last year. The track and field
program is widely considered to be among the best in the country,
sending such athletes as the late Florence Griffith Joyner to the
Olympics to capture summer gold.
In 2000, the Sydney Olympics will see its fair share of Bruin
athletes as UCLA tries to top the 56 it sent to Atlanta in
1996.
Fifty six people representing the country’s finest from
our campus? That is something that should prompt ticker tape
parades in the streets of Westwood.
Add to that the ridiculous statistic that if UCLA was a separate
country, its 12 gold medals in 1996 would have ranked seventh among
all nations in the world. Think about it: the nation of Bruinia
competing against the world’s best.
All that points to the fact that there is more to athletic life
at UCLA than just basketball and football. While they may get the
most play, let’s face it: Sports Illustrated would not have
named UCLA as the top sports program in the country solely based on
the legacy of Wooden. The magazine shows a picture of athletes from
21 different UCLA sports standing on the Janss Steps, all of whom
could contend for a national championship year after year.
It takes more than a few good sports to make a great athletic
department. And UCLA is not just the top program in the country
now, nor the best twenty years ago, but one that is going to be the
best for a long time to come.
Will the rest of the Bruin athletic department get their due? Is
the success of Olympic sports going to finally conquer Westwood in
a year that has seen two major sports falter in up-and-down
seasons?
That decision is largely up to the Bruin fans. Maybe they should
take a cue from the athletic department and realize that the
Olympic sport s have just as much a place in town as Lavin and
Toledo.
And whatever happens, it’s going to be a heck of a lot of
fun to watch.
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