Mehran Ebadolahi (left) and
Hooman Mofidi show off their LoseLavin.com
T-shirts on Bruin Walk. Ebadolahi and five of his friends have set
up a Web site calling on UCLA to rid itself of men’s basketball
head coach Steve Lavin.
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who
said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your
own reason and your own common sense.”
– Quote on UCLA basketball coach Steve Lavin’s desk,
attributed to Buddha
By Diamond Leung
DAILY BRUIN SENIOR STAFF
[email protected] After a night of watching his UCLA Bruins
play basketball, Mehran Ebadolahi was having a bad case of March
madness. He trudged back from Pauley Pavilion to his dorm room, so
angry he couldn’t speak. Steve Lavin’s boys had just
lost their regular-season finale to Oregon and would fall to sixth
place in the Pac-10 ““ their worst finish ever. “Mehran
was really pissed off,” recalls roommate Mike Flores.
“When we finally got back, all he said was,
“˜That’s it. It’s over, man. We have to get Lavin
out of here.'” Ebadolahi had wanted to keep it to
himself, but that would have been unhealthy. He wanted to yell, but
that would only antagonize his neighbors. What he really wanted was
the whole world to know how he felt. So he vented on the Internet
““ the mode of communication UCLA helped invent. And now, its
athletic department and Lavin have to come to terms with the cyber
smack-talk. One month after the Oregon game, Ebadolahi was feeling
a lot better. As the founder of LoseLavin.com, he had regained the
spring in his step, marching from his dorm room, past Pauley and
onto ground zero for UCLA student activism ““ Bruin Walk. On a
Friday afternoon, Ebadolahi sat down at one of the tables to
advertise his prized Web site. He dressed the part. “Save
Bruin Basketball,” the back of his blue T-shirt read.
“Lose Lavin,” the gold letters on his chest screamed.
He also took out paper, a clipboard and a pen ““ all the
materials necessary for petitioning the UCLA administration to fire
Lavin. Ebadolahi and the five co-founders of LoseLavin.com ““
four of whom are UCLA students ““ had already signed it, and
now they turned to their fellow Bruins for help. Some students did
double takes and grinned. Others furrowed their brows. But most
walked straight to class. By the end of the day, the LoseLavin guys
had added 30 signatures to the 350 virtual signatures on the
Internet petition, featured on their Web site. Ebadolahi had become
a loser ““Â as in one who wants UCLA to lose Lavin ““
and he was proud of it.
 Daily Bruin File Photo UCLA students have launched a
campaign against men’s basketball head coach Steve
Lavin.
“We want the students to get involved,” he said.
“It’s UCLA basketball. It’s time for the athletic
department and the chancellor to realize that UCLA is not about
mediocrity. I don’t have a problem with Steve Lavin as a
person. If he could coach, it’d be all good.”
Ңbull;Ӣbull;Ӣbull; A red circle with a slash through
Lavin’s face greets visitors of LoseLavin.com. The site hawks
100 percent cotton LoseLavin T-shirts for $11 each and offers
investment in them. It also features a picture of Lavin in the team
huddle, pointing to his head with the caption, “If I only had
a brain.” Why go out of your way to embarrass your
team’s head coach? “I love the team so much,”
Ebadolahi said. “That’s why I’m doing this. Lavin
doesn’t belong at a big-time school like UCLA.”
Ebadolahi launched the Web site the day after the team left Los
Angeles to play in the first round of the NCAA tournament, so as
not to distract the players. The Bruins eventually reached the
Sweet 16 and got no further. Lavin has now led the Bruins to five
Sweet 16s in his six years as head coach;Â only Duke coach Mike
Krzyzewski can boast the same record. That’s not good enough?
“He’s going to the Sweet 16 every year, but
that’s just average,” co-founder Hooman Mofidi said.
“He’s not coaching right. This is UCLA. We’re not
used to losing. He has McDonald’s All-Americans, and
he’s not bringing us championships.” “People
think that we want every coach to be John Wooden, but that’s
not it at all,” Ebadolahi added. “We just know that
elite programs revolve around elite coaches.” The site
suggests some of the top head coaches in the nation ““
Kansas’ Roy Williams, Missouri’s Quin Snyder,
Pepperdine’s Paul Westphal, USC’s Henry Bibby and
Gonzaga’s Mark Few ““ as candidates to replace Lavin.
Some UCLA faithful have felt the same about Lavin, and they were
moved to start up other anti-Lavin Web sites. During the 1999-2000
season, an alumnus launched FireLavin.com after UCLA got off to a
slow start in the season. The Web site was taken down after the
Bruins made it to the Sweet 16 that year. Alan Elliott, who
attended UCLA from 1983-85, launched his own anti-Lavin Web site
early last season, complete with a running ticker that counted down
the months, days, minutes and seconds until Lavin would ideally be
fired. Elliott has since taken down the site. He said he
appreciates the LoseLavin guys for having the courage to
“pick up the flag for people to rally around.”
“It doesn’t matter what I say,” Elliott, 38,
said. “It’s important that the students feel their
power and ask why you would grant tenure to a bad teacher teaching
at UCLA.” “It’s a difficult choice to say,
“˜I’m going to go after someone,'” he
continued. “You have to vote your conscience. I hated to be
the guy doing it, but there was nobody accountable. The athletic
department has been allowed to run like a little fiefdom that only
reports to itself.” Ebadolahi maintains his beef is really
with the athletic department rather than Lavin ““ but he
doesn’t mind working toward hurting Lavin’s livelihood.
“Lavin has a buyout clause, so he’s going to be
fine,” he said. “This kind of criticism is to be
expected. He knows that. It comes with the territory.”
Ңbull;Ӣbull;Ӣbull; Lavin not only knows it, but he also
understands it. The embattled coach has heard it all, and over
time, he has become immune to it. His thick skin is now as
conspicuous as his slick-back hairstyle. Additionally, Lavin admits
to being out of touch. In fact, he’s easygoing, bordering on
apathetic, and that’s the way he’s going to be ““
at least, in terms of being Internet savvy. “It’s a
challenge for me to make Swanson’s chicken pot pie in the
microwave,” he said. “I’m really low-tech.
It’s probably a good thing that the Internet is so foreign to
me.” Even so, the sports information department would only
allow Lavin to be interviewed provided that questions about
LoseLavin.com were not asked. “The people running
LoseLavin.com have their opinions, and there isn’t anything
I’m going to say that’s going to convince them to not
run their site,” sports information director Marc Dellins
said. “We wouldn’t have any reason to interact with
them.” Lavin actually doesn’t mind it too much when
fans criticize his Jekyll and Hyde teams, substitution patterns and
usage of timeouts. That’s what being a good fan is all about,
he said. “Every basketball coach at UCLA since John Wooden is
going to be the target of criticism,” Lavin said. “Even
it seems as if the content were personal, it just reflects coaching
in the middle of an entertainment-driven city like Los Angeles. At
the end of the day, none of it affects our ability to recruit the
top players in the country, win games, graduate our kids and be
effective in our job as coaches and teachers.” That’s
not to say no amount of criticism can faze Lavin. It took two
extreme cases to make him aware of what was transpiring on the Wild
Wild Web. In March 2000, a click of the mouse, and Lavin and his
father’s lives were being threatened. The e-mailer was
eventually caught, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was
sentenced to 10 days in jail and three years probation. One year
later, a click of the mouse, and someone was attempting to
blackmail UCLA. Administrators received an anonymous e-mail
threatening to go public with allegations that Lavin had paid
players, bought them cars, provided them with personal trainers and
improperly contacted a number of high school recruits, including
current freshman point guard Cedric Bozeman. That is, unless Lavin
would no longer be serving as head coach. The administration still
does not know the identity of the e-mailer. Lavin sought legal
counsel and was provided with a packet of photocopies to brief him
on what was being said about him on the Internet. He learned of
FireLavin.com and later joked to the Sporting News that it was his
favorite Web site. Like his doubters and detractors in cyberspace,
Lavin looks to his desktop as a stress reliever. But he
doesn’t use the computer. He turns to an even higher power
““ the quote from Buddha sitting right on his desk. “The
important thing is doing your job and focusing your energy on
things you can control,” Lavin said. “That’s what
has allowed our program to be successful. It’s not even
healthy to think that you can control people’s
opinions.” “Fans are supposed to be emotionally engaged
and care enough to the point where they want to express their
opinions ““ good or bad,” he continued. “And then
there’s the occasional kook.” “¢bull;”¢bull;”¢bull;
Three weeks after tabling on Bruin Walk, Ebadolahi was at it again.
A new era was dawning on UCLA athletics, as Dan Guerrero had been
named the new athletic director to replace the retiring Peter
Dalis. Ebadolahi just wanted to hear what the man who now wielded
the power to fire or reaffirm the hiring of Lavin had to say at his
first press conference. So he covered up his LoseLavin T-shirt for
once and tried to pass himself off as a member of the Daily Bruin.
Security wasn’t buying it. Banished, but still determined,
Ebadolahi stood a few feet away from the J.D. Morgan Center,
passing out LoseLavin flyers. Inside the center, Guerrero, who will
leave his athletic director position at UC Irvine for UCLA,
admitted he was not at all familiar with the feisty relationship
between UCLA basketball and the Bruins of the Internet.
“Certainly there weren’t people with flyers telling me
to do things at UC Irvine,” he said. “For a program of
this magnitude, the reality is that there is never going to be
consensus in terms of the decisions I make.” Dalis,
meanwhile, is all too familiar with the Internet. He had mistakenly
accused Elliott of sending the blackmailing e-mail to UCLA and paid
the price by having to publicly apologize to a Lavin basher. He did
reveal the first bit of advice that he would give his successor:
“Don’t pay any attention to the Internet.”
Ebadolahi scoffed at the remark. “Lavin’s time is
running out,” he said. “Dalis can ignore it all he
wants, but just wait until next year when people are wearing the
T-shirts in Pauley Pavilion. “The message will get
out.”