In a bygone era, the ’90s, UCLA had an identity.
We were a sports school. Cal looked down on us for being slow
and USC looked down on us for being smart, but all we had to do was
point to the latest athletic contest because, as logicians know,
scoreboards are definitive arguments (unless of course your
opponent holds a “yo’ momma” trump card).
We’d win championships and then trash the sweet bajeezus
out of Westwood to celebrate. Pac-10 titles were like so many
dollar bills at a strip club.
Recent sub-par football and basketball seasons however, have
left us feeling empty and used.
Without athletics, we lost our raison d’etre.
“So maybe,” I say to myself, “we could be
academaticians instead!” If Berkeley can become a football
powerhouse, surely as the most applied-to school in the nation, we
could become a more hygienic Berkeley ““ Ivy League pedigree
with the street cred of a public institution.
From a pool of 45,000 applicants, there has to be a Doogie
Howser or two in the lot.
Yet listening to student questions during lectures, I’m
convinced that under “comprehensive review,” stupidity
qualifies as a hardship. Questions are either incomprehensible and
pointless, obvious and pointless or self-aggrandizing and
pointless. I guess we weren’t smarties either. Even our
attempts to be political like Berkeley come up short.
They have mass rallies at People’s Park; we have angry
denunciations in chalk form.
Caught in my greatest identity crisis since choosing between Ska
suspenders or alternative rock chain wallets in middle school, I
found no place for UCLA in my dichotomous paradigm (jock or
smarty). That’s when the greater dialectic showed me a third
way.
I was watching my Gilmore Girls, as per usual, when prospective
collegiate Rory Gilmore, that precocious strumpet played by Alexis
Bledel, took a tour of “Harvard University.”
Well, imagine my delight when Harvard was played not by sucky
Cambridge, Massachusetts, but by yours and mine very own Kerckhoff
Hall! I must have squealed and giggled for a full ten minutes in my
Hello Kitty PJs ““ I could just die, I was that excited.
And that wasn’t an isolated cameo either. We also doubled
for Harvard in the Method Man/Redman star vehicle, 2001’s
“How High.”
Notice anything familiar in classics “Old School,”
“National Lampoon’s Van Wilder” or the recent
“First Daughter”? There’s no rush quite like
recognizing Royce Hall or Janss Steps on screen and then making
sure that each and every person around you knows that you know that
very spot and have traversed it many a time. People look at you
differently when you’re in show biz.
You don’t even need a UCLA diploma to be cool. If you
haven’t graduated from UCLA just yet, count yourself among
such notable semi-alums as Doors’ front man Jim Morrison, Ben
Stiller and Jack Black ““ all UCLA dropouts.
Berkeley, take your academic prestige, invigorating intellectual
climate and national football ranking. UCLA’s not an Ivy
League school, but we play one on TV. We’re in L.A. because
there’s a je ne sais quois about seeing good-looking people
on a regular basis. What’s the point of getting the Nobel
Prize if you can’t see thongs peeking out of low rise Juicy
Jeans?
Berkeley is Berkeley, but L.A. is soooo Hollywood.
Of course we still have enough ugly people to lend us the
academic prestige USC can only dream about.
I am all for looking at beautiful people, but c’mon now,
we’re not shallow or nothing. Besides, who wants to be USC,
No. 1 ranking and all? Have you seen the campus?
The only time USC gets on TV is when riots occur next door (and
2002’s “Sorority Boys” starring 7th
Heaven’s Barry Watson, phbbbft).
Thanks but no thanks, Mr. South Central Juxtaposition of Class
Polarization in America. I’ll stick to dealing with pressing
socioeconomic issues from the safety of my West L.A. enclave.
Cal, USC, bask in your temporal athletic successes, yet remember
A.E. Housman’s words from “To an Athlete Dying
Young” that “early though the laurel grows/It withers
quicker than the rose.”
At UCLA we’ve been at the top before and we’ve moved
on. We’re better people for it, or at least the camera thinks
so.
Hector was the crowd member that yelled at Michael Moore to
take his shirt off. Chalk Leano at [email protected]