The Po Show

Sports Talk, with Paula

Last night my much beloved UCLA Bruins lost the NCAA Basketball National Championship.

But it's okay. They should be insanely proud of themselves to have gotten so far, considering how lousy they played at the beginning of the season and how NO ONE thought they had a chance to even get past the second round of the tournament. Every step of the way, all the jerks on ESPN and CBSportsline dissed the hell out of them. From one ESPN writer's prep article on the Final Four, you would have thought it was the Final Three. But those magnificent boys played their hearts out and made a run all the way to the championship. I can't wait for next season.

I have not felt this passionate about sports in a long time. See, I actually do not like sports very much, except college basketball and football (I positively despise pro football and get so tired of baseball by the end of the loooooong season that I want to puke). Prior to hooking up with Ross I didn't like ANY sports and was very contemptuous of athletes in general. Then I married a jock (a geeky, talented, brilliant jock) and graduated from a college that places a big emphasis on athletics, so I started to get into sports in general.

It became actively funny. For awhile I worked with a group that was all guys, and I was more interested in and knew far more about sports than any of them. One day we were at lunch and I was going off on a tirade about the Dodgers, during the course of which I called Mike Piazza a "sorry sack of shit." My dear friend Damian turned bright red and started laughing hysterically, that choking, uncontrollable kind of laughing.

He then launched into a California-boy's idea of a Brooklyn accent and started a "sports show" routine: "Hi, this is Sports Talk, with Paula. Tonight we're talking about that sorry sack of shit, Mike Piazza..." Then he started laughing again and couldn't continue. But for years to follow, every time I started in on some sports topic, they'd all say, "Hi, this is Sports Talk, with Paula."

But the UCLA Bruins are the only team that truly has my heart. We were living in Westwood when they won the basketball National Championship in 1995, during Ross' first year of grad school back at UCLA. We were part of the crowds that spilled out into the streets, exulting in the heady atmosphere. We got home before cars started being overturned and the police showed up firing rubber bullets though. We were too old for that. But man, that night's victory was intoxicating and I'll never forget it.

The last UCLA basketball game I attended was their home game against Cal in the spring of 1997. I was several months pregnant with Matthew and got so worked up during the last minutes (they lost!) that I started feeling contractions. Not good.

We took Matthew to one UCLA football game when he was about two, but basketball is too noisy indoors, so we haven't been to a game since. And of course for almost four years now we've been out of L.A. We don't get to see nearly as many UCLA games on TV as we'd like here on the East Coast, since even when they are doing really well the cable stations usually opt to show some eastern teams' game. Poor Ross will scroll through the listings every Sat., seeing if the game will be shown, and usually it is not.

But this year, we got to see the Bruins roll through the tournament, to one last night of
March Madness (in April). They totally got outplayed, but that was okay.

It was a hell of a run. And this sports fan loved it.