Joseph N. Bell -- THE BELL CURVE

The best show in town has been playing mostly to slim houses all year.

That is, until a week ago Wednesday. It was a good show before that, and

it’s going to be a very good show for a long time to come. But the

Newport-Mesa townsfolk have been inordinately slow to discover it.

I’m talking about the basketball Anteaters at UC Irvine. A blip in the

basketball firmament the past decade, one of those soft-touch teams

scheduled early in the year to fatten up the records of the

heavy-hitters, UC Irvine has suddenly and wonderfully turned on the

predators. But the students -- and especially the Town-and-Gowners --

took little notice until the bully of the Big West conference, Utah

State, came visiting UC Irvine with a 16-2 record and went home with a

bloody nose. Almost overnight, the blip became an incipient star.

I was there to see it, just as I’ve been there expecting some sort of

miracle to take place at almost every home game for the past 10 years.

When a half-dozen wins was a big season for the Anteaters, I was the guy

sitting on the visitors’ side in a sea of empty seats, across from a few

dozen students who were bored with studying and didn’t have anything else

to do.

I had lots of other things to do, but I went anyway, usually alone,

ever hopeful. Why? Because I love college basketball. Because I grew up

in Indiana, where failure to have a basketball hoop on your garage is the

mark of a dangerous radical. And because I greatly admired Coach Bill

Mulligan and his UC Irvine teams when I was teaching at the university,

and the connection never wore off.

Mulligan sent a half-dozen players to the pros and faced down the

bully of those days -- the University of Nevada at Las Vegas -- time

after time in UC Irvine’s bandbox of a gym that would have been

inadequate in any Indiana high school. Mulligan never got to the Big Show

-- to the NCAA tournament -- although he did get to its stepsister, the

NIT. And he enjoyed only a few years playing in the Bren Center before he

left the scene on a losing note that just continued to get worse.

UC Irvine is a tough athletic sell. Its academic demands are high, and

its athletic profile low, both downers for high school athletes being

recruited by the heavy-hitters. UC Irvine students have shown little

interest in basketball, and the Town-and-Gowners even less. So -- except

for the exceptional athlete to whom academics and a low profile are

attractive -- recruiting has to be done with an eye for reasonably smart

kids whose skills are latent enough that the major athletic schools pass

them by. Such perceptions require a kind of combination Svengali, Billy

Graham and David Copperfield.

Coach Pat Douglass came along three years ago and qualified on all

counts. He came out of a national championship program in Bakersfield to

the woebegone Anteaters and started recruiting high school projects. Some

worked and some didn’t, and so he sifted through them, hanging on to the

keepers and coming up each year with a new batch of projects. The records

improved until he won as many as he lost last year. And then it all came

together this year, built on a nucleus of the keepers garnished by some

high-class freshmen intrigued by what is happening at UC Irvine.

Public awareness was as apathetic as usual this year until UC Irvine

beat California -- a team probably headed for the NCAA tournament. Cal

alumni hyped the crowd to near capacity. When UC Irvine then almost beat

UCLA and did beat Washington on their home courts, the corps of believers

grew, along with UC Irvine’s winning record.

Only the basketball team was prepared for Utah State. The surrounding

cast was unaccustomed to such frenzy as hundreds of people standing in

line at the box office and chaotic lines of cars contesting for space in

the parking garage. So were the rest of us who had long been able to

arrive 10 minutes before the start of the game and get seated

comfortably.

There were students with painted faces, a band that rocked,

cheerleaders who actually drew cheers, and -- best of all -- a

blue-collar team supporting a magician named Jerry Green who simply

refused to lose. Somehow, all this was epitomized by a rather awkward

giant named Dave Korfman who came into the game wearing a helmet because

he had brain surgery only a month before and was not expected to return

this season -- or maybe any season.

Korfman had passed out while lifting weights on New Year’s afternoon.

When he fell, his head smashed against both the barbell and the wall. Two

hours later, he was in surgery. Two days after that, he was hungry and

wanted out of bed. And four weeks later, wearing a new steel plate and a

helmet, he was playing basketball against Utah State -- and a crowd that

filled every seat at Bren Center was ecstatic.

So that’s the way it’s going these days for the Anteaters. The winner

of the Big West tournament in Anaheim in March gets an automatic

invitation to the Big Show. That’s probably the only way UC Irvine will

get in, and Utah State will be standing firmly in the way. Meanwhile,

there are a half-dozen home games remaining in the regular season. And,

like I said, it’s the best show in town.

I’m starting to get in shape for the tournament. Gordon McAlpine, who

is a fine novelist and teacher at Chapman University, shoots hoops with

me regularly, and I’m going to step up the sessions. I concede him a few

years, but when I have the range, I can beat him. So I’ll be ready --

along with the Anteaters -- by tournament time.