Wild, Wild West

One good measure of a conference's strength is how its members perform in big games. The Pac-IO has come up short in recent NCAA tournaments, but its record against strong teams from other conferences this season may bode well for (he league in March.
Conference	Record vs. Top 25 Teams	Overall Nonconference Record
Pac-10	9-1	66-24
Big Ten	5-7	81-36
Atlantic-10	4-6	42-30
Big Eight	4-6	77-16
SEC	5-9	77-31
Great Midwest	3-7	53-26
Big East	2-5	63-14
ACC	3-8	70-14

Excise the John Wooden era from a Pac-10 basketball highlight film and what's left? A few grainy frames of Hank Luisetti inventing the jump shot at Stanford. A glimpse at Pete Newell, who briefly made Cal a power in the late 1950s. A shot of Lute Olson in his Man from Glad haircut roaming the sidelines at Arizona—the only conference team besides UCLA to make a Final Four appearance since 1960. A quick montage of those two electrifying point guards, Kevin Johnson and Jason Kidd, passing through Berkeley on their way to NBA stardom. And that's about it.

"I never even thought of UCLA as being in the Pac-10," says Cal freshman standout Jelani Gardner, a Southern California kid who grew up bleeding Bruin blue and gold. "They were just the team that won all those national championships. I didn't think much about the Pac-10 at all."

You're not alone there, Jelani. But, to quote the warbling folksinger from Big Ten country who was making it big around the time Wooden won the first of his 10 NCAA titles, the times they are achangin'. If early reviews hold, the Pac is back. No fewer than five Pac-10 teams (No. 2 UCLA, No. 9 Arizona, No. 15 Arizona State, No. 17 Cal and No. 23 Stanford) were ranked in the Top 25 last week, and another, 10-1 Oregon, is knocking on the door. Ten times during the preconference season Pac-10 teams met up with ranked rivals, and nine times they came away with victories (chart), the lone setback being Arizona's 94-84 loss at Syracuse on Dec. 22. That doesn't even include the 65-61 victory that Washington, which will in all probability linger near the conference's cellar this season, scored over unranked but still glamorous Michigan on Dec. 30.

"The league is so strong I'm not sure I even want to be in it," says Oregon coach Jerry Green. No doubt UCLA coach Jim Harrick was thinking the same thing, Jerry, after your team beat his 82-72 in the conference opener in Eugene last Thursday, preventing the Bruins from taking over the No. 1 spot in the nation. Yes, after years of complaining that they didn't get any respect, Pac-10 coaches are now getting it the old-fashioned way. They're earning it.

"We can talk all night about the criticism we've received being somewhat unfair," says Stanford coach Mike Montgomery, "but the fact remains that a team like Duke did not go out and lose in the first round of the tournament. We did." By "we" he means UCLA, a 112-102 loser to Tulsa, and Cal, a 61-57 loser to Wisconsin-Green Bay, both in last year's NCAA tournament; Arizona, which fell to Santa Clara 64-61 in 1993; and the Cardinal itself, which bowed to Siena 80-78 in 1989. After many such first-round el foldos over the years, the Pac-10 logo could be a guy with his hands around his throat.

But the springtime swan dive isn't as likely to happen this year, not with the seasoning that will come from much tougher intraconference play. Final Four contenders? Well, Arizona and UCLA are probably the only real ones. But don't count out Cal, which owns impressive back-to-back wins over then No. 11 Minnesota (82-75) and then No. 13 Cincinnati (89-76) in December. Ditto for Arizona State, which swept through Texas A&M. Michigan and Maryland to win the Maui Invitational in November and then rang up a 53-52 victory over Arizona last Thursday to prove that those results were not a fluke.

But the biggest Pac-10 news these days is coming from the Bay Area, which has been something of a hoops wasteland for about the last three decades. Stanford (10-1) lost its first game on Saturday, 77-63 at Washington State, but, as Cal discovered two nights earlier in an 83-71 loss on the same court, that is neither disgrace nor surprise. The Cougars are tough in Pullman, a place that, as George Raveling put it when he coached there, "is not the end of the earth, but I can see it from here."

And Cal, now 8-2 after an 84-76 win at Washington on Saturday, has become something even larger, a kind of Michigan West, the Pac-10's certified hot zone. Last year 31-year-old coach Todd Bozeman spirited Gardner and Tremaine Fowlkes out of Los Angeles, and this year he's already gone into Georgia and signed one of the nation's top five high school seniors, 6'9" Shareef Abdur-Rahim, and another gem, 6'10" Kenyon Jones. As much as any team, Cal is responsible for the Pac-10 renaissance, having given the conference an alluring new-kid-on-the-block alternative to what had become a rather bland double dose of steady but unsexy Arizona and dusty UCLA.

New Kidd on the block might be more accurate. When Bozeman, then an assistant under Lou Campanelli, lured Kidd to Berkeley in the fall of 1992, the Cal program got a boost that is simply incalculable. As Gardner puts it: "Jason helped enlighten everyone to Cal." In fact, Kidd gave the whole conference, as Bozeman says, "a toughness, a kind of flavor." And that flavor is definitely not vanilla, as it had been in recent years.

Predictably, Bozeman's quick success—he is 41-12 since taking over for Campanelli late in the '92-93 season—has caused some resentment, both from within the conference and without, partly because he's perceived in some quarters as having been disloyal to Campanelli. Did he orchestrate the firing of Campanelli? (Probably not—the administration wanted him gone.) Is he much more of a players' coach than was Campanelli, the traditional motivator-screamer? (Definitely.) Is he a guy who depends on getting star players and merely rolls the balls out at practice? (Probably not.)