Keeping the Faith

Two hours before the tripoff, the doors to Pauley Pavilion swing open, and the race is on. Ushers hug the walls as a brigade of students sweeps down the aisles, leaps up stairs and hurdles over seats, each person scrambling for the perfect vantage point.

For many of the participants in this mad rush, each UCLA home basketball contest is more than just a game--it's an event. It starts the night before the opening tipoff and extends at least a half-hour after the last second ticks off the game clock. These are the Pauley Pavillion Overnighters, and for five months every year Bruin basketball becomes their life.

All you need to join in the fun is a sleeping bag, preferably a warm one, and a student registration card, preferably current. The game ticket, available to all students, costs $1. Some fans begin sleeping outside the 13,000-seat arena over a week before game day. They leave in the morning for classes or work and return at night to their places in line.

The night before the Notre Dame game (this year's version is Sunday), you see more than 250 people stretched sleeping baging on tater-lots or passing aluminum-foil pipes from mouth to mouth. The spirt is communal, the campus police are tolerant and the Southern California weather rarely spoils the occasion.

Not all of the overnighters are students. The most prominent among them, a man called Frisbee, now sells insurance. Occasionally alumni impersonate students, changing the dates on old registration cards to make them look current, but most of the veterans have usher friends who let them in without checking an ID. Those graduates among the hard-core CULA fans have been known to schedule honeymoons and business trips to coincide with basketball road games.

But home games are where the over nightesrs shine, scenes of in evolving ritual that dates back into the years of Coach John Wooden, the Wizard of Westwood. Through chants of "Who's he?" "Big deal" "So what" "Who cares?" and "Go home" after the introduction of the visitors' line-up, shouts of "Play ball" at the end of the national anthem, and the flawless execution of a repertoire of game-time cheers and jeers, the faithful add to their enjoyment of the best games while over the likes of San Joe State.

The spirit certainly derives much of its power from the success of the Bruins' topranked team, but 10 NCAA championship banners are not a prerequisite for fan support. At the University of Massachusetts, a band of basketball fans has its own set of rituals. The "40-Minute Gang" sports orange pep shirts, white painters caps and painted faces for each Minuteman home game.

UMass students create cacophony during much of the game, wave hands and pom-poms to distract opposing free-throw shooters and release streamers onto the court after the an unpleasant place for a visiting team.

At Harvard, fan support is conspicuously absent. Even the brand new Briggs Athletic Center can't lure more than 500 supporters to a game. The cagers aren't a UCLA team, but they aren't winless either, and the hard-fighting Crimson have only been out of a game three times. Coach Frank McLaughlin's team mounted a comeback to nip brother Tom McLaughlin's UMass squad, 45-44, in Amherst earlier this season.

But in the battle of the fans, the Minutemen came out the clear winners.