MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2024
What Beban was like way back when: Forgive us for treating this as a holiday after another magnificent Pacific-10 win.
We refer to Southern Cal's magnificent win over LSU last night. Joining that game to earlier losses by Florida and Texas A&M, we're reminded of the rule by which the SEC remains the dominant conference:
If you don't count the games a conference has lost, that means it has won every game!
On days like this, we recall the great day when Southern Cal battled UCLA with the whole world at stake. The leading authority on all the greatness remembers the greatness right here:
1967 UCLA vs. USC football game
The 1967 UCLA vs. USC football game was a historically significant American college football game played during the 1967 NCAA University Division football season on November 18, 1967. The UCLA Bruins, 7–0–1 and ranked No. 1, with senior quarterback Gary Beban as a Heisman Trophy candidate, played the USC Trojans, 8–1 and ranked No. 4, with junior running back O. J. Simpson also as a Heisman candidate. This game is widely regarded as the signature game in the UCLA–USC rivalry as well as one of the 20th-century Games of the Century. The 64-yard run by Simpson for the winning touchdown is regarded as one of the greatest run plays in college football.
For the rest of the story, just click that link. As it turned out, Beban won the Heisman that year. The running back just had to wait.
With respect to Beban, ask us about our brush with greatness! It dates to his days at Sequoia High, where he amassed about three thousand miles of total offense as (we think) a single-wing tailback, but came off the bench as sixth man on the school's basketball team.
As a mere sophomore, we were allowed to watch him from the bench at the Stanford Tournament of Champions. Kevin Hardy's team won the whole thing, having beaten us by a point in the semifinals the night before.
At 6-5 and 270, Hardy was astoundingly light on his feet. (We sat there with Sivils, utterly puzzled by what we were seeing out there.) He became an All-American tackle at Notre Dame, which was still Notre Dame at the time, though football may not have been his best sport.
Could we ourselves have gone to UCLA? We could have done it, but it would have been wrong! Pushed hard, we usually offer this:
It would have been unfair to Kareem.
We tend to leave it right there, only saying it's time to move on.
At any rate, those were the days of Pacific coast dominance, "when we were very poor and very happy," before "the rich came into our lives" and before the Deep State came along.
Tomorrow: It starts
Is President Biden foolish or evil or does he support the terrorist side? I would vote for "foolish"
ReplyDeleteNews Biden just said Netanyahu is not doing enough to get a Gaza hostage deal
Commentary: Hamas has said "no" to all ceasefire proposals, including the ones by the US, has just murdered six American and Israeli hostages, and Biden is blaming Israel. Biden comes back from two weeks of vacation and the 1st thing he does is criticize Netanyahu for not doing enough for the hostages
Where is the criticism of Khamenei and Sinwar?
Meanwhile his admin has unfrozen Iranian funds and withholds weapons
Second-guessing the president makes you a fool.
DeleteLots of commentators have said Netanyahu hasn't done enough to end the war because the war helps him politically. Nothing DIC posted above shows this to be false.
DeleteAre hundreds of thousands of Israelis “foolish or evil” or do they “support the terrorist side”, dic?
Delete“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday pushed back against a new wave of pressure to reach a cease-fire deal in Gaza after hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested and went on strike”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/netanyahu-pushes-back-against-massive-protests-over-gaza-and-hostages-no-one-will-preach-to-me
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DeleteAs usual, DIC parrots some bullshit right-wing source which leaves an entirely false impression. Biden was asked a by a reporter if Netanyahu was doing enough to end the war, and all Biden said was "No." DIC's bullshit right-wing source takes that and spins it up into "Hamas has said "no" to all ceasefire proposals, including the ones by the US, has just murdered six American and Israeli hostages, and Biden is blaming Israel. Biden comes back from two weeks of vacation and the 1st thing he does is criticize Netanyahu for not doing enough for the hostages."
Delete"Benjamin Netanyahu defended his contentious plans for a continued Israeli occupation of a land strip in Gaza and ignored calls for a cease-fire.
DeleteIn his first news conference since the recovery of the six slain hostages, the Israeli prime minister doubled down on his refusal to agree to a truce that would involve Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza or lead to a permanent halt to the fighting."
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/01/world/hostages-strike-israel-gaza-war?unlocked_article_code=1.Hk4.OXhl.1Si5a0DlPz0j&smid=url-share
Yaov Gallant, the Israeli Defense Minister, would have a few choice words for DIC, as would hundreds of thousands of Israelis at this point. The argument that Netanyahu is engaged in a self serving and cynical ploy that makes peace impossible is entirely consistent with reality. As usual, the far right wing musings of DIC, spoon fed to him by right wing media, are FOS.
DeleteGoing to the same school with someone is not a brush with greatness, any more than Trump’s uncle at MIT makes Trump himself smart. Kareem did his best work in the real world, not playing games for guys like Somerby.
ReplyDeleteWord on the street is Somerby dunked on Kareem, back when he was known as Lew.
DeleteThis fantasy is pathetic.
DeleteAnonymices are petty down to their cloven hooves.
Delete"It would have been unfair to Kareem." Lol.
ReplyDelete(But also Lol at the unintentionally humorous "historically significant.")
In 1966 there were about 96 black students at UCLA out of 58,843 undergrads, most of them athletes. Today there are about 2145 (6.5%) out of 33,000 undergrads. Today, you do not need to be an athlete to attend, so that is some progress.
ReplyDeleteUCLA was a difficult place to meet people and make friends, as a largely commuter campus. Somerby would not have become good friends with Al Gore or Tommy Lee Jones had he gone there. He might have been there at the inception of the women's rights, gay rights and Chicano rights movements, met Fawn Brodie (who wrote best selling bios of Nixon, Thomas Jefferson, and Joseph Smith, the Mormon) but was denied tenure. Digby Diehl and Mike Royko headed the Daily Bruin, going on to become famous journalists. Comedian Steve Martin was a philosophy major and Jim Morrison (of The Doors) was a film major. Angela Davis joined the faculty.
Best of all, Somerby would never have been indoctrinated with his South Will Rise Again white supremacism, might have found a girlfriend and worked out his anger issues with his mom, and he might have found an actual career in standup in the nearly comedy venues. There were plenty of missed opportunities for him besides yearning over black athletes who were trying to break out of their South Central LA entrapment and join the Black Power movement nascent on campus. Lew Alcindor was a nice guy but he wouldn't have had any time for Somerby.
Correction, accidentally gave figures for the whole system, not the Los Angeles campus. Should be 17,183 with 1116 black undergrads.
DeleteAlcindor would have had to make time for Somerby when Bob was facializing him.
DeleteIt may be that Somerby felt poor while he was at Harvard, or maybe he felt too rich, embarrassingly wealthy, but UCLA is not a poor place either. It is embedded in West Los Angeles, with Bel Air on one side (across Sunset Blvd, which runs through wealthy neighborhoods to Pacific Palisades and Malibu) and wealthy Jewish neighborhoods to the West before you reach Santa Monica with its high priced homes. Cheap student housing existed in Venice and in a ghetto of student apartments immediately adjacent to campus, but many students commuted from their parents' homes or from other parts of the sprawling greater Los Angeles area. Many students worked outside of their classes, which meant they were absent from campus, not visibly poor. Only the frats and sororities were socially present, but they too were wealthy and only paid attention to each other. Dorm residents socialized with dorm residents and moved out as quickly as they could afford it. So I'm not sure Somerby would have felt poor and happy at UCLA. He more likely would have felt invisible, especially at first.
ReplyDeleteLet’s remember this post next time Bob wines about trivial stuff in the NYTs.
ReplyDelete