There is plenty of evidence to support that statement, but for the purpose of this rant, let’s just mention two recent examples, both of which involve the ever-powerful East Coast media machine, ESPN. The day after the Cal men’s basketball team played an overtime classic against UCLA in front of a sold-out Haas Pavilion—as loud a basketball arena as you’ll ever hear, by the way—ESPN.com was trapped somewhere east of total oblivion. UCLA’s victory sealed the Bruins’ 28th Pac-10 title and, for a night, was a tough blow for a Bears team trying to get back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in three years. But instead of listing a story about this game on their college basketball home page, ESPN.com ran a feature article on Duke, and stories from two games—Texas vs. Texas A&M and Duke vs. Florida State—that had been played two days earlier.

This egregious oversight on the Internet, which delivers up-to-the-minute coverage, wasn’t an isolated one. The next week, ESPN talking head Digger Phelps made a statement that should have burned the loafers of any self-respecting Pac-10 fan. Phelps, a former coach at Notre Dame, said Stanford was an unsung team that would do some damage in the Pac-10 Tournament. Of course, had Phelps been paying attention to the other coast, he would have known that the Cardinal went 3-6 down the stretch and lost by 21 points at home to UCLA in their final regular-season game.

Obviously, this is nothing new, and that’s precisely the problem. Since the days Pete Newell was winning all kinds of basketball titles from the old Men’s Gym on Bancroft Avenue, and those autumns when Pappy Waldorf was engineering one of the great college football dynasties up the street in Memorial Stadium, California has taken the backseat to traditional powers. For many, Cal’s exclusion from the Rose Bowl two years ago was the embodiment of this second-class treatment. Actually, that was just another chapter. “For decades, ABC, CBS, NBC, they went to the games they thought everyone could identify with, and that’s Ohio State, Georgia, Auburn, Notre Dame,” Edwards says. “I didn’t see a team from the West Coast other than USC on television until well into the 1960s.”

Enduring this cold shoulder “is something every California fan goes through at some point,” says Gaw, who is so devoted that he flew to the Bay Area from New York on consecutive weekends to watch Cal play USC and Stanford. “It’s something that’s not going to change in the next 100 years,” adds Edwards.

We think harder, work harder. We have to grasp things faster. My confidence is so much better. —Senior forward Reneé Wright

Eventually, though, sports will evolve. “It will take a passing of this generation of broadcasters and sportswriters and media people, and the passing of this generation of fans and people who have particular allegiances to certain schools and conferences,” says Edwards. “I think that’s at least another 25 or 35 years away. People will look back in wonderment to the time when Penn State and Notre Dame were the powers and other schools were ignored.”

Ryan Lillis, M.J. ’06, covers Cal football and basketball for the Sacramento Bee. An East Coast native, his eyes have been opened to the quality of West Coast sports since moving here three years ago.

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