Rivalry Divides City Into Red and Blue

Top 10 reasons why it’s great to be a UCLA football fan this time of year:

10. Expressionless mascot and expressionless coach on sidelines entertain kids at games.

9. Don’t have to disrupt year-end ski trip with inconveniently scheduled Rose Bowl game.

8. Only a few more weeks until the boss stops crowing about his alma mater, USC.

7. No more being compared to that “other” football school in town: Azusa Pacific.

6. Can re-gift that “UCLA Football” license plate frame from Christmas last year.

5. No bulky Heisman statues to crowd UCLA Sports Hall of Fame.

4. Blue handicap placards in players’ cars sparkle in late fall.

3. One more year removed from Miami, 1998.

2. Another Pac-10 title in moral victories.

1. Two words: basketball season.

Jim Patton

Redondo Beach

*

Regarding “former UCLA great Ken Norton” [Nov. 30], the Trojan family that Bill Plaschke raves about hardly compares to the Bruin nation. While USC sits atop its ivory tower, stuck in the past, UCLA is a modern family of all peoples and cultures and social classes of the world.

UCLA’s progressive and open minds long ago elected decathlete Rafer Johnson as a student body president, sent its track star Tom Bradley on to big-city mayoralty, and saw Ralph Bunche win the Nobel Peace Prize. We’ll even throw in Zev Yaroslavsky, a county supervisor, for good measure.

We Bruins are glad to see that USC has finally embraced the values that drew Ken Norton Jr. to UCLA decades ago.

Plus, we all know why a Trojan is forever. They never attend enough classes to graduate and keep freeloading off parents’ trust funds.

Jay Ross

Los Angeles