Arizona Basketball: Fists fly as Cats beats UCLA, Wildcats fan sucker-punched by Bruin fan
As Arizona Basketball was handing UCLA their second conference loss of the season, a frustrated Bruin fan was throwing his fist towards a Wildcats fan.
You don’t usually hear about fan brawls in college basketball, especially in the Pac-12, mostly because most schools do not pack their house like the Arizona Basketball team. Pauley Pavilion has been one of those sparsely inhabited venues during Pac-12 play even in big games, but that changed on Saturday when Arizona Basketball came to town.
Pauley Pavilion was packed to the brim by Bruins diehards. There were a few nosebleed seats available, but the lower bowl seemed to be about 90 percent powder blue and gold, or white (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar t-shirts handed out to students). The Wildcats fans who could afford the hefty price tag of about $100-$400 on the secondary market, showed up loud and proud. Their chants echoed off of Pauley Pavillion’s ceilings; “U OF A, U OF A” OR “A-RI-ZON-A, A-RI-ZON-A.”
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UCLA Students chants were more demeaning and centered squarely at Arizona’s returning guard, Allonzo Trier with “P-E-D’s, P-E-D’s” or “STEROIDS, STEROIDS.” The Bruin Den (Student Section for UCLA) chants didn’t seem to affect Zo much.
The electricity of the atmosphere and pumping adrenaline felt from the court to the rafters may have been the catalyst for an unfortunate event which affected my family personally.
My daughter, a former Marketing Director of the Zona Zoo, who was wearing a shirt with a huge Wildcat on the front of it and was looking to sit in her seat. The seat she paid $225 for her ticket on a third party ticket broker online. After four attempts to ask this 40-something male Bruin fan nicely to vacate her seat so she could sit down, nothing worked, he continued to tell her she had a fake ticket. She brought the 90 ish-year old Pauley Pavilion volunteer who helps with finding your seats for help, but he wasn’t successful either and gave up.
I don’t give up, and this was totally ridiculous, where was she supposed to sit? There were no seats available.
I had to get up out of my seat in the same section at the top row to help the elder Bruin volunteer understand what was going on, and found out the sweet man was afraid to go to talk to this Bruin fan. It all went down on try number five.
Our good Samaritan and fellow Wildcats fan, Avi Levy (Class of 2003) and his friend Brian (Class of 2004), sought to help my daughter (class of 2013), by looking for this guys ticket and found it on the floor. The Bruin fan kept checking his phone for an email and continued to try to convict my daughter of using a fake ticket. Duh, how did she get in if it was fake and she came into Pauley last?
Come to find; the Bruin fan was in the wrong seat. His seat was in the section to his right. When his ticket was found, he wasn’t too happy about being wrong. After he had punched Avi, he ran out of the row and up the stairs into the lobby. Four big Wildcats fans, all men, ran after him and the security finally found him.
After the game, Avi told us what happened in his own words, happy the Cats beat the Bruins:
“In a nutshell. Some guy sat in your daughter’s seat, and he thought I tatted him out and punched me in the mouth. He was arrested and removed from the game and campus. I graduated in 2003 and been going to UCLA vs. Arizona for about five years with a UCLA buddy of mine. In the end, Arizona won and I literally ‘took one for the team’ a sucker punch that is.”
Arizona Wildcats
His friend Brian, a witness, helped Avi get the fan removed. Avi is not pressing charges against this fan, nor did he ask UCLA to do anything further, he just simply wanted security to be sure the disgruntled fan left the building.
UCLA did offer our Alumni affordable tickets as USC did, but they have in the past. The SoCal Cats just felt the price was too steep to provide their alumni. Disappointing, though, and one has to wonder the motive. Not having an opposing team’s alumni section in attendance to cheer on your team is a good thing. You know how loud a stadium full of Wildcats fans can be or even a few Wildcats fans for that matter. On Saturday maybe 1/5 of the crowd were Arizona Fans, but they were still loud and could be heard until the UCLA Band drowned them out on queue.
I want to point out, and this is crucial, all the UCLA Fans I sat with were very kind to me as I was obnoxiously cheering on my Cats, and they also felt their own fan should be arrested and kicked out. They too were afraid for my daughter’s safety.
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Arizona wins, and Avi is okay, that’s all we care about, and my daughter got to sit in her seat for the second half around the sweetest and classiest Wildcats fans to watch her team spank UCLA winning by eleven points in their house! I was just happy that all the Wildcats stuck together. Bear Down Avi! Bear Down Arizona!