Our
View: Eaters of ants plot against unknowing
Beach
Cal State Long Beach has an arch-nemesis and we don’t even know it. Someone,
somewhere plotted our destruction last week and hoped to beat The Beach.
There were people working around the clock to see The Beach go down. They had
T-shirts. They had signs. They even staged two events to humiliate our beloved
mascot Prospector Pete.
All of this treachery was under our collective noses as we here at CSULB strolled
through another week on our beautiful campus, completely oblivious to the actions
abroad against us.
Who were these anti-CSULB deviants? Who worked so dutifully against us last week?
The answer may surprise, even shock, most of you.
The answer is UC Irvine, stomping grounds of the UCI Anteaters, located in the
heart of a stereotypical Orange County master-planned suburb.
There, just 20
minutes south on the 405, UCI publicized “Beat The Beach” week designed
to boost student morale for the upcoming basketball games of this past Saturday.
According to an advertisement in New University, UCI’s weekly campus newspaper,
two of the events included a boxing match with UCI’s mascot Peter the Anteater
and our Prospector Pete, followed by a Prospector Pete funeral procession the
next day to “bury the ’niner.”
That sounds like a lot of fun — for them. The advertisement called CSULB “UC
Irvine’s Biggest Rival.”
That’s really interesting.
Isn’t it odd that if UCI is our biggest rival, why don’t we, the
general student populace, know about it? Why don’t more students pack the
stands of The Walter Pyramid when the Anteaters show up to take on the 49ers?
Why doesn’t the other side of this apparently one-sided rivalry know anything
about this?
All these are valid questions. Perhaps one answer is due to our commuter campus
nature and fact most students don’t go to campus athletic events. But of
the substantial amount that do, why don’t they know who our biggest rival
is?
Maybe it’s because CSULB in recent memory never had a strong rival, so
someone, somewhere decided to create one with UCI. Too bad the masses on our
side didn’t get that memo.
To be fair, CSULB needs a sports rival. It’s a healthy, integral aspect
to creating campus spirit and pride. But the problem is you can’t just
create rivalries out of nowhere. They build with history.
Consider the strong local rivalry between UCLA and USC. There isn’t a Bruin
who doesn’t know the Trojans suck and there isn’t a Trojan who doesn’t
know the Bruins are losers. Such sentiments didn’t appear overnight. They
took decades of intense competition, not to mention some
Bruin bear defacing
and Tommy Trojan manure-dumping along the way.
Though our created-out-of-nowhere rivalry with UCI has questionable roots, let’s
accept it and go with our onshore Beach flow.
It’s time for a change of tone here at The Beach. UCI, you stink. Let’s
see how Peter the Anteater does in a boxing match on our campus with
the Beach Patrol to back our gold-digging brother up. Prospector Pete will step
on that
anteater’s overly-bushy tail.
Next year, if UCI is to be our campus rival, the Beach Pride Center ought to
organize more spirit events in a fashion similar to UCI. After all, true rivalries
don’t work if one side is apathetic.
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