AN UGLINESS GNAWS AT UCLA.

Byline: Kevin Modesti

A smoky cynicism has hung in the Pauley Pavilion rafters for most of two decades now, blown away by UCLA's 1995 national championship only to return thicker than ever.

Blame it on old guys - defined here as everybody with more than a few years on the head coach - alumni and assorted boosters and ex-university officials embittered by the thought that Bruins basketball will never again be the dynasty it was.

Even when things are going well, there's skepticism about whether they'll stay that way. When the good times indeed do end, there's muttering about how much worse they'll get before they get better. It has been this way under every coach from Gene Bartow to Steve Lavin.

Say what you will about the expectations of UCLA fans being impossibly high - in fact, they might be described as accurately as maddeningly low.

None of which was more than a mild shame as long as that cloud clung to the ceiling, up where the crotchety ones hang out. But now it seems to have drifted down to the court and choked the kids.

How else to interpret recent events? Jerome Moiso and JaRon Rush, both sophomores last season, are leaving UCLA, having declared May 2 that they're available for the late-June NBA draft. Now Jason Kapono, coming off his freshman year, is expected to announce any day that he is making the same early jump to the pros.

Are these the moves of wide-eyed optimists eager to sniff the rarified air of capitalist freedom? Or are these the moves of people who have taken a hard look at where they are and decided anywhere else would be preferable?

Do Kapono, Moiso and Rush believe they'll step directly from Westwood to the NBA All-Star Game? Or are they diving off a sinking ship, willing to trust their fortunes to choppy seas?

Let's give these guys enough credit to think they know the odds. Surely they've scanned the past performances and realize leaving college early is no sure ticket to professional stardom.

They must also have looked at the NBA careers of recent UCLA products and noticed that among the eight Bruins to be drafted since the 1995 championship, five already are out of the league and the other three averaged less than 6 points a game in 1999-2000.

But maybe that's the point. No longer is UCLA the place to go - or, even more to the point, the place to stay - to learn marketable basketball skills. The six Bruins in the NBA this season were the fewest in memory.

Suppose, on the other hand, that Kapono, Moiso and Rush actually think they'll succeed where Ed and Charles O'Bannon, J.R. Henderson and Tyus Edney - all ex-NBA players already - failed. Where might they get the idea that the underaged and unproven are eligible for big glory and bigger money?

They might get that idea by looking no further than Lavin, who was handed a six-year ``rollover'' contract in the spring of 1999 that made him the third-highest-paid head coach in the Pacific-10 - this at a point when he'd led the Bruins to increasingly poorer regular-season and NCAA tournament records and nobody else was trying to hire him.

The late-season surge and round-of-16 tournament run of the spring of 2000 suggested Lavin might get the last laugh. Maybe it would turn out he's worth the half a million a year guaranteed. But he'll have a hard time proving it now. Three players who were good for 41 points a game are on their way out.

In no way are Kapono, Moiso and Rush ready for the NBA. But maybe they've decided they won't be any more ready after another year or two at UCLA.

This is a problem for the NBA, too, only the league is loathe to acknowledge it.

When NBA commissioner David Stern entertained questions from reporters at Staples Center before the Lakers' victory over Phoenix on Wednesday night, he was asked if college players coming out early was an irreversible trend.

Yes, Stern said. And then he got sarcastic at the notion there was anything discouraging about this. ``You know,'' he said, ``I never hear people complain about gymnasts turning pro in their teens and figure skaters who don't go to college.''

Someone mentioned that Pete Sampras didn't finish high school. ``Don't you think that's terrible?'' Stern said. Terrible, we agreed.

Of course, everybody at the table was smiling at the silliness of all this, because nobody really believes the Samprases and Mary Lou Rettons and Michelle Kwans of the sports world are ruining their lives. But it's an uneasy comparison. Those sports and basketball aren't the same. Gymnasts peak in their teens. Two-guards take a little longer.

Maybe - probably - the three soon-to-be-ex-Bruins understand this. If they do, and they've made the judgment that this is the time to go pro, they're rejecting a future in UCLA basketball as much as they're embracing the possibilities of the pros.

That's cynicism. It doesn't look pretty on the young and it's a particularly ugly development for UCLA.