From Beach Boys fame to UCLA success, Love family has been on L.A. stage

"Brian just kept turning to me and saying, 'Wow, he's good, he's really, really good,' " Love recalls, speaking of the 2006 game at Pauley Pavilion, played when Kevin was still in high school. "And I kept saying, 'You know what, Brian, you're right, he is really good.' "

The moment might have been a small one, but to Stan Love it was deeply meaningful. Through basketball, his son was helping close a fissure in a fractured family, a family important in these parts because they've helped define us.

Kevin, we know, is at UCLA now, leading his team to the Final Four. If all goes well over the next few days, Stan will watch his son lead the Bruins to a basketball national title. There will be confetti, the cutting of nets and wild celebration.

A member of the Love family will have played a role in making people here puff their tanned chests and feel . . . well, frankly, feel proudly Southern Californian.

It figures.

For generations, the Loves and their extended family have been at the center of much that makes Los Angeles what it is, for better or worse.

This is a clan that was part of the vast, Depression-era migration that helped give the culture here a Midwestern flavor, witnessing first hand the waves of racial change that roiled South L.A. in the '50s and '60s.

It's the family -- Stan's brother, Mike, and three of their first cousins -- that formed the nucleus of the Beach Boys: the band that helped convince the world every Los Angeles neighborhood was bordered by a sandy beach stuffed with surfboards and bikinis. It's a family, with Stan Love stuck in the middle, that struggled against something deep in the fabric of this place -- excess, indulgence and the madness that can come with fame in L.A.

Now we have Stan's son Kevin, a precocious freshman, the Bruins' best player, a kid with a chance to make a lasting mark on another of our most precious possessions: UCLA basketball.

"It's pretty cool when you think about what this family has done here," says Love, 59 and fit, sitting at a Westwood restaurant this week. "The Southern California vibe is definitely part of what we are about . . . with the band and everything happening now, I guess you could say we've given something back."