Miller: Edney's shot looms large in UCLA lore
Published: March 17, 2013 Updated: 1:36 p.m.
Some of the shots really are prayers, wishes affirmed by the basketball gods.
Some of them really are miracles, once-in-a-lifetime instants that, all at once, impact so many lifetimes.
UCLA's Tyus Edney (11), in this March 19, 1995 photo, gets his last-second shot around the outstretched arms of Missouri's Derek Grimm.
JACK SMITH, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Some of the long shots really are just that – long shots – hurried heaves that beat not only the buzzer but also the odds.
Then there are shots like the one that crowned Tyus Edney, that defined Tyus Edney, that becameTyus Edney. A shot that kept alive the national title run of the 1994-95 UCLA Bruins and that, nearly two decades later, Edney is asked about only four or five times a week.
A shot that Edney made and a shot that made him.
"It was kind of almost like a mini-hook, wrap-around kind of thing," Edney says when asked to dissect a basket that UCLA fans have come to describe simply as brilliant. "I had to get it around his arm. It was kind of a hook, almost."
There was one thing Edney's second-round game-winner that mid-March afternoon in Boise most definitely was not. Lucky.
Though somewhat unorthodox, the shot hardly was unrehearsed.
"Believe it or not," Edney says today, "it was a shot I practiced a lot growing up."
As a kid – roughly ages 10 to 16 – Edney, his brother and their friends would play on a rickety miniature hoop in the driveway of Edney's Los Angeles home. The thing had a wooden backboard and a metal rim, one that hung at about 6 feet.
"The only way to get a shot up was to shoot it around someone's outstretched arms," Edney says. "My dad would get mad because we'd get hurt out there sometimes. We'd twist an ankle or something and he'd be saying, 'Hey, you gotta be ready for the real game.'
"But then he started seeing us taking those same shots in games and making them and he was like, 'OK, I'll leave you guys alone. You're fine.' That shot in the tournament basically was one of those."
So it wasn't a prayer, a miracle or a long shot, even if, after the game, defeated Missouri guard Julian Winfield countered, "You can't tell me that the little guy just knew that was going in when it left his fingers."
Actually, Edney was certain the ball was going in. And why not? He'd seen it go in so many times before.
While the ending was what really mattered, history more vividly recalls the journey Edney took that day just to reach the basket.
He grabbed Cameron Dollar's inbounds pass and navigated the length of the floor, through the Tigers' passive, don't-foul resistance – the prevent defense doesn't even work in basketball – going behind his back near midcourt and not encountering anything more than a speed bump until he was in the lane.
More celebrated teammate Ed O'Bannon had instructed Edney to look for him – "Of course," Edney saysnow, laughing. "I told him, 'OK, OK, I will.'" – and guard Toby Bailey was waving for the ball.
Edney saw both but, knowing the play had begun with only 4.8 seconds remaining, nothing appeared clearer to him than the rim.
"I knew I couldn't let anyone stop me from running," says Edney, now UCLA's director of basketball operations. "It was all kind of an instinctual, desperation kind of thing. After I went behind my back, it sort of opened up. My instinct was to just go to the basket."
Waiting for him there was a Missouri forward named Derek Grimm, all 6-foot-9 of him. Edney was 5-10. Still is, although in Bruin lore he'll always stand taller.
Facing that big obstacle, the littlest Bruin did what often is best when playing a game. He went back to being a kid, in his driveway, bending the ball around his brother's extended arms and over his brother's tip-toed reach.
Grimm, not wanting to foul, didn't even jump.
"I guess there's really no use in doing it," Grimm said afterward, "but you keep saying, 'What if? What if? What if?'"
The ball smooched the glass and settled in the net just as the 4.8 seconds reached 0.0. The Bruins had won, 75-74.
Dollar called the victory "a reprieve." Then-assistant coach Lorenzo Romar said the team had been "resurrected."
Two weeks later, the Bruins won UCLA's 11th national championship. "Without Tyus," O'Bannon said, "we wouldn't be anywhere."
"People have told me about how they hurt themselves running around celebrating after my shot," Edney says. "I've had kids tell me that their parents traumatized them because they were running around screaming. People in airports, in bars, going crazy. I've heard all those stories.
"The real impact of it for me came a little bit later. It was at least a year or two before I realized it. Each year following, it was surprising how much it stuck with people, how people remembered where they were when it happened, what they were doing. That's the stuff that still surprises me."
So, to this day, Tyus Edney's romp through the Missouri Tigers is producing the unexpected. But Edney knows at least one thing about that day that isn't surprising.
That his shot, no matter how it's described, went in.
Contact the writer: jmiller@ocregister.com
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