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| UCLA's director of basketball operations, Tyus Edney, sits next to Kyle Anderson at a college basketball game Dec. 22, 2013, in Los Angeles. Edney remembers when Tulsa knocked the Bruins out of the NCAA men's basketball tournament in 1994. (Danny Moloshok/The Associated Press file) |
The names flashed up Sunday afternoon, popping into the 68 slots that crushed dreams or lifted hopes.
Some three minutes into the show, UCLA learned its postseason fate: a No. 4 seed, with a bit of home-court advantage in San Diego. A few seconds later, it learned its opponent: No. 13 Tulsa.
And just like that, Tyus Edney’s mind flashed back.
The Bruins tip off the NCAA Tournament Friday against the Golden Hurricane, 20 years and two days after the most frustrating game of Edney’s UCLA career. Now the team’s director of operations, the 40-year-old is most often celebrated
There’s another game he rarely talks about: the 112-102 first-round loss to Tulsa in 1994. The upset still stands as the highest point total the Bruins have ever surrendered at the Big Dance.
“It’s selective memory time, I guess,” he said, laughing. “It was a tough game for us. It was a tough time.”
The Golden Hurricane have had spurts of success through their NCAA Tournament trips — this season marks their 15th all-time — but at that point, the program had a 1-6 record. Their lone win came in 1955, but in a third-place regional game that no longer exists in today’s format.
On the other end of the court was UCLA, a premier program that had started the 1993-94 season with 14 straight wins and entered that tournament as a No. 5 seed. Before the game, star forward Ed O’Bannon, an eventual Wooden Award winner, even admitted to reporters that he had no idea Tulsa was even in Oklahoma. That game, by the way, was played in Oklahoma City.
Backed by a home crowd, the Golden Hurricane ran up a 25-point first-half lead. They unleashed a trifecta of unanswered runs: 10 points, 10 points, eight points. By the time the game was over, UCLA could do nothing more but face a long, painful offseason.
“The locker room was bad,” Edney said. “I remember Ed got mad at everybody, kind of lost it a little bit. But it was warranted. We all knew that wasn’t us that was on that floor that day. It was a lot of anger and frustration. We knew we were better than that.”
“It wasn’t a bad dream,” coach Jim Harrick said then. “It was a nightmare.”
Tulsa went on to the Sweet Sixteen that season under coach Tubby Smith, and followed up with another the next year. In 2000, Bill Self took the Golden Hurricane to an Elite Eight, only to take a head coaching job at Illinois three months later. The program missed 11 of the next 13 NCAA Tournaments.
The Bruins came back from that stumble and won its 11th national title in 1995, something Edney thinks is no coincidence.
“If anything good came out of it, I thought it fueled us going into next season,” he said. “It really gave us another type of focus, to where we didn’t want that to happen again.”
This weekend, UCLA (26-8) is rolling into Viejas Arena weekend off a Pac-12 tournament sweep, but this year’s players don’t need extra motivation from the history books.
They have plenty of their own losses to ruminate on: the 20-point loss to Minnesota a year ago, one suffered with Jordan Adams sidelined by a broken ankle and followed by the firing of head coach Ben Howland; the 18-point loss to Washington State nary two weeks ago, one that was by far the Bruins’ most embarrassing effort of the season.
None have yet asked Edney about 1994.
“I don’t think I even want to bring it up,” he said. “We’re kind of in a good rhythm right now. If we just continue to do what we’ve been doing, stay focused, we’ll take care of business.”
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