Twenty-five years ago, ‘Little Hoop’ and Tyus Edney launched UCLA’s run to its last NCAA title
The basket stood just a touch over 6 feet off the ground. The rim wasn’t regulation size. The boys had to use a miniature ball.
Where are they now? A look at UCLA’s 1995 NCAA men’s basketballchampionship team
By BEN
BOLCH STAFF WRITER
LA
times
MARCH 21, 2020
7
AM
Little Hoop was a pain.
Tyus and Russell
Edney would lug the thing out of their Long Beach home every time they wanted
to play basketball in the driveway, the young brothers hooking the wood
backboard and metal rim to the gutter above their garage.
Little Hoop
could be dangerous.
The basket
occasionally fell, once plunking Tyus on the head and requiring several
stitches. There was no telling how many busted lips and sprained ankles the
boys sustained.
Little Hoop
didn’t seem to enhance their game.
 |
A young Tyus Edney, left, plays on “Little Hoop” (seen in the background) with neighborhood friends Jermaine Wilson and Hoang Do during the mid-1980s.
(Courtesy of Tyus Edney)
|
The basket stood just a touch over 6 feet off the ground. The rim wasn’t regulation size. The boys had to use a miniature ball.
Hank Edney used
to come home from work and cringe whenever he saw his sons playing on the
thing.
“You guys spend
too much time on that Little Hoop,” Hank would say, using the nickname they had
all given it. “It’s going to mess up your form and your shots and everything.”
If nothing else,
everybody agreed that it forced the boys to get creative, especially little
Tyus. He would drive toward the basket, confronted by the flailing arms of a
brother two years older and just as many inches taller. Pump-fakes, scoops and
hooks all became part of the arsenal of the jitterbug point guard who would go
on to star for Long Beach Poly High and UCLA.
He had no
choice.
“You had to come
up with all these different little shots to get the shot off,” Tyus said, “and
kind of one of my things that I learned how to do was shooting it around arms.”
It was here on
this driveway basket, Tyus’ torso twisting, his body suspended in midair, his
hand releasing the ball just inches above hostile fingertips, that the most iconic shot in UCLA
basketball history was born, nurtured and perfected.
“I think
I’ve seen that shot on that Little Hoop,” Russell Edney said of a basketball
prayer that would be answered 25 years ago this weekend, “about 10 or 15
times.”
Kids
often mimic their heroes making last-second shots, the scene having played out
countless times in backyards, driveways and parks across the country. This was
Tyus making his own play, years before he knew what it might become.
::
The game
was over. The season was lost. The misery was enduring.
UCLA,
winner of a record 10 national basketball championships, seemed cursed on that
March 1995 day inside Boise State University Pavilion.
The
top-seeded and heavily favored Bruins found themselves trailing by one point
and down to their final, longshot chance during a second-round NCAA tournament
game after Missouri’s Julian Winfield made a contested layup with 4.8 seconds
left.
As the
Tigers poured onto the court in celebration, a timeout halting play, the Bruins
contemplated another premature finish amid a two-decade title drought that
showed no sign of abating.
“When Missouri made that basket, five guys called timeout and they
all riveted 10 eyes right through me.”
FORMER
UCLA COACH JIM HARRICK
“The
prominent thought in my mind was, I can’t believe our season’s going to end
like this,” said Bob Myers, then a Bruins benchwarmer who would go on to become
a part-time starter and much later general manager of the Golden State
Warriors. “We were the No. 1 overall seed, we had a wonderful year, we had
great character, we had great leadership and coaching and I just felt like it
was one of those moments in life where I was thinking, this isn’t right, this
isn’t fair, this isn’t how it should be.”
Jim Harrick was
familiar with that feeling.
The UCLA
coach had made it past the regional semifinal round of the NCAA tournament only
one time in 10 previous trips with the Bruins and Pepperdine. In 1983, when he
coached the Waves, his team had lost a six-point lead with 57 seconds left in
overtime during what became a gruesome double-overtime loss to eventual national
champion North Carolina State.
Only a
year before UCLA sought a miracle finish against Missouri, the Bruins, as a No.
5 seed, had fallen in the first round to No. 12 Tulsa.
All
seemed lost again as Harrick’s players fixed their gaze on the coach while walking
toward the timeout huddle.
“When
Missouri made that basket,” remembered Harrick, now 81, “five guys called time
out and they all riveted 10 eyes right through me.”
The coach
had a plan. It would involve not his team’s best player but its smallest and its
speediest, a 5-foot-10 point guard specially equipped to make this sort of
play.
Edney had found himself in a similar spot just two years earlier,
albeit completely unscripted.
He
stole the ball at midcourt in the final seconds of a second-round West Regional
game against Michigan, the score tied and UCLA needing a basket to win. Edney
drove toward the rim, hoping for a layup, but found Juwan Howard, the
Wolverines’ towering 6-9 forward, in his way.
Edney
passed to teammate Ed O’Bannon, who was not expecting the ball. The pass was
stolen, the Bruins went on to lose in overtime and Harrick would lament that he
had wanted Edney to shoot.
Over
the years, Harrick made his players practice frantic end-of-game situations,
running a drill in which each of them dribbled the length of the court against
a defender in six seconds or less. It usually didn’t go well, players either
losing the ball out of bounds in their hurry or missing the shot.
“None
of them could do it,” Harrick said, “except Edney.”
The
coach made a high-pitched noise, indicating why the hard-charging dynamo was
specially equipped to pull it off.
“Zoop-zoop-zoop,
like a roadrunner,” Harrick said. “Zoop-zoop-zoop, zoop-zoop-zoop.”
Edney,
the fleetest player on the team, had been doing this sort of thing since taking
his talents from the home driveway to youth league games at Victoria Park gym
in Carson.
It didn’t
always result in heroic finishes.
“At
Victoria Park, he used to dribble through everybody, he’d come down and look
spectacular and then miss the shot,” said Hank Edney, who was his sons’ first
coach. “I said, ‘Tyus, I don’t care how good you look coming up the court and
how many people you go around. If you don’t make that basket, it doesn’t mean
anything.’ ”
The
degree of difficulty rarely matched what Tyus faced in his own driveway, where
the rules for playing on Little Hoop were strictly enforced. Goaltending was
closely monitored because the rim was shorter than some of the neighborhood
kids who came over for two-on-two battles. Dunking was not allowed except on
breakaway plays, for fear of the whole thing crashing down on a contested shot
at the rim.
Said
Tyus: “Every score was hard. You had to really get creative.”
Said
Russell: “You couldn’t pretty much do a regular layup because the ball was
small and there wasn’t a lot of space. In order to get the shot off, you would
have to do like little circus shots and if you didn’t get it off correctly, you
could get it blocked to your neighbor’s house.”
Some of the neighborhood kids preferred Little Hoop to the
regulation basket on a court around the corner. Games stretched into the night,
illuminated by a porch-light bulb. The Edney boys wouldn’t even let a motor
home parked in the driveway stop them, hoisting shots from either side of it.
Hank’s
cynicism toward his driveway basket softened during another game at the
Victoria Park gym when he saw his son make an inventive move.
“I
said, ‘I’ve seen that move before,’ ” Hank said. “That’s a move I saw on Little
Hoop.’ ”
He
would see it again.
::
As
he gave orders in the timeout huddle, seeking a savior in those final seconds
against Missouri, Harrick had a job for each player.
“I
sat them down, and I said, ‘All right, you in the corner, you in the corner,
you on the wing, you on the wing,’ ” Harrick recalled, ticking off the
responsibilities of everyone except his point guard.
The onus
would fall on Edney.
“I wanted
one guy to take it down,” Harrick said, “and I told Tyus I wanted him to take
it the length of the floor, they’re not going to foul you, take it to the rim
and let’s see what happens.”
Coming
out of the huddle, Harrick walked out onto the court, his arm draped around
Edney. The coach repeated his request so that there would be no doubt.
“I kind
of yelled at him,” Harrick said. “I said, ‘Tyus, do you have a crystal-clear
understanding of what I said?’ ”
Replied
Edney: “Yes, you want me to shoot the ball.”
It wasn’t
the last order Edney would hear as the Bruins drifted out of their coach’s
earshot.
“Give me
the damn ball!” O’Bannon, the team’s top scorer and emotional leader who would
become the consensus national player of the year, yelled at Edney. “I want the
ball!”
Edney
nodded softly at the conflicting agendas, unsure how it would all play out.
Fate
seemed to be smiling on the Bruins even before Cameron Dollar’s inbounds pass
from the baseline. Harrick scanned the court and noticed that Missouri
counterpart Norm Stewart had not inserted either Sammy or Simeon Haley, the
Tigers’ 7-foot, shot-blocking twins.
“By then it was almost a second-nature thing; it was like, oh,
well, his arms are up, I’ll just shoot around him.”
TYUS
EDNEY
Edney
knew the most important thing was not getting slowed on his way to the basket
from the backcourt. If he encountered a trap, he would have to dribble through
it.
He
gathered the pass from Dollar in stride and took three dribbles before reaching
midcourt while facing token pressure because Missouri did not want to foul him
and put him on the free-throw line. Edney made a behind-the-back move as he
zipped into the frontcourt, changing directions to elude the initial defense.
Three
more dribbles followed as Edney reached the paint and more defenders converged
upon him. As he neared the basket, Edney was confronted by the long arms of
Derek Grimm, Missouri’s 6-9 forward.
All those
crazy shots on Little Hoop had prepared Edney for the biggest moment of his
basketball career.
“By then
it was almost a second-nature thing; it was like, oh, well, his arms are up,
I’ll just shoot around him,” Edney said with a chuckle. “Even though it was on
a different scale, it was still an instinctual type of thing.”
Edney
pushed off with his left leg, twisted his body around Grimm and released his
four-foot shot just above the defender’s fingertips. The ball banked off the
backboard, bouncing off the front of the rim before falling through the net as
the buzzer sounded.
“YEEAAHHH!”
the crowd exhaled as Edney’s teammates poured onto the floor to engulf him
after the 75-74 win. Myers was the first to arrive, wrapping his arms around
Edney and lifting him from behind as Edney raised his arms in triumph.
“He’s the
hero,” Myers said, “and I’m just the guy that was happy that he had got us
through that game and we could keep playing.”
UCLA
would not face another challenge like this on the way to hanging its 11th
national championship banner, winning its last four games by an average of 12
points and every game by at least six. The Bruins would beat Arkansas by 11 in
the title game in Seattle with Edney limited to just 2½ minutes because of a
sprained wrist he sustained two days earlier.
His shot
would live on for eternity, the defining moment of Harrick’s coaching career
and a memory that continues to resonate for its creator a quarter of a century
later. Edney was stuck in a crush of shoppers at the grocery store last week
amid the novel coronavirus pandemic when
he detected the steady gaze of the middle-aged man behind him in line.
“Hey,
what’s your name, man?” the stranger finally asked.
“Tyus
Edney.”
“I
thought so, I thought so.”
It was a
sequence that has played out numerous times over the years for Edney, now the
director of engagement for UCLA’s athletic department. What comes next is
equally predictable.
“They’re
like, ‘Oh!’ ” Edney said, repeating the dialogue. “Four-point-eight! The shot!”
Yes, the
shot. It seemed as if everybody had seen it before.
By ERIC MADDY
la
times
MARCH 21, 2020
7
AM
UCLA began the 1994-95 college basketball season ranked No.
6 in the Associated Press poll. The Bruins quickly showed they were
championship contenders, winning 18 of their first 20 games (a loss to
California was later overturned by the NCAA), and were ranked No. 2 when
freshman guard Toby Bailey was inserted into the starting lineup on Feb. 21,
1995, for a game against Stanford.
With the
6-foot-5 Bailey as a starter, the Bruins went 13-0 to finish the season on a
19-game win streak. In the NCAA title game against Arkansas, Bailey made 12 of
20 shots, scored 26 points and grabbed nine rebounds.
Click box below to enlarge
Click box below to enlarge
Where are they now? A look at UCLA’s 1995 NCAA men’s basketballchampionship team
By BEN
BOLCH, ERIC
MADDY
LA
times
MARCH 21, 2020
7:11
AM
A look at the players and coaches on the 1995 UCLA men’s basketball team and what
they are doing 25 years later.
PLAYERS
G Toby Bailey — THEN:
Offensive sparkplug moved into the starting lineup late in the season. NOW:
Professional basketball agent who works alongside fellow former Bruin Mitchell
Butler.
G Marquis Burns
— THEN: Reserve suffered a back injury against George Mason in
December and transferred to New Mexico State in midseason. NOW: Works in
information technology for Coca-Cola in Southern California.
F Kevin Dempsey
— THEN: Sharpshooter who got limited playing time off the bench.
NOW: Bay Area chef.
G Cameron Dollar
— THEN: Tyus Edney’s backup who capably filled in during the
national championship game against Arkansas. NOW: Washington assistant coach
under Mike Hopkins.
G Tyus
Edney — THEN: Made the shot of a lifetime to sustain the Bruins’
national championship hopes. NOW: Director of engagement for the UCLA athletic
department.
C Omm’A
Givens — THEN: Backup to George Zidek. NOW: Lyft driver in San Francisco.
F J.R. Henderson
— THEN: The versatility to play all five positions made him
indispensable, even as a freshman. NOW: Having changed his name to J.R.
Sakuragi, he’s a center for the Aisin Seahorses of the Japan Basketball League.
F Kris
Johnson — THEN: Freshman played a smattering of minutes in 21 games
off the bench. NOW: Runs several business ventures and youth showcases while
also working as a basketball broadcaster.
F Bob
Myers — THEN: Walk-on practice player who would become a significant
contributor later in his college career. NOW: General manager of the Golden
State Warriors.
C Ike
Nwankwo — THEN: Backed up Zidek. NOW: Runs a basketball academy in
Thailand and brings players to the UCLA camp every summer.
F Charles
O’Bannon — THEN: Started every game and defended opponent’s best offensive
player. NOW: Assistant coach at Las Vegas Bishop Gorman High who recently moved
to Seattle to become a personal trainer.
F Ed
O’Bannon — THEN: The Bruins’ emotional leader, top scorer and most talented
player. NOW: Probation officer in Las Vegas. Championed college athlete causes
with his antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA over the
use of athlete image in video games and support of the California law that
will allow players to receive endorsement deals.
C George
Zidek — THEN: Strong post defender who could also run and shoot,
with a dependable hook shot. NOW: Broadcaster for Euroleague games described by
Jim Harrick as “kind of the Jay Bilas of the Czech Republic.”
COACHES
Head
coach Jim Harrick — Assistant coach at Cal State Northridge
Assistant
Mark Gottfriend — Head coach at Cal State Northridge
Assistant
Steve Lavin — Analyst at Fox Sports
Assistant
Lorenzo Romar — Head coach at Pepperdine
