COLLEGE BASKETBALL / NCAA MEN’S TOURNAMENT : Not Even the Final Proof Provides Enough Solace

It is 5:17 on an Arizona afternoon and the Sunday sun is setting ever so slowly. A basketball referee is yo-yoing his wrist to signify that a shot taken more than two minutes ago by a player from the University of Michigan should be counted. An overhead scoreboard is corrected to read “MICHIGAN 86, UCLA 84” and there isn’t a dry eye on UCLA’s side of the house.

One-and-a-half seconds later, David Boyle has flung the ball as far as he knows how, and Ed O’Bannon has bounced it once off the hardwood and aimed it awkwardly at the backboard, and it is the last gasp of a game too meaningful to forget and too painful to remember.

The UCLA coach can not let it go. Ten minutes after the gymnasium has been cleared, Jim Harrick has returned to the scene of the crime, searching for an answer, for an explanation, for a TV monitor or a voice of authority or for something or someone who can satisfy him definitively as to what has actually happened, searching if for nothing else than for simple peace of mind.

Eyewitness versions are varying with Roshomon-like inconsistency, until finally Harrick has heard enough and is hollering: “I want to see it! None of you have seen it! All of you are giving me an opinion, just like the officials! You’re talking about a game that is 10,000 times more important than anybody’s opinion!”

He wants slo-mo. He wants proof. He wants to know for sure that Jalen Rose’s shot left his fingertips before the expiration of a 45-second shot clock and that the basketball that Jimmy King snatched from mid-air and eased into the hoop had indeed brushed against the rim, validating its legality. When one mere shot means as much to a school and its students as this one did--”I’ve got to live with it my whole life,” Harrick laments--he at least longs to be reassured that it shouldn’t have been discounted.

Not until 6:45 p.m., an hour-and-a-half after the ball left the Michigan man’s hands, is its victim mollified. Crouched in a corner of the losing side’s dressing room, Harrick finally examines television footage, frame by frame, millisecond by millisecond, no longer furious but curious, before rising from the tiny portable monitor and saying: “OK. They made the right call. They made the right call.”

OK. It was OK to leave now. Yet, oh, such visions to walk away with, such disappointment to cart home. The “what ifs” alone would mount up day by day. What if Rose’s timing had been wrong or King’s had not been right? What if O’Bannon’s prayer had been answered as Christian Laettner’s once was, or what if officials had granted him another half-second to send it skyward?

More urgently, more memorably, what if Tyus Edney had shot the ball that he stole with the drama of a John Havlicek? Or what if Richard Petruska had not fouled out but instead had been there, beneath the basket, blocking out King, when the much-smaller Edney could do nothing more than watch and wince?

And then comes the question that hurts most. What if a 19-point advantage had been enough to make Michigan go away and leave UCLA alone, as it would have with most teams? What if the Bruins were the ones booking passage to Seattle for the next branch of the West Regional rather than being forced to find solace in having given these heavy favorites, to use Mitchell Butler’s description, the “scare of their lives.”

The Wolverines were worried. Damn worried. And angry. Their language in the locker room at halftime was proof of that, testified Rose, one of Michigan’s team leaders.

What sort of language?

“Explicit,” he said.

On UCLA’s end, the halftime assignment was a hard mix of believing in oneselves and believing in luck. The team that had nonchalantly drained seven of eight shots from three-point distance was the same team that, two nights earlier, had played an entire half not even attempting one. Kevin Dempsey was throwing knockout punches. O’Bannon was in his own personal ozone. And when even Petruska hits a three--having tried but once all season--then John Wooden must be wearing his wizard costume somewhere off-stage, pulling wires.

It was 43-26. Then it was 52-33. UCLA wasn’t simply playing with Michigan, wasn’t simply staying with Michigan. UCLA was making mincemeat of Michigan.

His players turning into baggy-pants clowns, an increasingly red-faced Steve Fisher paced and pleaded and implored them to get excited. Then the coach came to a terrible realization: “It’s tough to get excited when you’re taking the ball out of the net every time.”

Did it remind him of Loyola Marymount’s running up a tourmanent-record 149 points on Michigan three years ago?

“No,” Fisher said, “but it should have.”

And then, everything changed. The game flipped over, like a platter in a jukebox. Every Michigan man suddenly looked larger than the Michelin man. Every UCLA uniform shrunk. No Bruin made a basket in the game’s final 2:46, nor in the five-minute overtime.

Still, when all appeared lost, there was Shon Tarver, targeting three clutch free throws, and Rodney Zimmerman, tying the score in the desperate final minute, and most of all there was Edney, making the steal of the season with seconds to spare, so close to becoming a Bruin immortal that only the slightest indecision did him in.

He could have shot the ball. He could have taken better care of it. But what in the end does it matter? The game will always turn out the same, however long one replays it, however long one tries to forget.