An Odd Couple of Bruins : Edney and Zidek, From Different Worlds, Have a Lot in Common

Three years ago, a dorm room hardly seemed big enough for Tyus Edney and George Zidek, players born a world apart and separated by more than a foot in height.

What on earth could Edney, a Long Beach Poly High graduate, say to Zidek, who had experienced a revolution in Czechoslovakia but never had pounded the playgrounds of America?

How well could an American 5-foot-10 burst of point-guard energy and basketball improvisation communicate with a European seven-foot workaholic with a lot to work on?

This is how Edney remembers meeting Zidek, his assigned roommate freshman year:

“I moved into the dorms early, and when George first came, my friend was in the living room, asleep or something, and (fellow Czech Richard) Petruska and George came in the door, and it just scared him,” Edney says, laughing.

“You couldn’t even see to the top of their heads. They just came in and said,” and here Edney’s voice drops to a deep, pseudo-foreign rumble, “ ‘Where’s Tyus?’ They were two big guys.”

Three years later, Edney and Zidek are fast friends, the lead guard and center, two of the second-ranked Bruins’ three senior starters--the other is fifth-year senior Ed O’Bannon--pivotal parts of a team that is hoping its experience can guide it deep into the NCAA tournament.

Though O’Bannon is the team’s emotional leader and most talented player, Edney and Zidek are its calmer, quieter veteran souls.

Three years after their first meeting, after choosing to room together again their sophomore year, Edney and Zidek are bound by camaraderie and an easy friendship that both say began growing almost as soon as they became roommates.

For them, the paths to Bruin basketball significance were vastly different. Edney, though a relatively unheralded recruit, impressed the coaching staff and earned playing time immediately as a freshman and has started since his sophomore year.

Zidek, meanwhile, struggled, playing behind Petruska, who had transferred from Loyola Marymount, and the more experienced Rodney Zimmerman. As recently as the fall of 1993, Coach Jim Harrick said that Zidek, recruited after Cherokee Parks had bolted the area to sign with Duke, wasn’t in his plans.

“It says a lot about both of them, that coming from totally different backgrounds, they became such good friends,” says UCLA assistant coach Mark Gottfried. “I mean totally different.

“They became friends quickly. Both of them have the most gentle spirits. They have no ego, either one of them. They’re very humble.”

Zidek and Edney say that despite the cultural and practical differences of their lives and UCLA careers, they are more alike than different.

“Most people think, I guess, he’d be wild and stuff, but really, he spends a lot of time watching TV or stuff like that,” Zidek says of Edney. “I would say he’s quiet. He doesn’t do many wild things. I think he’s the same way he is on the court. He doesn’t make many turnovers on the court, he doesn’t make many turnovers in life.

“I bet you you would get along with him. He’s a real nice guy.”

In fact, Zidek says it was Edney who played a part in Zidek’s decision not to leave UCLA after his frustrating first two seasons and return to the Czech Republic for good.

Zidek has steadily improved to the point where he has been one of UCLA’s more consistent offensive threats this season, but he almost wasn’t here to enjoy it.

“I just didn’t have much faith that I was going to break through,” he says. “But when things were not going very well for me the first two years, Tyus always encouraged me to stay with it and don’t get frustrated. Just keep working.

“When he talked, he’d tell me to remember that good things take some time.”

Zidek went home, played well on the Czech national team, talked to his father, a coach with the Czech team, and decided to return to school. Even if basketball wasn’t going well, Zidek was having a brilliant academic career at UCLA, majoring in economics.

So when he came back for his junior year, Petruska having graduated, Zidek threw himself into refining his game--grabbing Gottfried or anybody else who would shag balls for him while he shot and shot and shot, in the mornings and after practice.

And during those shooting sessions, Zidek began developing a sweeping hook shot--now a shot virtually impossible to block--that he shoots with each hand.

“In the beginning, I was very frustrated,” Zidek says. “I knew the only way I could get a starting job was by outworking everybody every day.”

Says Gottfried: “George is an example of a guy who just stuck it out, kept working. In George’s junior year, as Rodney was a senior, it was clear that George had emerged.”

Zidek was the starter all of last season and averaged 11 points and seven rebounds.

“One game in the middle of last year, I remember they were double-teaming Zidek,” Harrick says. “And I punched Mark on the bench. I said, ‘Look, they’re double-teaming George!’ We went from a guy who wasn’t even in our plans to someone they had to double team.”

This season, with the Bruins’ half-court offense rotating around him and Ed O’Bannon down low, Zidek is averaging 13.3 points and, most important to UCLA’s tournament future, has made 62.5% of his shots.

He made three of the biggest shots of his career in UCLA’s one-point victory over Kentucky in early December, including a left-handed hook that the Wildcat defense obviously was not expecting.

For a UCLA team that has struggled to get consistent production out of its half-court game, Zidek’s pressure scoring was a revelation.

“Yeah, that was great,” Edney says. “I think every time he gets it down there, he’s going to score. And if he doesn’t, it’s like, ‘Whoa, that’s a surprise.’ He’s really developed his post game to where he’s going to have to be stopped. People are going to have a hard time doing it.”

Says Harrick: “I don’t think (Kentucky) had anybody in the game that could handle George, and I’m not sure George feels anybody can handle him now. We’ve got to look inside and get that guy the ball, because good things happen.”

These days, Zidek breaks up his teammates in the locker room, purposefully mangling American slang with his Czech accent and telling them all, only half joking, that nobody can stop him.

“Everybody knows he’s focused,” Edney says. “But he’s like a comedian sometimes too. People might not think that, but he’s kind of silly. Doing little silly things. You can’t imagine some of the things he does.”

Like making friends with a little guy from Long Beach who was assigned to live with him three years ago?

“Sometimes people’d ask me how it was, and I’d say it was cool,” Edney says. “We just got along well from the start. He’s a funny guy when you get to know him. The more I got to know him, the closer we became.”