Relatively Speaking, Bruins Getting Closer

An interviewer asked of Ed O’Bannon, the UCLA basketball player: “Where in the NBA would you like to play?”

“Oh, close to home,” Ed said. “Lakers, Clippers. . . .”

“Clippers?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Then Ed O’Bannon asked something back.

“Where do YOU want to play?”

The interviewer, Charles O’Bannon, broke up laughing and began to answer.

“Be honest now,” Ed said.

Charles paused a couple of seconds longer, until he made up his mind just how honest to be.

“Wherever the money is,” he said.

And the two brothers laughed and laughed.

*

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a distinguished 19th Century physician and father to the famous jurist, had a brother, John. At a party one day, John was approached by a young boy for an autograph. He had no idea why. John took the boy’s slip of paper and wrote: “ Frere de mon frere .”

(“My brother’s brother.”)

It is better when brothers can stand on equal footing. The O’Bannons do. Theirs are mirror images, Edward Charles and Charles Edward, jersey numbers 31 and 13, clean-shaven scalps and lean, angular frames. Pity both of them are left-handed. It’s the only thing that cracks the mirror.

Doing an interview with one another as a lark, the Bruin Brothers discovered something, the way interviewers often do, something neither had ever articulated. Their growing stature as bookend forwards for college basketball’s team of the hour has enhanced their fame, true. On campus they are truly King Edward and Prince Charles, emperor and heir. Yet everybody by now knows in Westwood that the younger is far more than merely his brother’s brother.

“You know something?” Ed said to a third party, gesturing toward his brother. “He and I are a lot closer now than we ever were before.”

“Really?” Charles asked, eyebrows rising.

“Really,” Ed said.

Theirs is the third brother act to play basketball at UCLA in nearly half a century. Others were John and George Stanich in 1947 and Denny and Kent Miller in ’58. Some kids get sick of the sight of one another and can’t wait to part ways. Others are inseparable. Horace and Harvey Grant played side by side for Clemson. The twins, Tom and Dick VanArsdale, were Purdue teammates. Dean Kelley and his little brother, Al, played for a 1953 Kansas team that lost the national championship game to Indiana by one point.

Ever since making the difficult decision to play at his brother’s side, preferring not to be in his shadow, Charles O’Bannon has been his own man. He turned 20 Wednesday. The night before, he and Ed played exactly the same number of minutes, 38, in UCLA’s impressive victory at Stanford. Then the team traveled to Berkeley, where the Bruin Brothers put on a show, Ed bombing away from the outside, Charles knifing through traffic on the inside. California’s defense never knew which brother to smother.

“It’s All in the Family,” reads a magazine headline taped to Charles’ locker at Pauley Pavilion.

He considers his brother’s words, about their relationship getting stronger. Charles hadn’t really given it much thought since. He says, “I guess he’s right. We didn’t hang when we were young. When you’re a baby brother, the older one’s mostly trying to get as far away from you as possible.”

And now?

“Now, we double-date.”

Ed is considerably older, by nearly 2 1/2 years. He’s around an inch and half taller at 6 feet 8 and has developed into the hottest pro prospect in the West, if not the country, some think, with his play in recent weeks. There are few if any traces of the surgery that was done on his left knee in the fall of 1990. He cuts to the hoop with ease, or stops and pops. The knee works fine. Ed O’Bannon is his old self. His moves are like those of a young Danny Manning, only off the wrong hand.

Or maybe a Bernard King, a trading card of whom is fastened to his locker door.

“How long’s that been there?” Ed is asked.

“Since the knee.”

They have it in common, Manning and King and O’Bannon, limping their way back to where their game used to be.

Ed is there. He is the principal go-to guy in a lineup that has more than one. Recognizing the talent around him, Ed is grateful to be able to lead rather than carry. He refers to Tyus Edney as the team’s best player, effusively praises the younger teammates and says, with conviction: “I don’t want this to be Ed O’Bannon’s team. It’s our team.”

Today, with Duke coming to town, UCLA could very well become the nation’s No. 1 team. UCLA is trying to go where Duke more recently has gone. A color poster of the Seattle Kingdome hangs from the walls of the Pauley locker room, a reminder for one more month of where the NCAA Final Four will be.

“Will this be UCLA’s year?” Charles O’Bannon is asked.

He looks a locker over and says: “It will if my brother and I have anything to say about it.”