COLLEGE BASKETBALL / NCAA MEN’S FINAL FOUR : Local Heroes : UCLA’s Stars Grew Up on the Courts of Southern and Central California, and They Haven’t Been Forgotten

The Victoria Park gym in Carson is dark and empty, its windows covered with plywood, its walls with spray paint, its doors with bullet holes.

If only it could talk. Just this weekend. Just this once.

It would shudder, and wheeze, then tell a story about how what is happening in Seattle started right here.

Everybody at that Final Four, talking about those great floor-length passes thrown by UCLA’s Tyus Edney. Little Ty. I taught him to make those passes, you know.

He learned in here that if he didn’t put perfect backspin on the ball, it would bounce away from the teammate and underneath a basket through a door marked “Women.” Barge into enough ladies’ bathrooms, a little boy learns quick.

The makeshift court outside a home in Ladera Heights is abandoned. It has a handmade wooden backboard, the net half torn, the three-point line trapped by a garden hose.

If only this court could talk. It would remind everyone that to understand the nationally celebrated UCLA basketball team, Californians need to look no farther than next door.

Those high, soft jumpers of Toby Bailey? They come from me. All those midnight games out here. If he’s banging the ball off the rim and the roof and the gutters, the neighbors are waking up and the phone is ringing and his father is coming outside in his pajamas to drag him to bed.

The more the ball swishes, the longer he can play. A little boy learns quick.

It only seems they belong to the rest of the world. As UCLA stands two victories from a national championship, the Bruins’ giddy smiles have been purchased by CBS. Understanding of their philosophy is being claimed by thousands. Even their dreams can be shared for the price of a souvenir cap.

But don’t be fooled. With five of their seven core players raised in Southern and Central California, these Bruins belong to us.

They represent not a powerful university, but a collection of playgrounds and back yards from Carson to Bakersfield.

For three other schools, this weekend is a national celebration.

For the Bruins, it is a block party.

In every fancy move of Edney and brothers Ed and Charles O’Bannon, there is a little bit of Victoria Park. All three played in recreation leagues there at the same time while growing up.

While Edney learned to pass, the O’Bannons learned to keep their feet. Because when the Victoria Park gym was full, the boys would play on an adjoining playground with a surface so rough it would shred your skin.

“You learn how to keep your balance here,” current rec-league coach Dwight Lee said, “or you don’t play very long.”

In every long basket by Bailey, there is a little bit of his front-yard court. It housed six players and a boom box nearly every weekend night while Bailey was growing up, making it stand out like a dead tree among the well-manicured front lawns of his exclusive neighborhood.

He learned not only to be deadly accurate there, but also to be as tough as his garage door, where there are still large cracks the size of his shoulder. Talk about crashing the boards.

“A lot of times I’ll see him doing something during a game for UCLA and I’ll think, ‘Hey, that came from our driveway,’ ” said John Bailey, Toby’s father.

And in every ounce of coolness exhibited by J.R. Henderson, there is a little bit of Wilson Park in Bakersfield, where Henderson would walk every day to play with his father and brothers.

You have to be calm when you’ve played at a park where the lights were metered for Daylight Saving Time.

Because for half of the year, in the middle of big games, the court would grow dark for nearly an hour before those lights came on.

“I’d come off and sit down, but J.R. would still play,” recalled his father, Milt. “I’d hear him bang into the pole, or the ball hit a fence, but he never said anything. There in the dark, he just kept shooting.”

From these inauspicious beginnings, a magical run was born. If the Bruins win today and in the national championship game on Monday, it is in these locales that the cheering will linger longest.

Local government officials might find the money to reopen the Victoria Park gym, which has been closed since last June because of problems with a flood and a fire.

John Bailey might not decide to try to grow plants around his wondrous driveway court after all, leaving it intact for the next generation of neighborhood kids.

Wilson Park finally might attract some great young players again, instead of the trash-talking guys in long pants and slippers who had taken over one end of the court on a recent day.

And perhaps somewhere, somebody who could be the next Edney or O’Bannon will start to hope again.

“That’s what this is about,” said Phillip Le, 16, before a recent game at the Victoria Park playground. “It makes everybody feel a little better about themselves, to see somebody from here make it. It makes everybody think they have a shot.”

Le said that nobody who plays the parks these days needs a roster to know who plays on the nation’s top-ranked college basketball team.

“You can tell by what guys say after they take a shot,” Le said. “Guys sometimes shout out the name of a player they are trying to imitate.”

In the rest of the country, those names are usually Jordan or Shaq.

“But lately here, you hear a lot of guys shouting, ‘O’Bannon,’ ” Le said. “And everybody knows.”

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There are only six rows of bleachers in the little gym.

“But some days,” said Issy Washington, a Los Angeles youth league director, “it would sound like the Forum.”

One of those days was when Ed O’Bannon scored at one end of the Victoria Park gym and then raced to the other end to block a fast-break shot.

He was in seventh grade.

“My dad used to call him the Franchise Player,” said Mark Myers, son of the late Jackie Myers, O’Bannon’s youth league coach. “And that was in the fifth grade.”

Another one of those days occurred when Edney dribbled the ball up and down the court, changing hands, behind his back, between cones, and was suddenly surrounded by coaches wanting to get his name.

He was 4.

“And that gym is still not fixed?” asked Hank Edney, Tyus’ father. “What a shame. What a landmark that is.”

At the same time, other landmarks were being formed.

John Bailey was so concerned that his privately schooled son would not acquire the right amount of street smarts that he built his own playground.

He widened the driveway. Tore out trees. Covered the roof in basketball-proof asphalt shingles. Installed a bulb that spread light to the three-point line.

Then he watched Toby and Moose, his youngest son, tear down the rim with dunks and break the windows with no-look passes. So what? So he brought a breakaway rim and inquired about plexiglass.

But at least the neighbors don’t complain.

“We can play until about 1 in the morning,” said Moose, a Loyola High senior. “Because we both had that quiet soft jump shot that Dad taught us.”

Two hours north, another family was playing late, and hard, and for a reason.

Milt Henderson, a former college player, wanted his son to be as unflappable as a Bakersfield heat wave.

So Milt would arrive early at Wilson Park’s full court, grab the rights to the next game against mostly former college players, then enlist J.R. and his two older brothers on his team.

J.R. was 12, his twin brothers were 13.

“And I never let the boys call fouls,” Milt said. “I told them, you have to play through all that.”

Because of the heat, the games wouldn’t start until late. They would never end until the lights went out around midnight.

J.R. would often get whipped, particularly by his older brothers when they split into opposing teams, but his expression never changed.

“That is where a lot of that comes from,” Milt said. “He would whine and whine, and I would say, ‘Shut up and play.’ He learned how to deal with things.”

When the boys grew older, Milt Henderson put 149,000 miles on a van while driving J.R. to games in the Los Angeles area.

Hank Edney wore out a motor home while carting Tyus and teammates to out-of-town tournaments.

John Bailey hired a man to reinforce his gutters before they came crashing down with the ball.

Jackie Myers, who coached the O’Bannons and Edney throughout elementary school, died suddenly of a heart attack in 1987 while driving home one night from the Victoria gym.

Myers was 40. This month, if alive, he would have fulfilled a lifelong ambition.

“All my father wanted to do was to be able to one day sit down in front of the TV set, turn it on, and watch his guys on TV,” Mark Myers said. “That’s all he wanted to do.”

Thousands throughout Southern California will be living that dream for Jackie today, huddling together to watch the kids down the street take on the world. For a day or two, at the very least, there will be no place like home.