SPECIAL REPORT / Final Four / Seattle, 1995 : Freshening Up : After a Slow Start, Bailey and Henderson Became Key Cogs in Bruin Machine

Let a couple of teen-agers born during the Ford administration loose in Pauley Pavilion, and see what happens?

Coaches yelling, seniors screaming, wild dances on the sidelines, basketballs flying toward distant corners of the court. . . .

Would John Wooden, who had quit coaching before these players were born, approve of any of this?

Still, somewhere amid all that falderal, Toby Bailey and J.R. Henderson, young, rangy and productive beyond their coaches’ wildest imaginings, have turned out to be the best UCLA freshman duo at least since Don MacLean and Darrick Martin in 1988-89, and probably longer.

Probably ever, considering that young men named Alcindor, Walton and Goodrich played in the days when freshmen couldn’t.

But don’t quiz the new guys too closely about those ancient times.

“I knew about them winning a lot of championships, but I didn’t really know the exact history or anything,” Henderson said this week. “I didn’t really follow that stuff.

“I didn’t really know the years. I think I knew how many they won, who was the coach.”

Forget, for a moment, Bailey’s explosive 26 points and nine rebounds last Saturday in the West Regional final victory over Connecticut. Ignore Henderson’s stylish 28-point outing at Washington State on Feb. 11. Discount all the bazooka dunks and defensive stands the two have turned in.

Focus, instead, on Bailey’s sheepish smile after he had missed a wild, one-handed alley-oop dunk last week against Mississippi State, or Henderson’s silent shrug after taking a taller man to the basket for a bucket.

What has the class of ’98 really brought to the Bruins’ Final Four run?

“They always say that we add a little, I guess, youthfulness,” Bailey said this week with a giggle. “The older guys, it starts getting boring to them after a while.

“So we add a little excitement. We ask a couple stupid questions every once in a while where they just look at us--’Huh?’

“I guess we just keep the spirit and the fun back in the game.”

In a season judiciously guided by seniors Ed O’Bannon, Tyus Edney and George Zidek, Bailey, Henderson and their rarely played classmates, Kris Johnson and omm’A Givens, have injected spark and spontaneity.

Who can get stale when Henderson is dribbling coast to coast against Arizona State’s press? When Johnson is wrapping a towel around his head in a makeshift desert cowl and slamming chest-first into his benchmates? When Bailey is doing a 360-degree dunk to trigger Pauley pandemonium?

“They bring their youthful spirit,” sophomore guard Cameron Dollar said. “They give people who’ve been here, like maybe Ed, who’s been here five years, he’s like, ‘Aw, man, same old practices. We’ve got to go through all the conference until we get to the tournament. . . .’

“Ed sees a young guy like Toby, who’s just excited to be playing right now. And then he’s like, ‘OK, yeah, all right.’ It’s like a cycle. The youthfulness of basketball and that spirit regenerates itself.”

Henderson and Bailey didn’t think their freshman season would be like this, and for a few months, it wasn’t.

Though both played well in preseason practices, neither had broken into the starting lineup when the season began. Henderson, though, jumped into the spotlight with two free throws that beat Kentucky with six-tenths of a second remaining in the Bruins’ second game. It was a sign of things to come.

Bailey, by then, was pouting, watching Dollar get the starts opposite Edney, and seeing Henderson get major minutes by virtue of his 6-foot-9 frame and versatility. O’Bannon, noticing Bailey wasn’t celebrating the Kentucky victory with his teammates, ordered him to get up and be happy, triggering Bailey’s emotional resurgence, Bailey says.

“It didn’t happen, like, right then,” Bailey said. “But when I started looking back on it a couple weeks after it was over, I was like, ‘Man, that was kind of selfish of me.’ I felt kind of bad about it, so I started changing my attitude.”

After UCLA lost to Oregon in its Pacific 10 opener, Coach Jim Harrick moved Henderson in for Dollar, hoping to take advantage of Henderson’s size. Henderson did fine, but quietly pined to play his more natural position, forward.

Henderson and Bailey, roommates during trips, told each other they thought Bailey was the more natural shooting guard and Henderson would be better coming off the bench.

“He’s not a two-guard, and he knows that, and he didn’t feel comfortable playing the two-guard,” Bailey said. “If we were in the same position, I could see (there being tension). But he’s a 6-9 swing man, a post man.

“He was telling me before I even started starting that he wished that I would start because he felt kind of out of position.”

Against Washington State in mid-January, Henderson was sent down low to exploit the Cougars’ low-post defense, and Harrick began to get the two into the game together more often, Henderson getting significant time as the backup center.

Then at Stanford, on Feb. 21, Bailey was inserted for good as a starting guard, and Henderson, to his relief, was deployed as a backup at all three front-line positions, most successfully teaming with Bailey in Harrick’s “quick” lineup that has consistently ripped apart teams with waves of fast-break baskets.

And in the game that got UCLA into the Final Four for the first time since 1980, it was no coincidence that the two freshmen combined for 44 points.

“I thought in the beginning, if we ever got this far, I don’t think I’d ever be playing this much,” Henderson said. “But it’s turned out the other way. The coach has confidence in me that I can go in there and be a spark for this team. I think that’s a big compliment for me.”

Bailey and Henderson say they have an on-court understanding forged by their time together on the road.

“He keeps me calm sometimes,” Bailey said of Henderson. “I think we are a complement, and I think in the future that’s going to help us out, because I can get a team fired up by doing the things I do, but he can always keep me level-headed.

“We’re the perfect roommates. He’s quiet. He just sits there, watches the TV. It’s surprisingly no controversy at all.”

So, whether or not UCLA realizes its ultimate goal and wins the title, how will this freshman fusillade affect the rest of Bailey and Henderson’s Bruin careers?

“It can do one of two things,” assistant coach Lorenzo Romar said. “On the negative side, they can be satisfied with what we’ve accomplished and ride that out.

“Or, they can look on the other side, like Ed O’Bannon did. Ed O’Bannon was in the final eight when he was a freshman. But Ed, and Tyus, they both looked forward to the time when they were the go-to guys.

“They can look forward to that, and I would think that would motivate and drive them to become the leaders that Ed and Tyus and George were.”

And then some new kids, born during the Reagan administration and ready to do cartwheels on the court, can ask dumb questions and start the whole thing over again.