McCoy Bruised, so Battle Goes to Bruisers

UCLA rode strong legs and willing hearts into the final of the NCAA Midwest Regional, then came up one sternum short of a berth in the Final Four on Saturday.

The sternum belonged to Bruin center Jelani McCoy, whose task it was to be, against a top-seeded Minnesota team that brought a 30-3 record into this game mostly on the strength of its strength, to counteract the Gopher goons. At 6 feet 9 1/2 and 240 pounds, McCoy would be about the only answer the Bruins would have when Minnesota sent 6-8, 270-pound Courtney James or 6-9, 275-pound John Thomas to the basket. Lawrence Taylor or Mike Tyson would have been better solutions, but McCoy was pretty much all the Bruins had.

And midway through the first half, they didn’t have him anymore, either.

He went up for a rebound, caught an elbow in the area around his breastbone, doubled over for a second, and soon left the game.

“I knew it was just a matter of time before it happened again,” McCoy said afterward.

It happened the first time last Saturday at Auburn Hills, Mich., in a 96-83 victory over Xavier. He caught an elbow that time, after going on a shot-blocking spree that had sparked his team. He left the game and didn’t return, team officials saying afterward that he had been held out for “precautionary reasons.”

Tony Spino, UCLA trainer, put it in a little better focus here Saturday.

“Nobody made a big deal about it then,” Spino said, “but I do remember one reporter coming up to me and asking if I was concerned, and I said, ‘Yes, very concerned.’ ”

Indeed, Spino was concerned enough to immediately get a protective “flak-jacket” type protector on hand.

“I had it the next day after the Xavier game,” said Spino, who described it as something worn a lot by football players and hockey players for similar injuries.

But although fearing a repeat of the Xavier injury, McCoy apparently didn’t like the feel of the flak jacket, wearing it before Saturday only in warmups for Thursday night’s game here against Iowa State. He also had rejected the idea of an X-ray.

When he got jostled on a rebound Saturday, contact that he said was not a cheap shot of any sort--as opposed to his description of the original injury against Xavier--he was taken to the locker room, where Dr. Gerald Finerman and Spino stretched him out on his back and iced the injured area.

“It hurt to breathe and to stretch my arms out,” McCoy said.

He also said that watching from the bench in the second half while his teammates became road kill for James and Thomas--at one point, the tallest player on the floor for the Bruins was 6-6 Bob Myers--was even more painful.

“It was the worst feeling in my life,” McCoy said.

He tried to get back in there to change something.

“My father [Fred] and I were making the decisions,” McCoy said. “Nobody expected me to play in the second half, but when I saw what was going on out there, with their big guys pushing us around, I said I’d try it.”

With a little more than six minutes left, and the Bruins hanging on for dear life, Spino took McCoy into the hallway, put on the flak jacket, and McCoy went into the game. But he stayed pretty much out of the heavy action in the middle, got no rebounds, no shots and no blocks in a three-minute cameo, and with his ineffectiveness soon apparent to Coach Steve Lavin, McCoy was back on the bench. Overall, he didn’t score in 13 minutes.

All the while, Minnesota’s musclemen continued to throw their bodies at the basket from short range, and when it was over, one statistical category pretty well told it all. In the first half, when McCoy was still a presence, if not a factor, the Gophers outscored the Bruins from the close-in paint area, 18-16. In the second half, it was 33-20.

“They needed me in there,” said McCoy, heart willing but spirit, and sternum, bruised.