THE SPIRIT OF ’95

He answers the phone in a rented room in La Crosse, Wis., where it is cold, where his legs ache from a crowded journey back from Yakima, Wash., and where Ed O’Bannon’s basketball life is beginning again.

He is tired, and a child yelps in the background. There is a chill.

“Cold is probably the least of my worries,” O’Bannon says. “I’m so used to the cold now. Been in the cold for three years.”

He talks generously about the current UCLA team, honestly about himself and his career restart in the Continental Basketball Assn. And when he is asked about his immortal Bruin days, Ed O’Bannon resists quietly, briefly.

But then he floats again, traveling back to 1995, and it’s an easier, warmer journey than back from Yakima.

“That’s something that I remember very vividly, and I smile on it a lot,” O’Bannon says. “Because nowadays it’s pretty much basketball-wise the only thing I have to smile on.”

In 1995, his jump shot was falling and his teammates were selfless, five years of labor had delivered him to the pinnacle as he embodied and emboldened UCLA’s crusade to a national title.

The season never dies, not through two-plus lifeless years in the NBA, not through a horrifying and thankfully brief tenure in France over last Thanksgiving.

But O’Bannon’s basketball wanderings do not seem to diminish what he and Tyus Edney and George Zidek and Charles O’Bannon and Cameron Dollar and Jim Harrick and the rest of that team accomplished.

Because of everything that happened before and after that frozen moment on the Kingdome floor after defeating Arkansas in the title game, because of the power of that moment, when O’Bannon collapsed in relief and joy, he, and 1995, seem only magnified.

“I think all 13 of us and the coaches, we all have that same memory,” O’Bannon says. “We all have that same minute where we were all on the same page, saying the same thing. There was one point in time where our minds were the same.

“No matter who gets let go from their teams in the NBA, or fired from their jobs at UCLA, that’ll always be ours.”

Dollar, the sophomore guard who was thrown into the breach when Edney’s injured wrist sidelined him only two minutes into the title game, evokes and expands on O’Bannon’s memories.

“I remember when Ed got fouled late in the game, and we all somehow met at the free-throw line,” says Dollar, a first-year assistant coach at UC Irvine. “We formed a hard, tight huddle. And it gives me a goose bumps today.

“Ed grabbed me, and then George grabbed us, Charles grabbed us, and then Toby [Bailey] or J.R. [Henderson]. It was all five of us, just locked in. Just us. It ain’t me, it ain’t you, or just those two, those three. . . . Just us.

“That’s what it was all about. The individual stuff kind of fades, tell you the truth. The only thing that lasts, as it should be, is the team.”

‘A Dream World’

The season was not without its troubles--but, with hindsight, given the self-destructing events that followed, it was among UCLA’s calmest seasons. And its most mature.

It began under the cloud of UCLA’s 1994 first-round blowup against Tulsa and the sense that Harrick could not flop in the postseason again and keep his job.

The Bruins raced through the early season undefeated (including a tense victory over Kentucky, sealed by two free throws by Henderson), then fell hard in the first Pacific 10 game, at Oregon, with Harrick drawing an ejection in the final minute.

UCLA steadied itself with the help of major contributions from freshmen Henderson and Bailey and lost only one more time--to California--the rest of the campaign.

“The whole season was kind of like a dream world,” Henderson says. “Just winning all the time, and watching those guys play, mainly. I remember times I was on the bench watching those guys do certain things, and I’m just like, ‘I don’t think I could ever do that.’

“And now in my senior year, I’ve kind of done some of those things, like Ed going berserk one game and having 30 points.”

As the season wore on, Ed O’Bannon put the Bruins on his shoulders, especially in a grinding, five-game, 11-day stretch that included home games against the Arizona schools (both top-25 teams at the time), the Bay Area trip, including the emotional Cal rematch, and playing host to Duke.

O’Bannon averaged 27.8 points in those games, which UCLA swept, and on Feb. 27 gained the No. 1 ranking it never lost.

“I’ve never been around a player that generated as much confidence in his teammates as he did,” says Mark Gottfried, Harrick’s most trusted assistant that season, who, in his third season at Murray State has led the Racers to a second consecutive NCAA appearance. Coincidentally, Gottfried’s first-round opponent is Harrick’s Rhode Island team.

“During that stretch, there was almost a moment of truth in every game where Ed kind of came out of the pack with a three-point play or something. You almost knew he was saying, ‘It’s time to get on my back.’

“That’s when our team really realized we were good enough to make a run at it. During that stretch, Ed O’Bannon was on a completely different level than everybody else.”

Says then-freshman and current senior Kris Johnson: “Regardless of what’s going on with his life, in the NBA or not, he’s still going to be the Ed O’Bannon when I was a freshman and I was looking up to him.”

Maybe, Johnson says, O’Bannon’s fierce battle to be dominant again after the knee injury that almost cost him his career in 1991, spent him emotionally for the NBA.

Maybe to be so good in 1995, O’Bannon had to survive mediocrity in 1996 and ’97.

“Ed was the No. 1 player in the country being recruited,” Johnson says. “Then he sat out 18 months, and he worked so hard to get back up to the national player of the year, the pinnacle, you know, 30 [points] and 17 [rebounds] in the national championship game.

“To make it from that far down, your knee’s torn up, you don’t know what’s going on with your career, your life basically flashing before you, and he made it all the way back.

“Maybe he was just drained emotionally or mentally fatigued. Ed O’Bannon didn’t all of a sudden just lose his game. I think it was something else going on. And I’m not too sure he’s not going to make it back again.”

O’Bannon showed signs early in his New Jersey Nets’ career under then-coach Butch Beard, but lost his confidence and his shooting touch, then was written off--and eventually traded--by new Coach John Calipari in his second season.

When you attain everything as a college senior, the NBA is a cold experience. And maybe he needed some time away.

“That sounds about right,” O’Bannon says. “I’ve really been trying to figure out what the hell happened, quite honestly. I was talking to my parents about this. They said maybe it was good that . . . not good, but at least . . . well, it doesn’t seem like it’s been good now. But I’ve been kind of resting. Because, for me, it was so emotionally and physically hard to get back from my knee injury. . . .

“I was kind of spent. I’m not making excuses for myself, I’m not going to do that. We kind of talked about it as far as why I haven’t been playing well. Because I was a pretty good college player.

“It was a shock--playing well at one point and not even a year later not playing well at all. I’m disappointed how things have gone, but it hasn’t discouraged me from playing and trying to get better.

“I just took a different road.”

Luck and Magic

UCLA’s road to its 11th national title, of course, was not without obstacles, or miracles.

“I don’t think I realized,” Bailey says now, three years older, countless controversies wiser, “how talented that team really was. And not only how much talent, but how kind of lucky that team was. . . .

“That shot that Tyus hit, that was luck. And just some different things that happened that season, that really was magic.”

Yes, that Edney shot. Boise, Idaho. Second round, against Missouri. With 4.8 seconds left. Top-seeded UCLA down by one, inbounding the ball 94 feet from the victory, and there went Edney.

“Jim wanted to get the ball to Tyus,” Gottfried says. “My initial thought was, ‘They’re not going to let him catch it.’ He’s the only guy we have who can go end-to-end in four seconds. Jim kept telling me, ‘He’ll get it, don’t worry, he’ll get it.’ And he got it.”

Edney rerouted the course of Bruin history that day, softly banking in a baby-hook as the buzzer sounded.

“We were dead,” Gottfried says. “And he brought us back to life.”

Says Zidek: “I buy him dinner every time I see him. Just for that. Basically, that was our season.”

Zidek says this with a soft smile in the Denver Nuggets’ locker room after another defeat. Zidek, much like O’Bannon, has bounced around the NBA after he was a No. 1 pick by Charlotte in 1995; he signed a 10-day contract with the Seattle SuperSonics on Monday. Even Edney has changed teams, from Sacramento to Boston, and rarely plays with the Celtics.

“Those guys who are at UCLA right now, they should just treasure every game they play at UCLA,” Zidek says. “Here, you play 90 games. You go from city to city, and players change quite often.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to play with a guy for four years. I don’t think I’ll have a coach that long.”

For those who cared for Harrick and watched his efforts to win the title before the ax fell, the bittersweet part of this is that he won UCLA’s first title since John Wooden, and was fired 19 months later.

“For me, having been there since the first year with Jim and knowing how difficult a task it is to be the coach at UCLA,” Gottfried says, “for him to reach that point was something tremendous.

“I just remember feeling that, ‘Man, you did it. You really did it.’ ”

In the last big scene, after the buzzer sounded in the title game, the band played, confetti dropped from somewhere, and Ed O’Bannon saw into the future.

“We said our prayer at the end of the game, something we had been fighting and clawing to do for the whole season, and I was so relieved and I started crying,” O’Bannon says.

“I was happy, but I think I was more relieved that everything was finally over. And all our critics, whoever doubted us, could shut up--about my knee, about whether we could win the big game, about Coach Harrick winning the big game. . . . Everything was just in the past at that point.”

Those moments, these players, were immortal. In the cold, in La Crosse, on that Pauley Pavilion banner. Immortal.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

FRIDAY’S GAME

UCLA vs. MIAMI

WHERE: Atlanta

TIME: 7:10 p.m.*

TV: Channel 2

*approximate time