BIG SHOTS

“Welcome back, and how about this game? With 3.2 seconds left, top-seeded Duke is on the ropes, leading by only one.

“The Blue Devils are going to want to put a big man on the passer on this inbounds play. . . .

“But I’ve got to think the ball is going to YOUR NAME HERE for the shot. He might be only four for 11 today, but he has been the man for this team all season. . . .

“Here we go, the ball is in. YOUR NAME HERE catches it, fumbles. . . . The shot is up, it’s off-balance, Chris Carrawell may have gotten a piece of it. . . and it’s good! It’s good! “YOUR NAME HERE has done it!!!

This is the universal hoop dream.

What kid ever bounced a basketball and didn’t imagine it?

“I had a basketball hoop made out of wood and clothes hangers in my room, and every night I’d count down, ‘Five, four, three, two, one!’ and put the shot up,” said Keith Smart, whose jump shot with five seconds left in the 1987 championship game gave Indiana the NCAA title.

He wasn’t the only one.

“I would say, ‘Laettner’s got the ball on the wing. Three, two, one!’ ” Christian Laettner said.

Twice in three years, he made last-second shots in overtime to send Duke to the Final Four.

Lorenzo Charles? He slammed home Dereck Whittenburg’s airball for North Carolina State in 1983 against Houston.

“When I was growing up, you’d shoot and shout out somebody’s name,” Charles said. “Julius Erving scores! Kareem scores! Moses Malone!”

Michael Jordan made 26 game-winning shots in his NBA career before he retired, going out with a jump shot over Utah’s Bryon Russell in the 1998 finals for his sixth NBA title.

But Jordan’s legend was born in 1982 when he was a skinny freshman for North Carolina who still wore Converse All-Stars, rising up with 17 seconds left to make a jump shot and give the Tar Heels a national championship--even if it took an assist from Georgetown’s Fred Brown moments later.

That is the essence of the NCAA tournament.

It takes 63 games to whittle 64 teams to one champion, and everyone waits for that captivating moment--a split-second reversal of fortune when agony turns to ecstasy, disaster is averted, or time is stopped dead in its tracks.

“At basketball camps, I always ask, ‘How many of you have ever thought about making the last shot to win a championship?’ ” Smart said.

“Every hand goes up.”

* BOB HEATON, 1979 Midwest regional final; Indiana State 73, Arkansas 71--If not for a 43-year-old insurance agent who lives in Terre Haute, Ind., the Magic-Bird game might never have happened.

If Bob Heaton hadn’t bounced in a left-handed prayer from 10 feet in the final seconds against Arkansas in the regional final--well, think about it.

He did, and Indiana State made it to the Final Four, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson met for the 1979 title, and the seamless rivalry that transformed both the NCAA tournament and the moribund NBA was underway.

Johnson’s Michigan State team beat Bird’s team for the title, and NBC earned a 24.1 rating--still a record for the title game.

Three years later, CBS replaced NBC and the rights fees tripled to $48 million for three years.

The numbers have grown exponentially since: CBS soon will pay $6 billion for 11 years.

Heaton, a reserve, made an even more spectacular shot earlier in the season at New Mexico State, a 55-footer that forced overtime and helped Indiana State stay unbeaten.

It was halfcourt shots all around at the next practice.

“I threw up an airball,” Heaton said. “The last one to shoot was Larry. He hit it and turned around to me and said, ‘There’s nothing to hitting a long shot.’

“I said, ‘Yeah, but you’ve got to do it when the pressure’s on.’ ”

* HERB WILKINSON, 1944 NCAA championship game; Utah 42, Dartmouth 40 (OT)--This wasn’t always a CBS production.

In 1944, Utah freshman Herb Wilkinson made a shot from beyond the top of the key with a few seconds left in overtime to win the championship.

“There was no television,” said Arnie Ferrin, 74, a freshman on that team who went on to become athletic director at Utah and was chairman of the NCAA selection committee in 1988.

“If we wanted to see the game, we had to wait a week or so and go to the movie theater when the newsreel came out.”

Ferrin figures the Centre Theatre in Salt Lake City was where he finally saw Wilkinson’s shot again.

“I remember vividly how exciting it was,” Ferrin said. “I might have gone two or three times to watch it, and I don’t even remember what the movie was.

“Today, you might see a shot like that 100 times in one weekend.”

* U.S. REED, 1981 second round; Arkansas 74, Louisville 73--There’s something about half-court heaves.

Grown-ups line up to try them. People win cash and cars for making them.

In 1981, U.S. Reed made a half-court shot for Arkansas to fell defending national champion Louisville.

“The funny thing was, before the game, I was trying long shots, 35 feet maybe, and guys were saying, ‘What are you doing?’ ” said Reed, 40, an assistant women’s coach at Arkansas Little Rock.

“I told them, ‘You never know when you might have to make one.’ . . .

“They called it a prayer. It was a prayer that was answered.

“I went up to shoot, and it was like everything slowed down. Like it’s not you anymore. Like instant replay. Then it goes in, and everything starts going faster than normal.

“It’s that zone, and the only people who know about it are the people who have been there.”

* TYUS EDNEY, 1995 second round; UCLA 75, Missouri 74--Sometimes a last-second shot wins a championship.

Sometimes it simply lets the eventual winner survive.

If not for Tyus Edney’s dizzying dash the length of the court in the final 4.8 seconds against Missouri in the second round in 1995, UCLA might have only 10 national titles.

If not for Richard Washington’s seven-foot jump shot with three seconds left in overtime against Louisville in the 1975 NCAA semifinals, it might be nine.

In 1995, Missouri’s Julian Winfield scored to give Missouri a one-point lead over No. 1-ranked UCLA with less than five seconds left. UCLA called time.

“We headed back to our bench, and we didn’t feel like we could lose,” said Cameron Dollar, now an assistant to Lorenzo Romar at Saint Louis. “You knew Tyus was going to make something happen.”

Jim Harrick, now at Georgia, calls it “a defining moment of my coaching career,” and it needed to be: A second-round loss would have been disastrous.

“Five guys turn and rivet 10 eyes on me as they’re coming to the bench,” Harrick said. “One of my assistants says, ‘We’ve got to throw the long pass.’ I said, ‘Be quiet, I know what I’m doing.’ ”

He had seen Jerry West go the length of the court in only seconds for the Lakers, and he had seen his players do it time and again in the Bruins’ six-second drill.

“Tyus, take it the length of the floor. They will not foul you,” Harrick said. “I walked him to halfcourt and said, ‘Tyus, I want you to understand clearly: I want you to shoot the ball.’ ”

Edney--now starring in Italy for Benetton--took the inbounds pass on the run from Dollar, dashed to midcourt, made a left-handed behind-the-back move and darted through the defense for a four-foot bank shot at the buzzer.

“Guys have cut Tyus off many times,” said Dollar, who beat Iowa State in overtime in 1997 with an end-to-end drive of his own. “Tyus always victimizes them with that behind-the-back move.”

* CHARLOTTE SMITH, 1994 NCAA championship game; North Carolina 60, Louisiana Tech 59--”I thought it was over,” Charlotte Smith said.

Only seven-tenths of a second left, down by two against Louisiana Tech in the 1994 title game.

“Coach [Sylvia] Hatchell was all cool and said, ‘You better believe we can win this game,’ ” Smith said. “I was, ‘OK, who’s going to take the shot?’

“It was a shock to me to hear her say I was going to take the shot.”

Smith--eight for 31 from three-point range that season--set a screen and found herself wide open for the inbounds pass, launching the shot right in front of the bench.

The buzzer sounded with the ball near the top of its arc.

“I closed my eyes, then everybody rushed me, and I was, like, ‘OK, we must have won,’ ” said Smith, 26, who plays for the WNBA’s Charlotte Sting in the summer and in Italy in the winter for Delta Alessandria, near Milan.

Smith’s shot spurred new interest in the women’s tournament, but it isn’t lost on her how much it might have meant if it had happened in, say, 1997, as the American Basketball League and WNBA were trying to outbid each other for players.

Bruce Levy, a prominent WNBA agent, puts it in black and white--or rather, green:

“It would have been worth hundreds of thousands, without a doubt.”

Smith settled for a message from Jordan.

“He called the basketball office at Carolina and said to tell me it was a great shot and congrats,” Smith said.

“I said, ‘Coach, why didn’t you give him the number to my dorm room?!’ That would have been great.”

* VIC ROUSE, 1963 NCAA championship game; Chicago Loyola 60, Cincinnati 58 (OT)-- In 1966, Texas Western became the first team to win the NCAA title with five black starters, defeating a Kentucky team that had become a symbol of racism.

What Loyola did in 1963 with four black starters is often under-recognized.

With three blacks starting for Cincinnati--the two-time defending champion--the game marked the first time a majority of African American players participated in the title game.

Down by 15 in the second half, the Ramblers needed a 12-foot jump shot by Jerry Harkness with four seconds left to force overtime.

Harkness--who still does television commentary on Loyola games--was supposed to take the last shot in overtime too, but something didn’t feel right, and he passed to Les Hunter.

“His shot went long, and Rouse went up and put it back in, with no time left,” Harkness said.

Rouse died late last year at 56.

“All this stuff came to my mind at the funeral,” said Harkness, 59. “He had all these advanced degrees, but as a boy, he had rickets. He was not supposed to walk, had malnutrition. Even when he played, he broke his nose two or three times. One time he went to a party and got stabbed. He went through everything, this guy, and he fought so hard.”

Loyola’s opponent in the regional semifinal had been Mississippi State--notorious for turning down three previous NCAA bids because the school would not play against blacks.

In 1963, Coach Babe McCarthy and the university administration decided Mississippi State would play despite the opposition of Gov. Ross Barnett.

“Going into the tournament, we were getting hate letters from the Klan, saying you’d better not win, and letters from the black community, saying you’d better not lose,” Harkness said.

Loyola won, 61-51.

“They’ve tried to do movies but it’s not exciting to people,” Harkness said. “A player with rickets, underprivileged players getting a chance to play ball, facing racism? They haven’t been able to sell it. It seems ho-hum to people now.”

* LORENZO CHARLES, 1983 NCAA championship game; North Carolina State 54, Houston 52--In Montevideo, the colonial city that is Uruguay’s capital, the news that Lorenzo Charles turned an airball into a national championship for N.C. State in 1983 caught up to him mostly because of the arrival of premium channels.

“They just got ESPN, HBO and Sports Classics maybe three or four years ago, and everyone watches them because they’re relatively new,” said Charles, 36, who played for Montevideo’s Nacional club during the August-February South American season.

Like English-speakers who can’t distinguish between a common Spanish name and a distinctive one, many of his Spanish-speaking friends didn’t recognize that there was only one Lorenzo Charles.

“One of our managers, he was watching the game, and throughout the game, he was sitting there thinking, ‘We’ve got a guy on our team named Lorenzo Charles too.’

“It wasn’t until the end when there was a close-up of me that he realized I was the same guy,” said Charles, whose pro career started with the Atlanta Hawks and has wandered through Italy, Spain, Turkey, Sweden, the Continental Basketball Assn., Uruguay and Argentina.

It would be even more difficult to communicate how enormous an upset it was when Charles--who scored only four points in the game--rose above Houston’s Hakeem Olajuwon to grab Whittenburg’s airball and slam it home just before the buzzer, sending Coach Jim Valvano into that famous frantic search for someone to hug.

The Cougars, nicknamed “Phi Slamma Jamma,” were ranked No. 1 and had won 26 consecutive games.

N.C. State needed double-overtime to beat Pepperdine in the first round.

Whittenburg, 39, the coach at Wagner College in Staten Island, N.Y., insists not a day goes by that he isn’t asked about it.

“I was sitting in the doctor’s office the other day, and I’m thinking, ‘This is going to be the day that’s going to break the string,’ ” he said. “I’m having a conversation with a man, not even about sports, and all of a sudden, out of the blue, he says, ‘What was it? A pass or a shot?’ ”

Whittenburg just laughs.

“Always a pass,” he said.

* DANNY AINGE, 1981 East regional semifinal; Brigham Young 51, Notre Dame 50--Before he became the feisty Boston Celtic so many loved to hate, long before he coached the Phoenix Suns, Danny Ainge lit up the NCAA tournament with his end-to-end drive and buzzer-beating basket for Brigham Young in 1981.

“Probably more than anything else in my career, that still comes up,” said Ainge, 40, who works as a Turner NBA television analyst.

“People remember where they were. They either love me for beating Notre Dame, or hate me for beating Notre Dame.”

Even two NBA titles with the Celtics, Ainge said, never eclipsed his dramatic drive through the Notre Dame team.

“I actually had anticipated some sort of zone or half-court trap,” he said. “But they picked me up full court. As long as I’ve watched basketball, coaches think by picking up full court they’ll make you use up the clock. It actually lets you get up speed.”

Ainge’s son Austin has signed to play at BYU beginning in 2002 after serving a Mormon mission.

Get ready to see that highlight.

“I hope not. It’s been played enough,” Ainge said. “They need to put it to rest and start the new millennium.”

* JAMES FORREST, 1992 second round; Georgia Tech 79, USC 78--There’s another side to every buzzer-beater.

The losing side.

“Every now and then, I see the replay on television and it conjures all the memories,” said George Raveling, the former USC coach. “I actually thought that was the one team I coached that could have gotten to the Final Four.”

Easy to forget, but the 1992 Trojans--with Harold Miner, Duane Cooper and Rodney Chatman--were the No. 2-seeded team in the Midwest Regional.

When top-seeded Kansas was upset, the door was opened.

Georgia Tech freshman James Forrest slammed it shut in the second round, making a three-point basket--his only one of the season--as time expired.

“I could see from the time it left his hand it was going in,” said Cooper, who was guarding Jon Barry on the play and now plays for the CBA’s Yakima Sun Kings.

The dejected team went back to the hotel, but nobody saw Brian Cousins, a 22-year-old graduate assistant coach, who locked himself in his hotel room, not rejoining the team until a few minutes before the flight home the next day.

“When we got back, I went home to my one-room studio in Pacific Palisades and shut the door, turned off the lights and didn’t talk to anybody for two days,” said Cousins, now an assistant at Texas.

“They still show the highlight. Al McGuire, screaming at the top of his lungs. We were eight-tenths of a second from the Sweet 16. That team we had was special. We were always the underdogs, but in our hearts and minds we were always going to win.”

* JARROD WEST, 1998 second round; West Virginia 75, Cincinnati 74--Jarrod West has played in an alphabet soup of leagues--the USBL, the IBA, maybe the new PBL next.

He has been a ThunderLoon, a Bee, and in Japan, an Isuzu Giggacat.

He is a 5-foot-10 point guard who doesn’t want to believe a March day in 1998 was the highlight of his career.

“Every time I go play a different place, people say, ‘I think I remember you. You’re the guy that hit that shot,’ ” said West, who banked in a three-point basket at the buzzer as West Virginia upset Cincinnati in the second round. “Every time I see it, I still get chills.”

Every March, he’s a hero again.

“I remember it like yesterday. There were 7.6 seconds when I finally got the ball.”

He used a screen, forced up a shot, banking it in even though Ruben Patterson got a piece of it.

The next week against Utah, West tried a three-point basket with five seconds left that would have tied it.

“Halfway to the basket, I thought it was going in,” he said.

It didn’t.

* KEITH SMART, 1987 NCAA championship game; Indiana 74, Syracuse 73--Only Indiana’s fifth-leading scorer, Smart scored 12 of the Hoosiers’ final 15 points as Syracuse struggled from the line down the stretch.

With Steve Alford covered on the final play, Smart took the big shot, making a 15-footer with five seconds left to give the Hoosiers the 1987 title.

Jordan sent word: That shot will change your life.

“I thought I was going to be the next Michael Jordan,” laughed Smart, now coach of the CBA’s Fort Wayne Fury.

The next season, after a summer with the U.S. national team and the emotional trauma of a young relative’s death, Smart was burned out.

“We missed Steve Alford and Daryl Thomas,” he said. “And I was trying to live up to everybody’s expectations, like I was supposed to average 20 points.”

Indiana faced Richmond in the first round of the tournament, and was upset, 72-69, after Smart missed the final shot.

“It was ironic,” he said. “One game you win the championship. Another, you miss and it’s over.”

Not long ago, Smart watched a replay of the title game with his 3-year-old son, Andre.

“I have an old jersey, and when they showed the shot he recognized the number and saw it on television and said, ‘Dad, that’s you!’

“Then Brent Musburger said, ‘And Keith Smart is the hero!’ He picked that up and started to say, ‘Keith Smart is the hero!’ That’s when it all came home.”

* BRYCE DREW, 1998 first round; Valparaiso 70, Mississippi 69--The play was called “Pacer.”

Down two with 2.5 seconds to play against Mississippi in 1998, 13th-seeded Valparaiso went to its deadeye shooter, the coach’s son, Bryce Drew.

A long inbounds pass, a touch pass to Drew, the three-point shot. Bull’s-eye.

Tiny Valpo has about 3,500 students, but is no longer unknown. The Crusaders are in the tournament again this season, the fifth year in a row.

The shot Coach Homer Drew called “a miracle” propelled Valpo to the second round and a second upset, this one over Florida State in overtime, before losing to Rhode Island in the Sweet 16.

“That was really the first time we ran that play in a game,” said Drew, 25, a reserve guard for the Houston Rockets. “First time was the charm. In practice, maybe I’d hit it 35-40% of the time.”

A role player now, Drew no longer expects the game-winning play to be drawn up for him.

“I think basketball is a game of ups and downs,” he said. “You can’t dwell on what you did in the past.”

* JEROME WHITEHEAD, 1977 NCAA semifinal; Marquette 51, North Carolina Charlotte 49--Al McGuire had announced his retirement and Marquette was in the Final Four, with a chance to send the coach out a winner.

But make no mistake: It wasn’t just for him.

“It didn’t have to be for him,” said Jerome Whitehead, who scored the winning basket in a wild finish to send Marquette to the final.

“He was a part of it. We’d just bring him along.”

With only seconds left in the semifinal against North Carolina Charlotte and the score tied, Marquette had the ball at the opposite end.

“It was kind of like the play Duke ran when they threw it to Christian Laettner, but it sailed through my hands and Jerome got it,” said Bo Ellis, now the coach at Chicago State.

Whitehead grabbed the loose ball and went up. UNCC’s Cedric Maxwell went up with him.

“I was just trying to get it in the basket, just trying to beat the clock,” said Whitehead, who played 11 NBA seasons and lives in El Cajon.

Two days later, Marquette beat North Carolina for the title, and McGuire left the bench for the final time crying.

* CHRISTIAN LAETTNER, 1992 East regional final; Duke 104, Kentucky 103 (OT)--Some people just have a knack.

Defending national champion Duke was in trouble in overtime against Kentucky in the East regional final, down by one with 2.1 seconds left and the ball at the other end of the court.

Then Laettner won one of the greatest games in tournament history when he caught Grant Hill’s length-of-the-court pass near the free-throw line, turned and made the shot at the buzzer.

Duke went on to become the first team to win consecutive NCAA titles since UCLA.

Two years earlier, Laettner KOd Connecticut to reach the Final Four, making a 14-footer with less than a second left in overtime.

Against Kentucky, Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski told his players in the huddle they were going to win.

“If it’s a tight game, he’s saying it every time, and we believed it every time,” Laettner said. “We lost to Wake Forest earlier in the season on a similar play, and I’m sure he told us we were going to win that game too.”

Against Kentucky, Hill’s pass was perfect.

“I just remember telling myself, if I can catch it good without getting bumped or getting the pass stolen,” Laettner said. “You know they don’t want to foul you because that’s the worst way to lose, with no time on the clock and the other team at the free-throw line. Their only mistake was they didn’t pressure the pass.”

Laettner, now with the Detroit Pistons, hasn’t become a star since he was picked third overall in the 1992 draft--but he has won three or four NBA games at the buzzer.

That knack: He still has it.

“That shot’s brought up every year because of March Madness,” said Laettner, 30. “ESPN loves to show it. It hasn’t gone away yet. I hope it never does.”