Shine Wore Off, but He Wasn’t Lost in Moment

One shining moment.

When the UCLA basketball players step onto Hoosier hardwood tonight to decide the national championship, they will be engulfed in the echoes of a mantra they have heard since their first dribble.

One shining moment.

It’s the NCAA tournament song, the March Madness promise, the soundtrack of prep stars and playground dreamers alike.

The Bruins believe part of it. But they won’t believe all of it.

The stage will be so bright, the action so quick, they will believe the “shining moment” part.

But being kids and feeling immortal, they won’t believe the “one” part.

The most important part.

“They’ll think they’ll have many moments like this,” Ed O’Bannon says with a sigh. “They think this will go on forever.”

The 6-foot-8 car salesman will be sitting in the RCA Dome tonight as a living reminder that it won’t.

“They need to savor every second out there,” O’Bannon says. “Because when it goes, it goes fast.”

The last time O’Bannon attended one of these, he was the star.

The last time UCLA played in one of these, he was their Afflalo and Farmar combined.

It was 1995, in Seattle, in the title bout against Arkansas, and clear your head of today’s college basketball mediocrity to check this out:

In the biggest game of his life, in the final game of his senior season, O’Bannon scored 30 points and grabbed 17 rebounds.

That’s Adam Morrison and J.J. Redick squared.

“You are so focused you don’t realize what you are doing, you are just doing it,” he remembers. “It’s like, the rest of the world doesn’t matter.”

And then, it does.

For the Final Four MVP and national player of the year, the shine was never again so bright.

He was a first-round draft choice, ninth overall, who lasted only two years in the NBA.

He was a basketball wanderer who played seven years in five different countries in Europe and South America, from Poland to Spain to despondency.

He retired at age 30 when he realized that the men deciding his fate at an Asian tryout camp didn’t even know who he was.

When it goes, it goes fast.

“I guess I wasn’t as good as I thought I was,” he says.

Turns out, he was even better.

He may not have been a professional success as a basketball player, but he is slam-dunking the part about real life.

Unlike many former stars, he has refused to wallow in the past. Unlike many aging heroes, he is not embarrassed to embrace the future.

O’Bannon has moved to Las Vegas and joined the car business.

Yep, he sells them, on the floor, a guy with no desk and hard shoes, from fallaway jump shots to sweaty handshakes, from two-hour games to 13-hour days.

“I always wanted to make a living as something other than a basketball player,” he says. “I wanted my life to go into another direction.”

Findlay Toyota and Scion, Ed O’Bannon, Sales & Leasing, it’s all on his business card.

“People see me and remember me and I’m proud to tell them -- ‘No, I don’t play. No, I don’t coach. Yes, I sell cars,’ ” O’Bannon says.

From one shining moment to power train warranties.

“The player tonight might be thinking they will play many more games like this in their careers,” O’Bannon says. “I’m here to tell them, they will not.”

*

The chants rose from behind him in the stands, and it surprised Ed O’Bannon.

The name being chanted by UCLA fans during Saturday night’s game was his.

“It started small and then it grew and grew and I’m like, wow, what can I do?” O’Bannon says.

So he did what any self-respecting Bruin would do. He stood, turned and led the fans in an eight-clap cheer.

“I’m honored that they still remember me,” he says.

How could they forget?

O’Bannon led Jim Harrick’s youngsters to UCLA’s first national title in 20 years, since the John Wooden years ended in 1975.

He remembers arriving back in Los Angeles to a hero’s welcome, with fans lining the freeways to cheer them on their ride home from the airport.

“It was like the O.J. chase,” he says.

He remembers “Good Morning America,” “The Tonight Show” and then a movie premiere during which he was stopped on the red carpet and asked to introduce a popular song for a local radio station.

“I’ll never forget thinking, this was the most popular song in the country, and I had never heard of it,” he says. “It was then that I realized, I had no idea what had been going on in the rest of the world.”

Reality struck swiftly.

Lasting only two NBA seasons with New Jersey and Dallas, averaging only 5.0 points and 2.5 rebounds a game, he was deemed one of the biggest draft busts in history.

“It wasn’t injury, it was confidence,” O’Bannon says. “I missed shots, got pulled from games, it affected my defense, and I lost all my confidence.”

He then disappeared into the foreign basketball wilderness, dodging snowballs during one game in Poland, hearing constant boos even during victory in Greece.

By the time he returned home and retired, he and his wife and three children could live only a few more years on his basketball earnings.

So he moved to the cheaper environs of Las Vegas and went to work. And work. And work.

“He’s a guy you would never believe was once a basketball star,” says Rich Abajian, Findlay’s general manager. “He works longer than anyone else. He looks down on nobody. He’s a great asset.”

O’Bannon was not too proud to make one of those zany car commercials, a popular spot in which he and the dealership owner play in a pickup game.

O’Bannon was not too cool to spend two hours helping an elderly woman buy her first car after her husband died.

“I’m at the bottom, and it’s tough,” O’Bannon says. “But it’s a lot tougher to get into the NBA.”

As a sign of his new focus, he purposely displays no basketball memorabilia in his house -- “I am very proud of everything we accomplished, but it has nothing to do with what I do today,” he says.

But the other night, just before flying to this Final Four, he couldn’t help himself.

For the first time in forever, O’Bannon pulled out a game tape of the 1995 championship victory over Arkansas and watched it.

The game lasted a couple of hours. The viewing took nearly twice that long.

“I kept rewinding and rewinding,” he says. “I couldn’t believe that was me. It was like I was watching somebody else.”

He watched the young kid soaring down the lane, leaping along the baseline, hugging and high-fiving and ruling.

“I thought it was going to last forever, I thought I was going to last forever,” he says. “Why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t anybody?”

Now he knows. Now he hopes UCLA knows.

Ed O’Bannon doesn’t think many of today’s Bruins even know his name, but he hopes they can understand his message, and compete against Florida tonight as if they really do understand the music that will accompany them.

It’s about one shining moment, all right.

This one.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.