One Shining Moment: 20 years after Tyus Edney saved UCLA's title
Editor's note: This week, Stewart Mandel will be looking back at four "one shining moments" from March Madness history. On Monday, we relived Ali Farokhmanesh's dagger 3 that helped Northern Iowa upset Kansas in 2010.
The game: March 19, 1995. No. 1 seed UCLA fended off eighth-seed Missouri's second-round upset bid and went on to win the national championship.
The play: Down one with 4.8 seconds remaining, Bruins point guard Tyus Edney took an inbounds pass under his own basket and dashed and weaved the length of the court to put up a swooping game-winning floater as the buzzer sounded.
The aftermath: Derek Grimm estimates he played in nearly 700 basketball games during a roughly decade-long professional career. But every March, the 6-foot-9 former Missouri center appears frozen in time at age 20, his long arms reaching up just short of the ball as it leaves Edney's hand in one of the most enduring highlights in NCAA tourney history. A matter of inches may have made the difference between which player and team ultimately became immortalized.
Today, Grimm enjoys relative anonymity, running an embroidery shop with his wife in their hometown of Morton, Illinois, though as a 6-9 former basketball star in a town of less than 17,000, "most of them know that I was in that UCLA game and Tyus shot it over me," Grimm said. "But it doesn't come up often with the local folks."
Edney became an instant UCLA hero whose legacy owes in large part to the fact he and the Bruins wound up completing what remains UCLA's most recent championship run. And after a 15-year professional career that began in the NBA (with the Sacramento Kings) and ended in Poland, Edney returned to the campus that adores him. Since 2010 he's served as the Bruins' director of basketball operations, first under Ben Howland and now Steve Alford. His duties are mostly administrative, though he often serves as a mentor to UCLA's players. He doesn't need to tell them about The Shot; they usually know before they arrive.
Meanwhile, random UCLA fans approach him "about once or twice a week" to relive the play. He says it never gets old.
"I love hearing peoples' stories, peoples' faces," he says. "I've heard some good stories, people yelling so loud and waking up their kids, or destroying some of their property."
Grimm's random encounters aren't nearly as frequent — or wistful.
"Usually only my buddies bring it up, just to razz me about it," he said. "No one [else] remembers who Tyus shot over. I guess some people do; you're calling me. And Missouri fans do, that's for sure."
In 2008, Coca-Cola incorporated Edney's shot into a March Madness commercial for Coke Zero. Grimm remembers getting a call asking for permission to use his rights. "I didn't mind," he said. "I got a small check." He seems at peace with being on the wrong end of a One Shining Moment.
"If he misses it, or I block it, no one would have known it would go in. We have an opportunity to rewrite history," Grimm said. "That's the beauty of the tournament. You never can tell."
Stewart Mandel is a senior college sports columnist for FOXSports.com. He covered college football and basketball for 15 years at Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on Twitter @slmandel. Send emails and Mailbag questions to Stewart.Mandel@fox.com.
