LOS ANGELES _ Little Hoop was a pain.
Tyus and Russell Edney would lug the thing out of their Long Beach home every time they wanted to play basketball in the driveway, the young brothers hooking the wood backboard and metal rim to the gutter above their garage.
Little Hoop could be dangerous.
The basket occasionally fell, once plunking Tyus on the head and requiring several stitches. There was no telling how many busted lips and sprained ankles the boys sustained.
Little Hoop didn't seem to enhance their game.
The basket stood just a touch over 6 feet off the ground. The rim wasn't regulation size. The boys had to use a miniature ball.
Hank Edney used to come home from work and cringe whenever he saw his sons playing on the thing.
"You guys spend too much time on that Little Hoop," Hank would say, using the nickname they had all given it. "It's going to mess up your form and your shots and everything."
If nothing else, everybody agreed that it forced the boys to get creative, especially little Tyus. He would drive toward the basket, confronted by the flailing arms of a brother two years older and just as many inches taller. Pump-fakes, scoops and hooks all became part of the arsenal of the jitterbug point guard who would go on to star for Long Beach Poly High and UCLA.
He had no choice.
"You had to come up with all these different little shots to get the shot off," Tyus said, "and kind of one of my things that I learned how to do was shooting it around arms."
It was here on this driveway basket, Tyus' torso twisting, his body suspended in midair, his hand releasing the ball just inches above hostile fingertips, that the most iconic shot in UCLA basketball history was born, nurtured and perfected.
"I think I've seen that shot on that Little Hoop," Russell Edney said of a basketball prayer that would be answered 25 years ago this weekend, "about 10 or 15 times."
Kids often mimic their heroes making last-second shots, the scene having played out countless times in backyards, driveways and parks across the country. This was Tyus making his own play, years before he knew what it might become.
