Alex Tyus was thisclose to yet another heartbreak at Thompson-Boling Arena.
Tyus, who clanked a potential game winner with five seconds left at Tennessee last year, stood at the foul line with a wide-open shot at redemption: one-and-one free throws, game tied, 42 seconds left.
Tyus choked. Again.
The senior forward clanked the front end, and all of a sudden the Volunteers were poised to steal an SEC win without suspended coach Bruce Pearl. But unlike last year, Tyus had a chance to escape his role as the Gators’ goat.
Maybe a Tennessee player or fan got in his head. Maybe he became his own worst enemy, thinking back to last year’s failure. Maybe it was just the odds — a 75 percent free-throw shooter due for a miss.
Whatever happened at the charity stripe, Tyus did not stop to feel sorry for himself. Instead, he hustled back on defense and came up huge for the Gators, blocking the Vols’ potential game-winning shot inside the paint.
Sure, Kenny Boynton stole the show in overtime, hitting a pair of clutch treys and knocking down two free throws as Florida held on 81-75. But Tyus was equally important, extending Florida’s lead to six on a breakaway dunk and limiting Tennessee’s second leading scorer Tobias Harris to 0-for-2 shooting in the last five minutes.
“I could see when he was walking back after the missed free throw that he was disappointed,” coach Billy Donovan said. “I was really impressed that he kept his head in the game.”
Tyus paced Florida with 18 points and seven boards for the game. And perhaps just as sweet for Gators fans was the victim of his late-game block: Volunteers center Brian Williams, who has never shied away from the role of villain at the O’Dome, often jarring with Rowdy Reptiles in past years.
But, in the big picture, it doesn’t really matter that Tyus stopped Williams — or that he even led the team in scoring Tuesday night. Heck, the final score probably isn’t a huge deal. It’s one win in a season of 30-plus regular season games.
What does matter, however, is how much responsibility Donovan put on his big men to set the tone. Tyus started the game scoring Florida’s first seven points. And in the second half, Tyus and fellow big man Vernon Macklin combined for the team’s first eight.
Perhaps a greater indicator of Tyus’ stability was his ability to bounce back from a terrible performance Saturday against Ole Miss, when he recorded just two points and three rebounds in 27 minutes.
Coming into this game, he said he wasn’t even worried about bouncing back.
“I’m just coming out trying to play with an open mind, figure out where I need to get the ball at and just go from there,” Tyus said. “It’s going to come, I’m just going with the flow.”
And Florida needs that confidence. Recede Wallace cut his dreads, but he kept some swagger.
