HENDERSON IGNORES FLU, AIMS TRUE.

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

UCLA forward J.R. Henderson was sweating profusely and his head was spinning and that was 24 hours BEFORE he'd step to the free-throw line for the most important one-and-one of his four-year collegiate career.

Henderson was sick when he went to sleep Thursday and by the time he awoke on Friday his teammates Baron Davis and Rico Hines were weakened by the same strain of flu. It was a bad omen for Henderson, who had also been sick in the game he had come here to forever erase from his memory.

Somehow Henderson was able to ignore the stars he was seeing and focus on the basket well enough to make two free throws with 25 seconds left to give UCLA a lead it wouldn't relinquish in a 65-62 win over an upset-minded Miami Hurricanes team.

``This team's been through too much to have its tallest player sit out because he was sick,'' said Henderson, looking a little green around the gills.

The first half was enough to make any hoops junkie ill. The NCAA hadn't set a place for the Hurricanes at its banquet table since 1960, which might explain why the Miami players looked so much hungrier than the Bruins (23-8) in the early going.

The Hurricanes (18-10) got five of their first six baskets on follows en route to building a 20-10 lead. The Bruins, meantime, who were making their 34th NCAA Tournament appearance, had four baskets in the first 12 minutes.

Two points every three minutes? To be sure, the Bruins had to get out of THAT 2-3 zone and they would as Henderson slowly found his footing.

A period that started with Henderson missing a reverse layup ended with him accounting for 15 of the team's 32 points.

Henderson would wind up with 26 points, six rebounds and three steals - which evened out his three turnovers - as UCLA joined Pac-10 brethren Stanford, Washington and Arizona as first-round survivors.

While the Pac-10 flourished, the Southeastern Conference was floundering. Kentucky's senior guard Allen Edwards admitted he was chasing away nightmares after watching three of the four SEC schools that played on Thursday go down in defeat.

``I had a dream we got upset,'' Edwards said. ``When I woke up and realized it was only a nightmare, I was like whew, I'm glad that was a dream.''

The folks at CBS breathed a little easier after No. 2-seeded Kentucky cruised to an 82-67 win over South Carolina State but their pulses didn't return to their resting rates until Michigan and UCLA won their subsequent games at the Georgia Dome to assure the network's marquee second-round match-up between the Bruins and the Wolverines at approximately 1:56 p.m. on Sunday.

The network that brought us the canned Nagano Olympics was up to its usual contrivances on Friday, proving once again you can't spell CBS without BS. During a television timeout with less than four minutes remaining in the Kentucky-South Carolina State game, a CBS camerawoman turned her lens on the buffo Bulldogs band members and implored them to ``play something funky'' on cue.

They obliged with a rendition of ``Pass the Peas.''

By the day's end, the Bruins would be singing the praises of Henderson, who, unlike Kentucky's Edwards didn't need to close his eyes to raise the curtain on his worst fears.

In the days - months? - leading to this week, Henderson would be staring at the television or sitting quietly among his teammates and all of the sudden he'd have a flashback, of the LSD - Losing Sans Dignity - variety.

Henderson hasn't been able to shake a bad trip from two years ago. In 1996, the Bruins arrived in Indianapolis needing six wins to become only the second team to successfully defend its national title since the John Wooden era ended. They couldn't even muster a single victory, losing their opener to Princeton 43-41, with the Tigers' decisive points coming on a back-door play that left the Bruins fully exposed as mere pretenders to the crown.

Henderson, stripped of his strength by strep throat, attempted two shots and finished with a measly two points.

``I look back on that game and I get real mad,'' he said. ``It wasn't just that we lost but how we lost. On a back-door play.'' His gaze grew vacant, his mind replaying the game even as he stood in another place and time.

``I still think about the Princeton game a lot,'' Henderson said. ``I felt like I let the team down.''

He has carried it since then, appearing in 63 games, 59 of them as a starter. He has scored at least 10 points in 55 of the 63 games and at least 20 in 22 of them. He has eight double-doubles. He has had a great career, but the Princeton loss forever will grate on him unless he can make amends in this tournament.

He drove himself to exhaustion trying to exorcise his demons while simultaneously trying to hold off Miami's 6-7 junior forward Tim James. When Henderson drew a foul with 6:40 left, he barely had enough energy to drag himself to the free-throw line. Needless to say, his attempt clanked off the rim.

Henderson's classmate Toby Bailey tried to bail the team out when Henderson repaired to the bench to look for his lungs. In quick succession he made a 3-pointer, grabbed an offensive rebound for an easy follow and snared a huge defensive rebound on the Hurricanes' bid to tie it at 58.

Bailey was underneath his basket, slipping his heel back into his sneaker, when Miami sophomore Johnny Hemsley made a 3-pointer at the other end to give the Hurricanes a 59-58 lead. But Bailey would be in impeccable position with roughly eight seconds left when Charles Wiseman's potential game-winning 3-pointer bounced off the rim and into Bailey's hands.

So it was the Bruins' three seniors lived to play another game, advancing by a margin as thin as Bailey's fingernail on a night when Henderson was a Q-tip in the eye of the hurricane, somehow surviving the storm.