Game Over 
Rudy Awakening
Last year he preached togetherness and the Houston Rockets responded with an NBA title. But this season Rudy Tomjanovich faces a greater challenge: getting his team to play like champions.
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First as a scout and later as an assistant coach, Rudy Tomjanovich watched the game from his new perspective. He watched Fitch impose a much-needed structure on the Rockets’ two young superstars, the Twin Towers, Ralph Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon. He watched with anticipation as the Twin Towers led Houston to the NBA finals in 1986, then watched with horror as the dynasty-in-the-making collapsed. Rockets guards Mitch Wiggins and Lewis Lloyd had tested positive for cocaine and were banned from the league, Sampson was traded as an unfulfilled promise, rookie Derrick Chievous was discarded as a bust, and Fitch was fired and replaced by Don Chaney. He watched as Chaney’s emphasis on defense slowly took hold of the team, resulting in a 1990-91 record of 52-30, a franchise best. He watched as Chaney was honored as NBA coach of the year, then watched as Chaney was fired the following season after a 26-26 start.
When Rudy T looked around next, he discovered that he was the interim head coach of the Houston Rockets. “The players had always respected Rudy,” says strength coach Robert Barr, “and there was always some mumbling from way back about how they wanted Rudy to be the coach.” But Tomjanovich never held such an ambition. It suited him more to be one of the guys. “All of a sudden,” he remembers, “I’ve got to buy these clothes to look good when I’d rather be in a warm-up suit and be an honest person.” According to Dawson, “He had always played hard but was never a leader as a player.” The prospect of telling a player to sit on the bench was galling to him. Furthermore, Rudy T had always been a shooter first, a rebounder second, and a defensive player somewhere far down the list. “It got to be a joke,” Rudy says. “How could this guy get the players to play defense?”
But the task was thrust upon him. Whether he liked it or not, his performance would inevitably be viewed as an audition. Still, the mission at hand was to finish out the last thirty games. Under Tomjanovich, the Rockets went 11-4 before Olajuwon was injured and the team lost ten of its last fifteen games. General manager Patterson announced that he would take a few weeks before appointing the head coach for the 1992-93 season. Tomjanovich didn’t covet the job, but the success of those first fifteen games before Hakeem went down inspired a familiar roiling in his guts. It always irked him that when he strolled around the city, he’d see Houstonians wearing Chicago Bulls T-shirts. “God,” he thought, “I’ve got to get them proud of our guys.” It also occurred to him that he had no choice but to nominate himself. Dawson would have been the obvious successor but for his high blood pressure. Instead, as Dawson reminded Rudy T, “If you don’t take it, a new guy will come in and we’ll both lose our jobs.”
On May 20, 1992, Patterson promoted Tomjanovich to head coach. Rudy T knew that he was inheriting a talented team but one burdened with underachievers. He served notice that day that he would rule the Rockets with a firm hand. “Everybody knows me as a nice guy,” he said at a press conference, “but I’m meticulous on details, and I’ll enforce them. I’m willing to take whatever drastic measures there are—cutting playing time, fines.”
In June Tomjanovich made his first major decision as a coach by selecting Alabama forward Robert Horry as the eleventh pick of the draft, ahead of several marquee stars. The Summit crowd viewing the selection on closed-circuit monitors booed when Horry’s name was announced. But Tomjanovich had been there before—RUDY WHO?—and his judgment was on target: Horry would prove to be the first wise draft pick by the Rockets since Olajuwon had been selected eight years earlier.
The next savvy move he made was to relocate the team’s preseason training facility to Galveston, where, in an isolated setting, he could promote the kind of togetherness he had come to believe in as an unheralded star. “He made it very clear,” says Olajuwon, “that this isn’t his team, it’s our team. So if you want to go somewhere, you have to sincerely do it together.” In addition to aggressive defense, Tomjanovich emphasized a well-spaced offense in which the in-and-out passing between the center, Olajuwon, and the perimeter players would be accomplished by sliding the latter players toward the ball so that Hakeem could better see his options. “He instilled the players’ belief in his game plan,” says Kenny Smith. “It’s going to take the players to maintain the structure, but they have to believe that the structure is beneficial. And I think our guys believe it.”
What gave the structure credibility was Rudy T’s willingness to let the players modify it. Tomjanovich had seen the fruitlessness of Bill Fitch’s rigidity; Rudy T had also never forgotten how it made him feel when Alex Hannum didn’t deal straight with him during his rookie season. Tomjanovich made a point of talking honestly to his players and letting them talk back. This made him a player’s coach, but he was also a coach’s coach and made Dawson and the other assistants feel indispensable. “If you don’t like coaching under Rudy,” Dawson says, “you will not like coaching.”
The payoff was immediate: Rudy T’s Rockets amassed a franchise-best 55-27 record in the 1992-93 season, won the Midwest Division for the first time in seven years, and advanced to the Western Conference finals before losing to Seattle in a seven-game series. Tomjanovich was voted NBA coach of the year by his peers—a genuine honor with ominous overtones, as his predecessors Del Harris and Don Chaney had been similarly honored and then given the gate the following year. Rudy T wasn’t going down the same road. He scribbled plays and viewed tapes until four in the morning all summer long, showing up at the Rockets office with what looked like saddlebags under his eyes. In the June 1993 draft he used the Rockets’ first-round pick on Sam Cassell of Florida State—another unsung star, like Horry and Tomjanovich, but a fearless point guard who would prove crucial to the Rockets’ championship drive the next year.
The 1993-94 season read like a masterful script from Tomjanovich’s own hand. His Rockets charged out of the gate as disciples of Rudyball and won their first fifteen games, tying an NBA record. He kept Smith his starting point guard as an act of faith but liberally used backup Scotty Brooks while letting the rookie Cassell develop at a reasonable pace. When the rookie was ready, Brooks was removed from the rotation as Rudy T had been in 1981, but the coach let his player know that he knew it wasn’t easy, that he appreciated Scotty’s upbeat attitude. Tomjanovich worked wonders with the mercurial Vernon Maxwell: By the end of the season, Max was an inspirational leader who rode the others about playing tough defense. Rudy T gave the blue-collar substitutes Mario Elie and Carl Herrera significant minutes while keeping the starting lineup constant throughout the season, so as to maintain a sense of individual security.
The Rockets won the Midwest Division with a 58-24 record. They dispatched Portland with little effort, survived two home losses to win a seven-game series against Charles Barkley’s Phoenix Suns, manhandled Utah in five games, and at last prevailed against the muscle-bound Knicks in a seven-game championship series that was as grueling as any ever. Characteristic of Tomjanovich’s career, his crowning accomplishment would be mitigated by critics who called the ‘94 NBA finals an artless seven-round wrestling match. “We were a great team, with all the qualities you need to win,” he says, bristling. “We had speed, finesse, power, an inside game, and an outside game. But it came down that it was going to be a war with New York, and what were our choices? We could beat a racehorse team like Phoenix and then turn around and beat a hand-to-hand-combat team like the Knicks. What they’ve said about our team bothers the hell out of me.” Due respect was still withheld from Rudy T. Even so, he had achieved the ultimate—for himself, his team, and the city of Houston. He was a champion. And for a man at the top, he now realized, there was only one direction available. Now that was something to worry about.
One night last December I sat again at the Los Andes bar until three in the morning, listening to Rudy T talk, in effect, about how the 1994-95 season was going to be the death of him. His team had won that night, and a win is a win, but they weren’t dominating the way champions are supposed to. The fact that the Rockets didn’t look altogether dominant last season either, and yet somehow managed to walk away with rings, wasn’t lost on him, but it provided little comfort.
These nights, he couldn’t sleep. He would knock back a few at Los Andes, hit the Gallant Knight or the Satellite Lounge or one or his other favorite live-music haunts, meet up with his strength coach and buddy Robert Barr, down a few more light beers, and find his way home at about three or four, where he would watch game tapes for another hour or so. He would dream about the Rockets. Then he would roll out of bed at nine, get his hair wet, put on his warm-up suit, say hello and good-bye to Sophie, and without eating breakfast climb into his Nissan Pathfinder and drive to the Summit or the Houston Baptist University gym, talking on his car phone to Carroll Dawson along the way. At the morning practice he would oversee the shoot-arounds with his familiar baggy eyes, but otherwise he would seem rested, even placid. The sound of a dozen bouncing basketballs seemed to be a tonic to him. This was his home, this blur of muscles, this cacophony of squeaking shoes and swishing nets. And Rudy T had made it back here, safe and sound.
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