The NBA TV documentary “Clutch City” did something I thought would be impossible. It made me care about the Houston Rockets, specifically the group that won the NBA championship in 1994 and again in 1995.
Wait, let me clarify. You might think from the preceding statement that I had no emotion toward that team, as in “I couldn’t care less,” or “Who cares?”
I assure you that is not the case. I hated that team. For years, I’ve carried intense emotional baggage related to that team, or those two teams if you differentiate between the Otis Thorpe 1994 version and the 1995 Clyde Drexler version.
When we watch sports, we root for “our team,” and we generally know much more about that team and the players than we do the “other team.” What a good sports documentary does — and there are suddenly dozens of them out there, from ESPN’s “30 for 30″ to NFL Films’ “A Football Life” and more — is help you get to know, in a deeply personal way, the individuals and teams you didn’t know about before.
“Clutch City” wasn’t just about the Rockets in those two seasons. There were mini-documentaries about Rudy Tomjanovich and Hakeem Olajuwon within the larger 90-minute commercial broadcast window. If you watched, you learned about the things in each of their lives that gave them the incredible drive to succeed, that ultimately bore fruit when they came together in Houston.
Tomjanovich was very honest in a very public way about his childhood, as a member of a family that received welfare assistance. You could hear the shame in his voice even today. You got to understand what basketball represented for him: a place where good things could happen, although they didn’t always. This is why the documentary had to show Tomjanovich nearly losing his life as a result of being decked on the court by Kermit Washington of the Los Angeles Lakers. That portion of the film neatly underscored the difficulty of Rudy T’s basketball existence, and how he turned it into a positive with the Rockets.
Olajuwon told of being introduced to basketball in his senior year of high school in Lagos, Nigeria, and how just eight months later he was offered a scholarship to the University of Houston. His parents were dumfounded that such a thing was possible just by playing a child’s game. His story continued at UH, with the crushing disappointments of the two NCAA title game losses, and then moved into his NBA career.
By the time the film gets to the point where Tomjanovich is promoted from assistant coach to the head job in the middle of the 1991-’92 season, I was hooked.
I liked these two guys, and respected where they came from. Olajuwon thought about leaving the Rockets after that season, because he was so frustrated with the revolving door of players and coaches, and there were many times when he felt he was the only one on the team that really wanted to win, that everyone else was just happy to be in the NBA.
Hakeem, after a lot of lobbying from Tomjanovich, decided to stay, and the 1993-’94 season was a very good one for the Rockets. They lost in the Western Conference semifinals to Seattle in seven games, and suddenly the future in Houston looked very bright.
I know this review is not supposed to be about me, but I was there, so I’m going to interject myself into the story. In the fall of 1993 I started my first real full-time sportstalk radio show in Phoenix. This was just a couple of months after the Suns went to the Finals and lost to the Bulls, so the place was crazy for the Suns. It was also before they had MLB and NHL teams, and the Cardinals had been there long enough for people to realize that nothing was happening there. It was a Suns town, plain and simple.
I was from the San Francisco Bay Area, so my only experience with the Suns was my beloved Golden State Warriors losing to them in Game 7 of the 1976 West Finals, a crushing disappointment for a 15-year-old who had developed a taste for winning basketball.
So I had to learn to like the Suns, or at least learn enough about them to do a decent radio show. When the 1993-’94 season started, I got a pretty powerful inducement in that direction. I was hired to co-host a postgame show on TV for selected home games. “Okay,” I thought, “I like the Suns now.” When the playoffs rolled around, which everyone assumed would result in another trip to the Finals, my job description on the TV side expanded to sideline reporting. Are you kidding me? Now I LOVE the freaking Suns.
It wasn’t only because that job was so much fun to do, it was about the money. I was getting paid for every TV game roughly what it would take a week of four-hour shows to earn on the radio.
So everything was going great… until the Rockets showed up.
The film tells the story of how they let the Suns win the first two games in Houston, only to somehow take two back in Phoenix. Then they went up 3-2, but the Suns won Game 6 at home to force Game 7. The Rockets had Hakeem and a bunch of guys, but he was not guardable, especially by Charles Barkley, Oliver Miller, Joe Kleine and A.C. Green. They led by 12 after one quarter and coasted to a 10-point win that ended my cool gig and my gravy train a couple of weeks earlier than anticipated. It wasn’t just losing the games and the dough; the Rockets left me with nothing to talk about on my radio show but minor league baseball and whether it was going to hit 120 degrees. Thank God for O.J. Simpson that summer! I was bitter, to say the least.
In 1995, we in Phoenix were going to get even, and it was going to be SWEET! However — and this is where “Clutch City” covers crucial ground as a storytelling vehicle for the Rockets — we didn’t know how Houston was evolving with a new roster.
The Rockets, struggling to defend their title, picked up Clyde Drexler in a midseason trade and somehow got worse, and limped into the playoffs as a sixth seed. We were having so much fun watching the Suns sweep Portland in the first round that we didn’t really notice the Rockets coming back from a 2-1 deficit to beat Utah, taking the deciding Game 5 on the road. (Remember, in the 1990s, first-round series were still best-of-five.) We also didn’t notice Drexler, who had a much more difficult transition to the Rockets from Portland than I had realized until seeing “Clutch City,” scoring 41 in the Game 4 win that kept the Rockets alive against the Jazz.
The second Houston-Phoenix playoff series in as many years started out great for the Suns, which was great for me as well. The Suns rolled to wins in the first two home games by 32 and 24 points. The Rockets were dead — ask anybody! Game 3 was a blip on the radar. What is documented is that Roy Green, former NFL player and friend of Charles Barkley, had accompanied the team on the charter to Houston. What is also documented is that Barkley was 0-10 from the field in Game 3, a game won by Houston. What was widely rumored was that nobody saw Barkley or Green anywhere near the team hotel between the flight landing and the Saturday afternoon tip-off at The Summit, then the Rockets’ home arena. What did they do? Where did they go? Who cares, Suns were still up 2-1, and they pushed that to 3-1 with a come-from-behind 114-110 win in Game 4 behind 43 points from Kevin Johnson.
This is GREAT! Got the Rockets on the ropes, two of the remaining three are at home, and then it’s on to the conference finals, and potentially four more home games/pay days for ol’ JC!
Well, you all know what happened, but until you watch “Clutch City,” you don’t know WHY it happened. With that additional knowledge, it seems obvious that the Rockets went on to win those last three games and the series, overcoming their toughest test on the road to a repeat. They had players who had done it before, and while very few teams repeat, I believe that the experience the Rockets brought into the 1995 playoffs was the primary reason they were able to do it.
Well, that and Hakeem.
There is some unbelievable footage in the film of him doing the “Dream Shake.” David Robinson had the misfortune of receiving the MVP trophy for 1995 prior to West Finals Game 1 against Houston, and Hakeem didn’t take it very well. He set out to show who the MVP was, and Robinson, one of the finest defenders of his time, had no chance.
As soon as I became aware of the existence of this film, I didn’t think I’d even be able to watch it, and to tell you the truth, if I wasn’t writing this review, I might not have. Were that the case, I would have realized that I had it wrong 20 years ago, and the baggage and bitterness I’ve carried against the Rockets all this time represented a waste of time and energy.
The NBA TV documentary franchise, which did such important work in telling the inner stories of the 1992 Dream Team (2012), has established a high standard. NBA TV also aired original documentary films on the 1984 NBA Draft (last year) and the mixture of sadness and success that was Julius Erving’s professional life in “The Doctor” (2013). “Clutch City” upheld that high standard — enough that I could learn to love the 1994 and 1995 Rockets despite my history with the 1990s Phoenix Suns.
*
You know how as sports fans we root, even when we’re watching highlights of a game where we know how it turned out? Well, I’ve always rooted for Mario Ellie’s “Kiss of Death” jumper to miss, or for Dan Majerle’s answer to go in. A funny thing happened while I watched this show. I was rooting for the Rockets against the Suns — my Suns, my paycheck, my memories.
That’s a pretty damn good sports documentary, if you ask me.
