Role reversal in second season:
Spoiler:
The 1985-86 Rockets were very much the same team as the year before, except more mature. We had been playing together for a year, and the Twin Towers concepts didn’t have to be learned anymore, just refined. Ralph’s role and mine began to be reversed. Unlike my rookie year, Ralph pulled down more rebounds than I did that season and I out-scored him.
On John Lucas and his drug issues:
Spoiler:
Unfortunately, before the playoffs could begin we lost our point guard. John Lucas tested positive for drugs with seventeen games left in the season and was kicked off the team. Coach Fitch was very tough. Coach Fitch didn’t rely on the NBA to check on his players, he did his own checking. When Coach Fitch found out that Lucas was doing drugs he buried him, he didn’t let Lucas play. The NBA didn’t know, but Coach Fitch Knew. That’s the kind of coach he was. He was a man out of principle and I liked him for that. When the NBA finally found out, Lucas was banned from the league.
We had worked for two years to develop a team where everyone knew his role, where every role was filled, where every teammate knew if he just did what he was responsible for doing we would win. That had given us confidence, and now that confidence was shaken. We would have to adjust, move people from position to position. Robert Reid, bad knee and all, went from forward to point guard. He was 6’8” and playing against all these quick, quick guards and he did not have a point guard’s mentality, but he was the man Coach Fitch picked for the job. It’s not the kind of thing you want to do going into the playoffs.
Facing Kareem alongside Sampson:
Spoiler:
Maybe the Lakers were comfortable. They had beaten us with such easy in game one, maybe they lost some of their edge. I don’t know what it was but we came out in the second game and our team was ready. We were on top of them from the beginning, on the attack. In the first quarter I took the ball in for a powerful dunk—with *authority*. We were all playing with authority. “Block my shot Put your hand there and I will break it!” That kind of authority. Ralph was getting every rebound. The Lakers would attack but they couldn’t penetrate; our guards were pressing up front and Ralph and I challenged every ball that came into the lane. Every shot they took from the outside would miss, and we would snatch it and go down and throw it into the post. They didn’t have an answer for us.
Ralph was with Kareem and I was matched up against Maurice Lucas. Lucas had a great reputation; he was very strong, very physical, he could do everything but jump. He couldn’t guard me, I jumped all over him. Finally the Lakers had to put Kareem on me and I was throwing in the jump hook, the fade-away. Kareem was 7’2”, so I had to use the fade-away.
We worked Kareem on both ends. When he had the ball and beat Ralph, I was over Kareem’s shoulder every time. We were blocking the sky hook! Ralph denied him the middle and when Kareem turned to shoot I would come from the weak side and block him. Not once but *twice*! When I was guarding Kareem, Ralph would do the same thing. Kareem was thirty-nine, I was twenty-three. He had two big guys pushing him, putting hands on him. In the paper the next day Kareem was quoted: “It looked like these guys were dropping from the sky.”
End of G5:
Spoiler:
Game five was tight. We all played well. The Lakers brought in Mitch Kupchak to play me and he was pushing and throwing elbows, and finally in the fourth quarter I retaliated. We had a fight. The referees kicked us both out. I was upset with Kupchak for playing me that way and with myself for getting thrown out of such an important game. I went to the locker room and watched the last few minutes on TV.
With the score tied at 112 and one second to play, Rodney McCray inbounded to Sampson. With Kareem in his face Ralph jumped in the air, caught the ball, and in one motion—there wasn’t time for him to dribble; there wasn’t even time for him to come down—he turned and put up an arcing jump shot that started at about his waist. The whole L.A. Forum seemed to suck in its breath. When the ball came down it was right in the net.
We had beaten the Lakers! No one outside of our own organization had vein us a chance but we beat them four straight games because Coach Fitch had made us believe and had created a system that would win for us. (It is a tribute to the Lakers and their great championship spirit that they set about solving the problems we presented. Ralph and I banged Kareem around all series long and he went home that summer and worked hard in the gym to build up his body. He came back the next year more fit and solid than he had been in ten years and he wouldn’t be moved.) We had played great and kept our focus and optimism and our enthusiasm high and not listened to anyone who said we would fail. We were young, we were the future, and the future was now.
Thoughts on Bird:
Spoiler:
Larry Bird loved the game. He wasn’t graceful but he was smart, he knew his limitations, he worked hard and maximized his talent and stuck to basics, and it worked for him almost every time.
People didn’t see how Larry Bird got things done. I really didn’t know until I played against him. This guy was big. He was *wide* and he would box out and fight for every rebound. Bird used everything he had for that team. He couldn’t jump but he was 6’9” and heavy. He was a forward and many times when I picked off my man and was getting in position for the rebound he would see me coming and box me out before I could get there. He was strong and always pushing and grabbing, and as quick and young as I was I couldn’t get around him.
Back then people were saying he didn’t have any talent; he’s a basketball player but not an athlete. Because Bird made it look so easy by hitting all his open shots and grabbing balls without jumping, people didn’t see how hard he worked. I had played only four games against him in two years in the league, and the Celtics had won all four. It wasn’t until this series that I really understood how good he was, and then I saw what Coach Fitch had been saying about his hard work and I developed an even deeper respect for his game.
G4 and Walton:
Spoiler:
It was a tough series that opened at Boston Garden. When we had played there during the regular season Ralph had taken a hard fall. Someone had undercut him, and ever since he hadn’t had a good game in Boston. We had a chance in the first game but lost it and then got blown out in the second. We came back to Houston and won game three. Game four at the Summit was the turning point.
It was close. At the end of regulation I went for a block and the shooter missed. Bill Walton—who had starred while winning a championship with the Portland Trail Blazers and then gotten injured and now, nine years later, was coming off the bench for the Celtics—got the ball. Walton was a true big man. He didn’t put the ball on the floor, he kept everything up by his chest with his elbows out like railroad ties, just like his coaches had taught him. UCLA coach John Wooden had done a very good job with a very good student; Bill Walton was fundamentally sound. Coach Lewis would have loved him. When our coaches showed us Walton’s form I said, “That’s impossible. How can he do it like that?” I didn’t believe it until I saw him do it myself. With the ball at his chest Walton could snap a pass or go up for a dunk or shoot the jump hook. Bill Walton had the best jump hook in the league that year, that was his strength.
So with a few seconds left Walton faked the shot. I almost went for it but I recovered. Right then I saw there was no way he could shoot over me. I had him. When he went up to shoot I went straight up with him.
But Walton had a very quick release. I touched the ball. *I touched it!* The ball barely glanced off the glass and went in.
That was the backbreaker. A crucial basket, the turning point.
I had him, I knew i had him. I had my legs under me, I was in good position, I went for it, *I touched the ball!* Nine times out of ten I block that shot, but he shot over me.
More drug issues and Sampson's injury in 86-87:
Spoiler:
Things didn’t work out as I’d planned. In the middle of the 1986-87 season our front court, Lewis Lloyd and Mitchell Wiggins, tested positive for drugs and were banned from the league. John Lucas had been banned the year before. Drugs in the NBA were a real problem.
Worse, a little more than a third of the way into the season Ralph Sampson went down.
Ralph was a big man who could play like a guard and he liked to do it. He could dribble the length of the court, he had one-on-one moves that were unusual for a man his size, he was fast and graceful and agile—and fragile. Not soft, just breakable. Ralph was so tall and had such long legs that his knees, which supported his weight and were called upon to do more twisting and turning than they were designed for, were always vulnerable. His knee finally gave way. His injury was a real tragedy.
Ralph had surgery and went directly into physical therapy and rehabilitation but he was never the same after that. His game relied on his quickness and mobility, his ability to change direction in an instant, and with bad knees that was no longer possible. I felt very sad for him. Before the injury he had been under constant pressure to be consistently great. Afterward it was just a constant struggle just to play at all. Maybe because he had performed so effortlessly, Ralph got the reputation of being lazy. But I was there and I saw, from the inside, that he was just the opposite. He stretched, he trained, he would stay after practice and work with weights. People said he was weak and lazy. No. He was a very hard worker. His problem was that his body betrayed him. It never came back.
With Ralph gone for most of the season and our backcourt decimated, we were in trouble. We needed pliers all over the court and we needed someone in management to look forward and begin putting together the Rockets of the future. Only six months before, the future had looked bright. Now it was clouded with questions.
On Sampson being traded (87-88):
Spoiler:
Nineteen games into the 1987-88 season the Rockets traded Ralph Sampson. We could almost see it coming. Ralph’s knee was not perfect and when games got to crunch time Coach Fitch beta playing Jim Petersen in his place.
Ralph and guard Steve Harris were traded to the Golden State Warriors for center Joe Barry Carroll, guard Eric “Sleepy” Floyd, and cash.
The Rockets’ organization didn’t do it gracefully. We had just come back from a road game in Chicago when an older gentleman from the front office came to the airport and told Coach Fitch. They didn’t show Ralph the courtesy of telling him in private. He had been the Rookie of the Year, the All-Star Game MVP, an All-NBA performer for the team, and they gave him no respect. Rather than doing it in a proper setting where he could react to this upsetting news privately, they pulled Ralph aside in the airport lounge where everyone could see and told him he had been traded. I thought that was very cold.
Ralph’s whole career was undermined by expectations that he shouldn’t have had to live up to. Ralph was even more fragile after knee surgery; he certainly wasn’t going to go inside and bang with the power forwards and he had lost some of the mobility that made him such an unusually quick and gaveled big man. And still people wanted him to perform miracles. He should never have been asked to be a post-up center; he wasn’t built for it. He and I complemented each other, and even though we didn’t have a close personal relationship I enjoyed playing with him and we played well together. People who had been on his case from the beginning—media and some fans—called him lazy, didn’t appreciate the things Ralph could do, and instead wanted him to do things he couldn’t. He left Houston without people truly understanding what a good player they had been seeing.
Hakeem and Fitch's firing:
Spoiler:
There were rumors that I got Coach Fitch fired, but I liked Coach Fitch, and Coach Fitch knew I liked him; we had a good relationship and I liked his system. Coach Fitch thought of the team first, himself second. You could have a one-on-one confrontation with the coach and that was okay, he didn’t care if you or anyone else liked him. But if you did something that hurt the team he would take you apart. His discipline was firm but he let you know in the beginning that he expected to be obeyed. Just do your job and you had no problem. There were no surprises with Coach Fitch. I thought his values were very strong.
Coach Fitch knew I liked him. At the end of our playoffs he came up and told me, “I’m proud of you. And I deserve a lot of the credit.” He did! He is a proud man and he helped me tremendously by drilling into my mind the work ethic necessary for me to establish myself in the league. I had come in as a number-one draft choice, the first pick in the draft; another coach might have let me coach or might have settled for less than my best. That would have been a disaster; if a new player learns he can do just enough to get by he will never achieve the full power of his potential. That was not going to happen with Coach Fitch, he was going to wring every last drop of ability out of me. I will always appreciate him for that.
Thoughts on Chaney as coach in 89-90:
Spoiler:
Back at the Summit the Rockets had traded Rodney McCray and my friend Jim Petersen for rebounding forward Otis Thorpe, and had hired Don Chaney as coach. This was a big change.
Everybody had been complaining about Bill Fitch’s system and they wanted to bring in somebody who was just the opposite. Don Chaney was the other side of Bill Fitch. Don Chaney was a nice guy. Nice guys, as they say, finish last.
Don Chaney had been a guard on Coach Lewis’s great University of Houston teams of the late sixties. He came in and tried to please everybody. It didn’t work. He just couldn’t take charge and make the men do what we were supposed to do. Where it would cost someone money if he so much as dribbled the ball after Coach Fitch blew the whistle, the guys tested Chaney and he didn’t stand up to them. We went from strict to loose, we lost our discipline. Coach Chaney didn’t like confrontation and the guys knew it. From January 1 to the end of the season we played .500 ball. We came in second in the Midwest but were seeded fifth in the Western Conference playoffs and were eliminated in the first round by the Seattle Supersonics. I was disappointed but I wasn’t surprised.
There's a nice big section he wrote on MJ, but I don't have enough time to type it now (it's like 5-6 pages I think). 90salldecade posted a lot of good stuff already, and said he'd post about Hakeem's thoughts on Shaq and Ewing later:
90sAllDecade wrote:When I have time I’ll post more about his strategy against Ewing and Shaq. You can read his book he explains it all.
(if he has the time, maybe he can grab something about Robinson, though it's up to him.
).There's actually a good quote section about Hakeem training during the summer of 92, if I have a chance I'll try and type it before the deadline for the runoff tomorrow.
