I remember 1994 quite clearly: A fledgling cable network called Court TV proffered a weird range of vaguely compelling shards of life, from the lengthy divorce proceedings of Tony Maglica, the man who invented the Maglite flashlight, to the trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who took a 12-gauge shotgun to their parents before taking in a second-tier Bond flick—but there was also some basketball to be watched. At halftime of a playoff game I was watching, Magic Johnson announced that he was retiring from the NBA because he was HIV-positive, and in the process taught half the country the difference between being HIV-positive and having AIDS, but the press conference was interrupted by the bizarre spectacle of what was instantly identified as a “low-speed chase,” with a white Ford Bronco somehow on the freeway, not pulling over, never pulling over, with everybody somehow knowing that OJ Simpson was in the car, that he’d been accused of stabbing his ex-wife and another man to death. It’s all so clear in my memory. The game was squeezed into a tiny rectangle off to the side of the truck chase, and this may have been where it belonged: in a year with so much else going on, maybe it was reasonable for what Robert Lipsyte called “SportsWorld” to be pushed to the side somewhat.
Or, anyway, that would have been reasonable had 1994 actually harbored what my memory just said it did. The Menendez brothers were definitely around, but Magic had in fact retired on the 7th of November, 1991. The Maglica trial began in 1992, and was a palimony suit, not a divorce proceeding. OJ’s ridiculous stunt did ensure that any/all coverage of the Rockets/Knicks Finals would take place firmly within the confines of the Toy Department, but the series was already a bit of an oddity: a championship being contested without that most august personage of the 90s, Michael Jordan, who had, in the aftermath of his father’s murder, and coming off three straight titles, taken his incomparable competitive fervor and complete lack of perspective into the narrower world of minor-league baseball.
Videos by VICE
In the interregnum and its power vacuum strode one of the greatest centers the game has known, Hakeem Olajuwon, bolstered by a coach, Rudy Tomjanovich, blessed with true wisdom. With an awkward, ungainly roster around a uniquely nimble center, Rudy T. simply shrugged and said “Fuck it,” and rolled out an offense consisting of Olajuwon’s undefendable low-post game and four guys standing on the three-point line. Pick your poison: let Hakeem go one-on-one, which would undoubtedly embarrass your center and ruin your night, or send help down low and give up a steady stream of open threes. Houston shot 1,285 three-pointers that year, when the league average was 811. More tellingly, three-point attempts accounted for 19.1% of their total shots, against a league average of 11.7%. Hakeem took home the MVP on the strength of his 27 points, 11.9 rebounds, 3.6 assists, 3.7 blocks, and just over a steal and half a game, assist and steals numbers both otherworldly for a post player of the era. The NBA defenses of the time had just spent half a decade trying to figure out how to stop Jordan, and were thus as monumentally ill-equipped to handle Tomjanovich’s novelty as just about everybody else was to handle Olajuwon in the paint. Except maybe for the New York Knicks.
That year’s Knicks team is best understood as the version of the Rockets you’d get if there was a transporter malfunction. In the place of amiable offensive mastermind Rudy T., you get maniacal defense fetishist Pat Riley. In Patrick Ewing, the Knicks had one of the few centers who could even try to match Olajuwon’s prodigious gifts, with Ewing’s shot-blocking and outside shooting holding him always just on the cusp of total dominance. Otis Thorpe and Charles Oakley could have swapped teams without anybody noticing at all, and Vernon Maxwell was essentially an alternate-universe John Starks who never said “I GOT THIS!” before singlehandedly shooting his team out of a championship. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Hakeem Olajuwon had long cast a shadow across my basketball fandom: the first playoffs I watched in a serious way was in 1986. I had a thick case of puppy love with respect to the Lakers, and I had dutifully internalized and would solemnly deploy—as only a 12-year-old boy can—the notion that Kareem was the greatest, though no longer the best. Head-to-head, Hakeem, then spelling it Akeem so as to not freak out the squares with a spurious unpronounced H, dominated Kareem in a way I’m not sure anybody had ever seen, and taught a very young me an incontrovertible truth about the nature of passing time as it pertains to athletic performance. The Lakers won the first game of the series, and dropped the next four, powered by Akeem’s 31, 11.2, and 4 blocks a night, completely obliterating Kareem’s good-enough-against-literally-anybody-else and unthinkable-for-a-man-of-38 27, 6.8, 2.4.
Olajuwon followed that induction into the ways of disappointment and sadness by dominating the everliving shit out of my Denver Nuggets for the remainder of his career, posting numbers at or above his career averages in a minute and half less per game: i.e., as I can attest, doing in three quarters what it usually took him four to do, and enjoying the fruits of his labors on the bench as the second-stringers finished it all off. He seemed unbeatable to me, and like a center in the truest sense, the place from which everything else devolved.
Pat Riley, of course, was unintimidated. If the Rockets had Hakeem as their sun, he had his own dark star to unleash in Patrick Aloysius Ewing, and a remaining roster at least as good as what the Rockets packed, with a slight advantage at the point. The teams came into Game Five all knotted up and that’s where OJ came in, gun to his head, cellphone in hand. Unlike Riley, Ewing, and the Knicks, he managed to blot out Olajuwon’s flair and remove him from the center of the picture.
The trial’s lurid parody of a rational legal system dominated Court (and the rest of) TV like Akeem had mastered Kareem, and in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating (and others), we were taught what we needed to know about venality, brutality, and incompetence, and reminded that cops like to crack skulls with their Maglites. We all learned what “defense wounds” were, and were shocked—shocked!—to hear what kinds of words LAPD liked to use on the topic of black men. The past two decades have exhibited no shortage of white dudes doubt-free and declaiming re: the guilt of OJ Simpson; outside of Houston and New York, I doubt that many people are still all that exercised about the 1994 Finals. But, with all that 1994 spilled into our lives and into our sports, it’s actually a relief to duck back into the Toy Department and catch back up with the Knicks and Rockets, who that year delivered a final round which embodied nothing more controversial than “the slightly deeper team wins,” and “Pat Riley should have pulled John Starks before he went 2 for 18 in a six-point loss.”
Maybe it’s cowardly to look away from politics and violence and retreat back to the land of low stakes like that. But, after all, I was one of those who was watching the game first, before it got squeezed off the screen by life. I’m not quite sure why my memories of 1994 were so muddled. Maybe it’s just the fog of two decades now gone and a game watched while taken in drink, maybe I had overwritten my memory of Magic’s comeback as a coach during the 1994 season with the more-important fact of his 1991 mainstreaming of a then-marginal (and unbelievably stigmatized) malady. (Try watching 1993’s Philadelphia if you want to see a likeable homophobic protagonist that’s essentially unimaginable today; it took a while to get the boat turned around.) Magic is still the highest-profile HIV-positive person on the planet, a status that, interestingly, does not define him publicly at all. Twenty years on, America’s virulent racism is both more strident and more stridently denied: we’re not surprised anymore when a cop calls a man “nigger” but neither can we just establish, and stop fucking debating, and start dealing with, the obvious fact that George Zimmerman murdered a boy, because he was racist, and got away with it, because so is the country and its justice system. Twenty years on, Lyle and Erik Menendez are still in jail; so is OJ Simpson (unrelated). Pat Riley was back in the Finals, in a series that didn’t look much like mid-90s basketball (thank fucking god). Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing entered the Hall of Fame together a couple years back, 2008, the same year Court TV rebranded as TruTV. The progeny of Court TV—shitty camera work, zero production values, not paying writers, complete distortion of life in favor of tidy narrative and unending conflict—are everywhere, whether you’re watching TV or not.
I still have a Maglite. I keep it by the front door.
