“…Like the 1994 finals.” It is usually a recurring tagline as a metaphor for steel playoff series, ugly games, low scores and attrition battles that do not usually have the blessing of the majority public. The 1994 NBA Finals were ugly. It was arid, swampy, unbreathable and damned hard. The blows echoed through the television and you went to bed sore, with a strange feeling of apprehension after seven battles of barbed wire and trenches that finally made the Houston Rockets champions. It was ugly and it was hard, almost a tribute to the working class; a soundtrack of gray skylines and post-industrial hermeticism. Each inch of terrain that was conquered required an effort that left you in the chassis. A rude awakening, something much more similar to real life than almost everything that had happened in the NBA in the previous three decades. It was hard but (again: life) full of meaning. Damn hard but unforgettable.
Michael Jordan had just gone to play baseball after winning three rings in a row and a labyrinthine question arose in the NBA. The Houston Rockets and New York Knicks played, in fact, only the second final since 1979 in which Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and/or Michael Jordan were not present. Added to the lack of megastar dust that glued the most casual audience to television was the collision of two hypermuscled and fearsome defenses orchestrated by Pat Riley and Rudy Tomjanovich. The result was a television audience that fell a dramatic 30% compared to the six fights between Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley that shaped the 1993 final. A rating of 17.2 marked a point of depression corrected by Jordan’s return (29 reached the 1998 final) and before another dark decade that was later lifted by the return of the Celtics-Lakers and the reunion of the Miami Heat big-three. That cursed final was hit by another mortar blow that ended up dislocating it.
New York was experiencing a moment of absolute sporting upheaval with the Rangers on the verge of winning the Stanley Cup and the Knicks in search of their first ring since 1973. Madison Square Garden was the epicenter of a city that could not even sleep and that barely learned that, on June 12, OJ Simpson’s ex-wife was found dead along with her friend Ronald Goldman. Days later, the Knicks and Rockets played in the Big Apple the fifth game of a series that was 2-2, already immersed in a climate of arms tension. In the middle of the third quarter, and with the Knicks 59-53, NBC cut the broadcast to show how OJ Simpson was driving down Interstate 405 in a white Ford Bronco with the entire Los Angeles police behind him. He barely reconnected with the party in what the journalists involved later defined as the prehistory of reality shows. David Stern yelled into the phone to get seconds of television presence but it was a lost cause. Only those who were in Madison saw how the Knicks went to a 3-2 that smelled like a ring. The rest of America followed the evolution of a white Ford Bronco.
After that fifth game, Rockets forward Mario Elie was wandering around the hotel, unable to sleep a wink after seeing how his team’s 2-1 had become 2-3, on his way back to Texas. Until he crossed paths in the hallways with the gigantic figure of Hakeem Olajuwon who smiled and told him: “Calm down Mario, we’re going home.” At that moment he knew that they would be champions, a perception that point guard Kenny Smith maintained since Olajuwon received the Regular Season MVP and refused to lift the trophy if all his teammates did not accompany him. From there arose the spirit that knocked down the Knicks for whom every training session at that time was “like a rugby match”, the team that had one of the toughest frontcourts (in the full sense of the term) in history: Patrick Ewing , Charles Oakley, Charles Smith, Anthony Mason… The Rockets turned the final on their own track towards a tremendous 4-3 in a tremendous final in which there was not a single broken game before the last minutes and in which the average difference It was just over 7 points. And the highest, 9. The Knicks in fact averaged 86.9 points compared to the champion’s 86.1, the Rockets who were saved in the sixth game thanks to a play that is already a sacred legend of the playoffs: Hakeem Olajuwon came to the line of three to score the final shot by John Starks and leave the score at 86-84. Starks had brought the Knicks closer to the title with 16 of his 27 points in a sublime last quarter that was only missing that winning shot that went into limbo and that crushed the spirit of the electric point guard until leading him to a nightmare seventh game: 2/ 18 in shots, 0/11 in triples.
The Rockets won that ring and the next (4-0 to the Magic of the still emerging Shaquille O’Neal) and legitimized the number 1 in the draft that they gave to Hakeem Olajuwon in 1984 ahead of Sam Bowie… and Michael Jordan. A year later it was 1 Patrick Ewing. In that final, both defined the subtitle of the story of their wonderful careers. Olajuwon settled the score after the final loss in 1986 against the Celtics. Ewing once again let slip a train from which he was always getting off: the Detroit Bad Boys, Reggie Miller’s Pacers… and those damned Michael Jordan’s Bulls who eliminated them three times in a row from 1991 to 1993. But in 1994 he was one shot away. escape the list of the best to ever win a ring. He shares it with contemporaries like Barkley, Malone and Stockton or Reggie Miller…. Almost always and almost all, victims of Michael Jordan.
So in 1994 a ring was defined but also a legacy. Two of the best centers in history, number 1 draft picks embracing the American dream (Nigerian Olajuwon and Jamaican Ewing). Two warriors who were drained in a final in which Olajuwon almost always ruled, scored more than his closest enemy in the seven games and reduced to ashes the historic defensive performance of an Ewing who broke the records for total blocks (30) and in a match (8) of a final. Olajuwon, the only player to reach 30 points in the entire tie, finished with averages of 26.9 points, 9.1 rebounds, 3.9 blocks, 3.6 assists and 50% shooting from the field. Ewing was at 18.9+12.4+4.3 blocks and 36% shooting. Huge numbers in a final in which each point was an ordeal and in which the defeated team did not reach 40% in field goals in four of the seven games. In the seventh game, Olajuwon finished with 25 points, 10 rebounds, 7 assists and 3 blocks. Ewing was 17+10, with two blocks… and 5 turnovers.
In the end, the home court factor that Houston had scratched by winning the direct duels of the season decided: 58-24 to the Knicks’ 57-25. On the way to the final, Riley’s team had to play seven games against the Bulls without Jordan and against the Pacers. The Rockets, before crushing the Jazz in the Western final, played an incredible series against the Suns: 4-3 after losing the first two games on their court. They left an 18-point lead in the first and 20 in the second until the patience of the Houston Chronicle was exhausted, which headlined after the second game with a gigantic “Choke City.” But the Houston Rockets won and the NBA ended up nodding in silence, pained, to the hug in which Olajuwon and Ewing melted, still on the court and just after the seventh game. Literally drained.
Later they both entered the Hall of Fame together (2008), in a ceremony after which Olajuwon said he looked at Ewing and kept wondering how the hell he managed to score over such a human mountain. Fourteen years had passed since their duel in the forgotten final and 24 since they met in the NCAA final. That time Ewing won and Georgetown won with Reggie Williams as MVP. Before, Houston, with Olajuwon, had lost the 1983 final and Ewing later lost the 1985 final. And both lost in 1982 against Jordan’s hammer North Carolina: Olajuwon in the semifinals, Ewing in the final. From 84 to 94, both giants helped redefine an ultra-physical and confusing NBA, with Michael Jordan’s government as the only identity after the Magic-Bird era.
So the 1994 game was the final of Cassell’s triple that rescued the Rockets in the third game that went eight minutes without scoring (that’s what that final was like), that of Starks’ explosion and implosion in a single quarter, that of Ewing’s 8 blocks… but especially Hakeem Olajuwon’s. The Dream, one of the best centers in the history of basketball. And for that alone, and for his final embrace with Patrick Ewing, it is worth rescuing her from oblivion. Because that hug sums up everything that basketball is and everything that sport should be.
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2024-04-11 15:07:53
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