Home Team III: Rockets

My husband, older son Ross, and I are sitting in our tiny tv room in our first house in Houston watching the NBA playoffs. It is either 1994 or 1995, which means that Ross is either three or four years old. The years of Ross’ infancy run together for me, as do the Rockets’ back-to-back championship seasons. In one of those seasons, the O.J. Simpson car chase interrupted the NBA finals, splitting the screen so the game played out on the left side of our tv and the oddly slow journey of the white Bronco through LA highways played out on the right. In one of those seasons, perhaps the same one, Ross learned to add 2 and 3 to two-digit numbers: 2 for a regular basket, 3 for one behind the 3-point arc. The first occurrence is a matter of public record. I google and find out that the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman happened in 1994. This is from an article by Doug Criss, written in June, 2019 for CNN:

June 17, 1994, was supposed to be a big sports night. Viewers around the nation settled in front of their TV screens to watch the New York Knicks take on the Houston Rockets in Game 5 of the NBA Finals. But instead, another sports figure dominated television in an unforgettable way on that night 25 years ago. O.J. Simpson hopped into a white Ford Bronco, rode down a Los Angeles interstate and sparked one of the most-watched events in TV history.

The second temporal dilemma, the second ordering of experience, is harder to pin down. Ross’s newly-forged ability with addition and his Rockets fandom are private landmarks, part of family history, ungooglable. I like to think those thingsemerged in 1994, since this would make Ross’s mathematical skills  even more impressive. But I suspect that he joined us as a numerate fan was 1995, and that Scott and I watched the O.J. Simpson car chase and the accompanying game 5 without much participation from our son. I do know, however, that Ross—and his brother Paul wo regrets not having been alive to enjoy the championship runs—have a clearer understanding than I do of the difference between the two seasons. They could tell me, for example, which year the famous Mother’s Day game against Utah took place, for which the stands were almost empty.* They could tell me, without benefit of Google, which year head coach Rudy Tomjanovich coined the phrase “heart of a Champion,” and which year the phrase “Clutch City” was born.” As lifelong fans and sometimes bloggers for official and unofficial Rockets sites, they recognize the names of Rockets who have for me disappeared into an amalgam of family and sports memories.

The story of my relation to this home team is less conflicted than the ones I offered in the previous posts in this trilogy. This, in spite of, or perhaps, because I like watching basketball less than I like watching baseball or football. The pace of the game can make me anxious, to the point where I cannot listen to games on the car radio for fear of driving off the road at key moments. Since my sons love the game as much or more than they love anything else, it has been, nonetheless, the background rhythm of my life from October to June for the last 27 (or is it only 26?) years. For all of those years, when I walk into my living room at night, there have been tall, beautiful men, running from left to right, and from right to left on my increasingly large tv sets. I read to the swishing of basketball nets, to the voices of Bill Worrell, Calvin Murphy, Matt Bullard, and Julia Morales (the last of whom is also part of Astros broadcasts and seems happier there).

Yes, over the years, there have been some bad guy moments. Yes, in what I believe was 1994, Vernon Maxwell brought guns to the Summit parking lot. Yes, some 20 years and two venues later, James Harden partied at strip clubs, got fat, got sulky, and wanted out of Houston. But Maxwell was suspended quickly from the team for his behavior, and Harden, for whom I still have a not-so-sneaking fondness, eventually left to sulk elsewhere—actually two elsewheres. Mostly, the on-court memories are good—after all the Rockets have more championships (2) than any other Houston men’s professional team— Astros (1), Texans (0)—but more than any other team, perhaps more than any other entity, the Rockets shaped and sustained our family life.

First, I would say the Rockets—and to as lesser extent the other Houston teams—helped to mitigate some of the challenges (and silences) of the boys’ teenage years. If conversation stalled, as it sometimes did, if my younger son seemed not to want to talk, the Rockets offered us an occasion, a lexicon, and a connection. We could talk about player stats, the pick and roll, and spacing. I could be inducted into the intricacies of goaltending (editor’s note: mom understands sports very well, but is unable to get a grasp on this simple rule) and schooled about why step-back jump shots did not constitute a travelling violation.

It is clear to me that the Rockets, their seasons, and their different teams over the years structure my sons’ sense of time and, thus, family memory. I remember quite clearly where I was the night, in a basically insignificant game, Tracy McGrady scored 13 points in 33 seconds, pulling out an astonishing victory. I was in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher, having lost faith in the possibility of a Rockets’ win. Ross, aged 13 (this is an easy calculation for him) was watching TV at the crucial time, having refused to go to bed before the end of the game. After each basket, bringing the score closer and closer, Ross would pop into the kitchen to chide me for giving up too early. He remembers the time (I only know it was way past bedtime), the year, and the score at each point in the comeback. I remember another weary night of cleaning the kitchen island. On less glorious nights, when the Rockets would be eliminated from the playoffs (usually in spectacular collapses), the boys and I would go to IHOP or House of Pies for a midnight feast of bacon, mourning, and autopsy.

The connection to the Rockets also fed into my sons’ accomplishments and sense of their place in the world. Paul has long been a influential member of Rockets Twitter, and was once interviewed on a local sports station about his analysis. He, and Ross, at different times, wrote for a local Rockets blog. During his long treatment for cancer, Ross was almost always able to show up at his job helping to run the Rockets stats camera up in the catwalk of Toyota Center. His wonderful oncologist knew how much the job meant to him and would allow him to leave some appointments early. I was terrified Ross would get sick up on the catwalk after a chemo treatment, picturing him catapulting, like a free t-shirt, into the crowd below, but he never lost his balance or (to my knowledge) became unable to do the work.

The family relation to our NBA home team is then more than a series of powerful connections, and more even than the sum of these. The Rockets, their seasons, their victories and losses, their drafts, their scandals, their roster transformations—and even, basketball gods help us, their changes in uniform—have formed a temporal grid that overlays our family history and makes family narratives, however partial, accessible to us all. The Rockets grid is of course not the only one available to us, but it is powerfully inclusive: through it we can see the growth of our children and the emergence of skills with words and numbers; the development of their skills as writers. We see the story of family illness and recovery, of communication and silence, of disagreement and allyship, and the power to tell stories about the intimate past.

*This memory of a memory turns out not to be true. Neither Ross nor Paul knows anything about the Mother’s Day game. I leave this fantasy here for obvious reasons.