Part 19

adapted from material previously posted at Othertimelines.com

Summary: In the previous eighteen chapters of this series we recalled the history of the Rochester Royals’ transformation into the Houston Oilers and the Oilers’ subsequent successes and failures in their new home; the short but eventful lives of the IBL and the ABA as they both attempted to supplant the NBA as the dominant force in pro basketball; Houston’s back- to-back 1989 and 1990 NBA league titles; their painful 1991 NBA Finals loss to the New York Knicks; their premature exit from the 1992 NBA postseason; their return to the top of the mountain with their 1993 NBA Finals victory over the Chicago Bulls; their triumphant rematch against the Knicks in the ’94 NBA Finals; the departure of Michael Jordan to Chicago as a free agent; the Oilers’ 1995 NBA Finals victory against the Indiana Pacers; their defeat by the Bulls in the 1996 NBA Finals; their stunning early exit from the ’97 NBA playoffs; the opening of the Enron Center; and their run to the 1998 NBA Finals. In this installment we’ll review their ’98 Finals rematch with the Chicago Bulls.

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Just three years had passed since Michael Jordan bade farewell to Houston, but to Oilers fans it felt more like a hundred years. In previous NBA Finals appearances during the ‘90s the Oilers had frequently been solid favorites to win; this time, however, most oddsmakers had them pegged as a 3-1 underdog against the 800-pound gorilla that was Phil Jackson’s Bulls. The balance of power in the NBA elite had been sharply transformed by Jordan’s departure to Chicago, and the 1998 Finals were viewed by some sportswriters as a litmus test of how Houston was going to handle that transformation.

The United Center was packed to the gills with a sellout crowd anxious to see whether the Bulls could stick it to Houston for the second time in three Finals matchups with the Oilers or the Oilers would avenge their ’96 Finals defeat at the hands of Chicago. In any case, NBA fans looking for action would get their  money’s worth and then some-- especially if Jordan’s performance in the ’98 Eastern Conference playoffs was anything to go by. His Airness had been hitting the basket with the lethal accuracy of a Marine sniper and blocking shots with enough force to knock over a mid-sized apartment building.

Game 1 of the 1998 NBA Finals also marked another major step forward in the league’s evolution as a global phenomenon. Foreign correspondents from a record 126 countries were on hand to cover the action; to cite just one example the Middle Eastern satellite TV network al-Jazeera, which was in its second year of broadcast service, had nearly fifty correspondents and technical staff on hand for the game. The BBC deployed a team of 75 to the United Center. China’s CCTV-5, perhaps the NBA’s largest overseas television broadcast outlet, sent enough personnel to Houston to start its own basketball league. There was even a modest group of correspondents on hand from the Pacific island of Vanuatu, whose total population would barely have added up to one-half the full combined membership rosters for the Katy, Sugar Land, and Conroe chapters of the Oilers’ official fan clubs.

But whatever language a fan might have been watching the Game 1 play-by-play in, you could hear plenty of superlatives in all of them about the Oilers’ play; Houston gave Chicago all that it could handle throughout regulation and mounted one of its best overtime efforts of the ’97-’98 NBA season to pull off a 148-139 series-opening victory. Charles Barkley, who would retire from the NBA the following season, hit a three-pointer at the end of regulation to set up the OT session and blocked ten of the Bulls’ first eleven shots during the OT period.

Game 2 started out promising more of the same; indeed, by the midway point of the second quarter of that matchup the Oilers were leading the Bulls by a healthy thirteen points and looked to stretch that edge out to as much as twenty-five points by halftime. But at the 7:32 mark of the second quarter, Chicago center Luc Longley hit back-to-back free throws to spark a 24-5 Bulls run that put Houston down by six points heading into the final minute of the quarter; when the halftime buzzer sounded the Oilers were trailing the Bulls by eleven points.

And things would get worse for Houston from there-- much worse....

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The third quarter of Game 2 was a nightmare for Houston fans; it witnessed a near-total collective breakdown on their team’s part which recalled the worst moments of the Oilers’ 1970s  playoff defeats and for some older Houston hoop buffs stirred up bitter memories of the 1963 NBA Finals beatdown Bobby Wanzer’s men had sustained at the hands of the Boston Celtics. The Bulls opened up the afterburners and never looked back, stretching an already substantial lead even wider. By the time the quarter was over, Chicago was up by thirty-one points.

In the fourth quarter Charles Barkley was ejected after drawing a technical foul. Some fans today think this may have the moment when the Oilers effectively lost the series to the Bulls; it certainly marked a dramatic shift in momentum against  Rick Pitino’s squad. With Barkley gone for the rest of Game 2 and benched for Game 3, Houston was like a race car with a tire gone flat right before the finish line; they ended up losing Game 2 by a score of 122-97 and were tabbed by most Vegas oddsmakers as 5-1 underdogs at tipoff time of Game 3. The mood on the Houston team charter jet as Pitino and company flew home to get ready to face the Bulls at the Enron Center was a somber one indeed.

It wasn’t much cheerier among Oilers fans, who bombarded the airwaves of Houston sports talk radio with angry denunciations of what they were convinced was favoritism toward Chicago by most if not all of the referees who had worked the first two games at the United Center. One especially irate caller who was a regular on the Energy City’s most popular nightly AM radio sports talk show  made liberal use of every one of the seven words found on George Carlin’s notorious list-- plus one or two Carlin forgot. Even the city’s spiritual leaders got involved in the hullabaloo; a pastor at Houston’s main Protestant church devoted a portion of his mass that week to criticizing what he viewed as the lack of integrity being shown by certain members of the NBA officiating crew in the way they handled(or, depending on your point of view, mishandled) Game 2 of the ’98 Finals.

But the outrage Houston fans vented over the refereeing in Game 2 would seem like mild annoyance in comparison to the almost  thermonuclear fury which erupted in the aftermath of Game 3. Even though more than a decade has passed since that critical loss by the Oilers against Chicago, the scars for some Houston hoops fans  are still every bit as raw as if the defeat had happened only the night before. There are those who feel the Oilers were victims of  a league conspiracy to rob them of their rightful glory; those who blame the Game 3 loss on outright incompetence by the senior referee; and those who assert that the referees were all blinded by the sheer star power of the Bulls lineup.

Anger levels rose to the point where the Houston Police actually had to activate their riot squads to maintain order at the Enron Center the night of Game 4. With the Oilers trailing the ’98 Finals two games to one, not many people in the Energy City were inclined to forgive and forget-- not after the Oilers had lost 136-115 in a game many felt they should have won. Game 4 set something of an unofficial NBA record for most fans thrown out of a playoff game; at least 110 people were escorted from the Enron Center by Houston police or arena security for disruptive behavior, usually involving obscene comments or thrown objects--sometimes both --aimed in the direction of the Chicago bench or the referees. At least one especially irate(and inebriated) Oiler fan spent the night in the Harris County jail after swinging a punch at Bulls head coach Phil Jackson.¹

Chicago upended the Oilers 99-77 to take a 3 games-to-1 series lead in the ’98 Finals. A sense of impending doom began to creep into the minds and hearts of Houston fans; even some of the most die-hard optimists among the Enron Center faithful felt some twinge of doubt as to whether Rick Pitino’s crew would be able to hold out much longer against the Bulls. A few Houstonians were so  sure the Oilers were about to lose the series they couldn’t stand to watch and decided to sell or give away their tickets to Game 5 of the Finals,.

That turned out to be a wise decision. In Game 5 the Bulls drove a stake through the Oilers’ collective heart, hitting ten of their first eleven shots in the opening quarter and galloping  out to a 25-point lead in the second quarter; Michael Jordan hit free throws with a precision and consistency that would have done credit to a Marine sniper. Despite a valiant comeback effort by Houston during the third quarter and the early half of the fourth  quarter, Chicago essentially left Houston in the dust. The final score was Bulls 127, Oilers 110. For the second time in four NBA Finals appearances against the Bulls, Houston had come up short at the crucial moment.

Losing the series at all would have been a bitter enough pill for Pitino and company to swallow, but the controversy over the officiating in Games 2 and 3 ensured that the taste of defeat in the Oilers’ mouths would be especially sour this time around. In the off-season the quality of NBA officiating-- or lack of it, as the case might be --would be one of the two biggest gripes on which Houston fans vented their displeasure. The other one was the labor disagreement between NBA players and management that had been steadily building throughout the ’97-’98 NBA season and was threatening to lead to a strike or a lockout which had the potential to jeopardize the ’98-’99 season. Having endured a long and bitter baseball strike just four years earlier, sports lovers in the Energy City were in no mood whatsoever to see the Enron Center sit dark and empty throughout the coming fall; some openly  vowed to abandon pro hoops altogether if either side in the labor squabble did anything to prevent or delay the coming of the ’98-’99 NBA campaign...