what old rockets do u remember watching play?

Otis Thorpe! Then Robert Horry. I remember O T dropping 40pts one night. He even hit an outside jump shot. Then Horry came along. I remember Horry getting into an in-game dunk contest vs Dominique Wilkins, and Horry held his own!

 

Von Wafer Luther Head

 

Ralph was a monster. No injuries and he would be right there with Dream. Not that good, but close.

 

My first Rockets memory is watching Calvin Murphy have a point scoring duel against Pistol Pete Maravich of the NEW ORLEANS Jazz...they both scored over 30 if erratic childhood memory serves.

 

Moochie Norris.

 

Ish Smith

 

Steve Novak, Bob Sura, Von Wafer, Shane Battier, Juwan Howard, Jon Barry, Scott Pagett, David Wesley, Carl Landry, Luis Scola, Steve Francis, Cuttino Mobley, Mike James, Luther Head, Troy Williams, Terrence Williams. Ton of others for sure though.

 

This guy was pretty old

 

I must have come out of the womb with an affinity for basketball. When I was 3, the Harlem Globetrotters were coming to Houston and having heard as such from a commercial apparently I wrote down the phone number and called, not knowing that I needed a credit card. My knowledge of the Globetrotters came from episodes of Scooby Doo which was incorporating the Globetrotters into their cartoon at the time, the power of advertising in action. The woman that took my call called my mother back and next thing I knew we were at the Summit for the Globetrotters. I was sold. While most kids were playing little league and youth soccer, myself included, I longed for the opportunity to play basketball. First it came in the form of a hoop in the driveway, then as an eight year old, the Spring Baptist Church announced it was hosting a youth basketball league. As fate would have it, my embracing of the game coincided with the rise of the Olajuwon-Sampson Rockets culminating in an NBA Finals appearance vs the Boston Celtics in 1986. I watched every game that year, even attending a couple (I still own a cup from The Summit with the signatures of the '86 team: Olajuwon, Sampson, John Lucas, Mitchell Wiggins, Louis Lloyd, Jim Petersen, Steve Harris, Granville Waiters). My father worked for Aramco (acronym for Arabian American Oil Company) and late 1986 we were off to Saudi Arabia where my family would
reside until the turn of the millennium. Not a lot of sports reporting in the Kingdom during the 80's (sometimes we wouldn't know who won the Super Bowl for months), but one of the way us American expatriates maintained a connection to our home country was through our sports teams. So with understandable delay, I learned of Sampson's degenerative injury, the drug suspensions to Houston's guards, and basically the dismantling of what was once the NBA's next big thing that was once the eighties Houston Rockets. Magic and Bird were aging and the league's balance of power shifted to Detroit in the form of villain too easy to dislike, but there was a talent on the rise in Chicago that tried and tried again to get over the Pistons hump before finally doing so in 1991 defeating the Lakers in the NBA Finals. By this time I was in the 9th grade playing Junior High basketball for Dhahran Junior High..my teammates enthralled with the likes of Sixers' Barkley, Jordan, a rookie of the year in San Antonio named David Robinson. My game involved a lot of pivots and juke fakes inspired by Olajuwon who at this time was in year 4 of being a one man team, the Leftover of a once promising potential NBA dynasty in Houston. The rockets were a perennial 8th seed doomed to a first round exit by the likes of the Lakers. 94' was also the year I returned to America (Arabia does not allow expatriate children to remain in the Kingdom beyond the 9th grade as teenage American tendencies do not jive well with the Wahabbist Islam practiced in the Kingdom). Now the season before my re-patriotization, the Rockets added Kenny Smith to a roster that already included Vernon Maxwell though few had any reason to notice nationally. I was off to high school in New Jersey. I played Varsity ball all three years in Jersey where most of my teammates followed the Knicks, Nets, and Celtics...the Rockets almost completely irrelevant to the point where on numerous occasions I found myself explaining my Rockets hat as "Yes. We have pro basketball in Houston. We have uniforms and everything (to quote "Major League"). My high school teammates wanted to fly like Jordan and snickered at my game of pump fakes in the post, effective as they were I might add, because the Rockets still Loop 610. Meanwhile the team drafted a rookie out of Alabama named Robert Horry....nobody in NW Jersey seemed to notice. Akeem became Hakeem as Olajuwon rediscovered his Islamic roots from a life long left behind in his Nigerian homeland. The result was perfection. Suddenly 1993 saw the Rockets win the Midwest division on the strength of a seemingly reborn Olajuwon who would've been MVP had a Barkley trade to Phoenix not resulted in the Suns securing the #1 seed in the west. The Rockets reached the 2nd round for the first time since the mid-80s and found themselves in a dog fight with the Gary Payton, Shawn Kamp Supersonics who used home court advantage to eke out an overtime game 7 victory over the Rockets. Still, none of my northeastern contemporaries seemed to notice, believing a Patrick Ewing to be the best center in the league. In the offseason the Rockets drafted a guard named Sam Cassel. Once again few noticed. November 1993, my senior year in high school, was beautiful. The Rockets jumped out to a record breaking 15-0 start, the 15th win coming at Madison Square Garden against the believed contender NY Knicks with the Jordan retirement. I noticed a change. My New Jersian coherts knew who the Houston Rockets were, but still thought their Knicks were on a path to the Larry O'Brien trophy. I graduated as the Rockets were eliminating Barkley's Suns in comeback fashion in the second round...Clutch City was born. I was set to return to my home state for college and watched Houston eliminate the Utah Jazz in the Western Conference Finals during Freshman orientation at the University of Texad Jester dormitorium. The Rockets were in the NBA Finals for the first time in the better part of the decade and while the Knicks were the story nationally, the Rockets and newly crowned MVP, Hakeem Olajuwon, had home court advantage. After UT orientation it was back to Saudi for the summer. Luckily, the 1991 Gulf War had brought AFRTS U.S, military television to my community and I was able to watch the NBA Finals, albeit the time difference requiring me to rise at 2am for tip off....a most inconvenient requirement when game 4 was hijacked by O.J. Simpson's white Ford Bronco saga. Still, I watched every minute of this finals with family and friends in the middle of the night and when Olajuwon passed off to Vernon Maxwell for a three late in game 7, I knew the city of Houston was about to win their first major sports championship. It was a euphoric feeling that I felt again the following season when Drexlet and Olajuwon swept a young Shaq-lead Magic team to go back to back. I'm a Houstonian that's died hard with the Astros, Oilers, Rockets, and more recently the Texans which means moments like these are almost non-existent. I experience the feeling again when Vince Young ran into the end zone on 4th and 5 one January night in 2006 in the Rose Bowl vs USC, it never again since. Now it appears the Rockets are making a play at their own Super Team to counter the Warriors, a play that could eventually result in the acquisition of one Lebron James in this Rockets' fans' most extreme hopes, and one the possibility of doesn't even seem that improbable as history would suggest it should be thanls to the aggressiveness of one Daryl Morey. I'm 41 years old now and I can say with confidence that of Houston's three professional sports franchises, only the Rockets have reached for the stars in my lifetime. Here's to hoping for big things in 2018 and beyond.

 

I sprained my thumb scrolling through this post on my phone.

 

Sorry bro. I was on a roll down memory lane

 

Also, John Egan, Elvin, Rudy, Calvin, etc.

Any oldtimers remember the name of that guy who had the "wine stain" birthmark on his face? I think he was a guard, back in the early-mid '70s.

I also remember seeing Dave Feitl at the Ocean Club all the time back in the mid-'80s.

 

Didn't he have a bat chase or something??

 

I'm aging myself, but when I was a kid growing up in Houston, there was a basketball
clinic put on at the Galleria by Calvin Murphy and Rudy T, Mike Newlin when they were players! LOL
I don't remember much about it (I was maybe 8). But I remember Murph shooting FT's and showing his prowess.
Seems I remember a goal setup on the top level of the parking garage (non-covered)
I also came home with a very cheesy basketball with the Rockets logo on it.
(If my dad would have had any sense he would have had all the players sign it and put it away)
But the ball was cheap and only lasted maybe a month before it wore out and went flat. That was that

So I've seen most of them play, Moses, Murph, Newlin, Rudy T, Hakeem, Sleepy, and on and on.

One of the BEST things that I remember about Rockets basketball back in the early days (80's) was Gene Peterson and Jim Foley
I used to LOVE listening to him do play by play on radio. Had a terrific booming voice and just brought
the action to life through words. (RAT-A-TAT, DIPSY DOODLE) i would sometimes watch the game on TV and put the radio on just to hear Gene.
And Jim Foley would always come up with these crazy stats and numbers that would amaze (LONG before the internet)
I miss those guys. Bill Worrell was pretty fun, but nothing like Gene and Jim. They were a Houston classic

 

Kevin Willis.

 

He looked 90.

 

John Lucas and Sleepy Floyd

 

In no particular order:

Steve Francis (Childhood hero)
Catino Mobley
Mo Taylor
Moochie Norris
Yao Ming
Bob Sura
Aaron Brooks
Luis Scola
Terence Morris (no idea why this name has always stuck in my head)
James Posey
Tyron Lue
Reece Gaines
Luther Head

Jim Jackson (2 reasons I remember him 1) no one would shut up about how he was a journey man and 2) IF ONLY HE HIT THAT THREE TO BEAT THE LAKERS IN THE PLAYOFFS)

"O'Neal missed the free throw, going just 4-of-14 from the line and giving the Rockets a chance to win. After a series of timeouts, Rockets All-Star guard Steve Francis penetrated and found Jim Jackson wide open in the left corner.

But Jackson, who had made a 3-pointer from the same spot earlier in the period, missed this time. O'Neal corralled his 17th rebound as time expired."

http://www.nba.com/games/20040417/HOULAL/recap.html

Chuck Hayes
Carl Landry ()
Kyle Lowry
Kevin Martin
Kelvin Kato
Kenny Thomas

 

Seems like old Rockets had more passion.