Then he saw me sitting on the other side of the bar.To the bartender he said, pointing in my direction, “And get that man another one of whatever he’s having.”Lighting a Kool cigarette, he said to me, “I see you already know all the right hangouts.”The owner approached, shook Rudy T’s hand, and said, “Aw, man, you missed the band! Last year he preached togetherness and the Houston Rockets responded with an NBA title. First Name Rudy #13. Tomjanovich made a point of talking honestly to his players and letting them talk back. “He hated the guy who came in to substitute for him. A very rough place. It’s a curious matter to contemplate, since the man known everywhere as Rudy T is a truly beloved figure in Houston, having worked for the Rockets organization (first as a player, then as a scout and an assistant coach before his promotion in 1992) for 25 years. He was on the road every day, scouting both college and pro teams while paying his daughter Nicole to tape games off the home satellite system.
He also led the U.S. men’s team to a gold medal in the ‘2000 Summer Olympic Games’.
I talk to every man. In the 1970 NBA draft, when the three-year-old San Diego Rockets selected Tomjanovich instead of Maravich as the second overall pick, San Diego fans were outraged, and the headlines screamed, RUDY WHO?“That hurt,” he says. It’s not For the record, Rudy Tomjanovich is not a regular guy. The games at Hofheinz Pavilion were sparsely attended, while the occasional games staged at the Astrodome were utterly forlorn experiences. “My whole vision was cattle and tumbleweeds,” she says. But the $100,000 contract was big money for a Hamtramck boy, and so he and his newlywed—Sophie Migas, a good Polish girl from his hometown—packed up their belongings and drove west, determined to make believers out of the San Diego skeptics. After Hayes was traded in the summer of 1972, Rudy T led the Rockets in scoring.
He watched as Chaney was honored as NBA coach of the year, then watched as Chaney was fired the following season after a 26-26 start.When Rudy T looked around next, he discovered that he was the interim head coach of the Houston Rockets. He married Sophie Tomjanovich in 1970. “He instilled the players’ belief in his game plan,” says Kenny Smith. But it came down that it was going to be a war with New York, and what were our choices? “It got to be a joke,” Rudy says. “I was so damned hyper and just couldn’t relax,” he says. Associated With. I don’t want to be part of the entertainment. When the rookie was ready, Brooks was removed from the rotation as Rudy T had been in 1981, but the coach let his player know that he knew it wasn’t easy, that he appreciated Scotty’s upbeat attitude. “He grew up in the upper peninsula and came down to work in a factory. It suited him more to be one of the guys. The Summit crowd viewing the selection on closed-circuit monitors booed when Horry’s name was announced.
“All of a sudden,” he remembers, “I’ve got to buy these clothes to look good when I’d rather be in a warm-up suit and be an honest person.” According to Dawson, “He had always played hard but was never a leader as a player.” The prospect of telling a player to sit on the bench was galling to him. When it came time to try out for the Hamtramck High School junior varsity team, one of the coaches watched Rudy T put a few mean moves on his opponent, then took him aside and told him, “Don’t even waste your f—ing time. “He made it very clear,” says Olajuwon, “that this isn’t his team, it’s our team. Despite such an impressive career, he has been constantly snubbed for a place in the ‘Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’. And yes, he realized: He had to stay around the game.Rudy T visited the office of Rockets general manager Ray Patterson. Whether he liked it or not, his performance would inevitably be viewed as an audition. See the events in life of Rudy Tomjanovich in Chronological Order She lived at address. I said to myself, ‘Why move your family because you have to prove that you’re a tough son of a bitch?’” The Tomjanoviches stayed in Houston, and on October 2, 1981, Rudy T ended his eleven-year career.For two months he sat at home, driving his pregnant wife and two children crazy. The only recognition he got that year was at a team banquet, when he was awarded a trophy for having the worst mustache in the organization. The erratic rhythm of the National Basketball Association’s 82-game season, which spans the six months from November to April—not counting a month of preseason games and two months of playoffs—is a maddeningly episodic odyssey. “If you don’t like coaching under Rudy,” Dawson says, “you will not like coaching.”The payoff was immediate: Rudy T’s Rockets amassed a franchise-best 55-27 record in the 1992-93 season, won the Midwest Division for the first time in seven years, and advanced to the Western Conference finals before losing to Seattle in a seven-game series. When the Rockets reached the NBA finals in 1981 for the first time ever, he sat glumly at the end of the bench as the Rockets lost to the Boston Celtics in six games.