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Re: Texas Two Step: An Alternate NBA History (NBA2K20)
Ch. 3
They say all great things come from small beginnings. The NBA is a testament to this, as it was once a league that could barely pay its players, then grew. The United States of America originally started out as 13 colonies but soon expanded to include many more states.
The intense dislike — perhaps even hatred — between the owners of the Houston Rockets and Dallas Mavericks started out as a tiny event that expanded into a major conflict.
It all began in 1948. Sam Hale and Lindsay Lewis were the eldest children of two very wealthy, very different Texas dynasties. Hale was a cattle rancher, born and bred, and his family had been in Texas since the day the territory was founded; the Hale family tree was vast, rooted, and well-known.
The Lewis family tree was a transplant from New York. Lindsay Lewis, the eldest daughter of Fredrick Lewis, was a rich oil-baroness. Her father arrived in Texas in 1934 with only a few dollars to his name and a dream of striking it rich; he did in a big way, stumbling (as the story goes, drunkenly) into one of the biggest oil deposits the state had seen.
The two families weren’t exactly rivals, but the Hales considered the Lewis’ to be of “carpet-bagger” stock. The Lewis’ thought the Hale family to be slightly more-evolved than the cattle they raised. But Sam Hale and Lindsay Lewis thought the world of each other — a chance meeting at a mutual friends party in early 1948 began a whirlwind romance that swept Lindsay off her feet and made Sam feel things no woman had ever made him feel.
The two family patriarchs put aside their differences and gave the couple their blessings. On November 1st, 1949, Sam Hale and Lindsay Lewis married and united two of the most-powerful families in Texas. It was, as one Houston Chronicle columnist put it, “a marriage destined to change the fates of both families and perhaps the state itself, should it all work out.”
It didn’t exactly work out.
Immediately after the extended honeymoon, the couple realized the two of them had very different ideas on how domestic life was supposed to work. Sam woke up, every day, at five in the morning to tend to his ranch and only came back inside the house for lunch during the day — when he reported back for dinner, his day was effectively done and he’d spend the rest the evening relaxing, before heading to bed no later than ten at night.
Lindsay wasn’t about that life at all. Her day wasn’t going to revolve around a ranch or the schedule of it; her mornings began at nine, maybe ten. She wouldn’t be cooking anything, that’s what chefs were for. She would spend her day doing light shopping but mostly socializing — there were always events going on and friends needing her to stop by. She’d dine out at one of her favorite restaurants for dinner before heading home for the night — if she didn’t have somewhere else to be.
It was a contrast in styles that produced multiple clashes.
“It was one of the most unexpected pairings in Texas history,” said longtime Houston Chronicle gossip columnist Susan Langford. “Sam Hale was a man who worked and enjoyed that. Lindsay Lewis was a woman who enjoyed everything else but work. It was oil and water.”
The two would clash, often, but equally their passions would remind them why they were together in the first place — they had two children in the course of their marriage. The oldest, Trent, was born in 1954 and their youngest, Nate, was born in 1956. Both would take after their parents in some respects, and the two had a close bond.
At least until the divorce in 1959. With neither parent willing to give up total custody to the other, a sharing agreement was made and the boys spent the remainder of their childhood years jumping between homes. Trent would blame his father for the divorce (when he reached adulthood, he would legally change his last name to his mother’s), while Nate was unwilling to pick a side — something that annoyed the elder brother.
The seeds were planted and, in 1990, the rivalry sprouted. Sam Hale, on the advice of his son Nate (who had made both his parents a lot of money thanks to his stock-market wizardry) bought the Rockets. He had been careful not to let the news leak out but, as with all things like this, the news did indeed leak.
Unwilling to be left out and encouraged by her son Trent, Lindsay Lewis used some of her family’s wealth to buy the Mavericks. Trent Lewis was incredibly competitive, especially with his father (Trent had his own, rival, ranching business that had been routinely overshadowed by his father’s), and bet that his father would be unfamiliar with this new arena.
His bet, initially, looked like a good one as Sam Hale named his son, Nate, General Manager of the Rockets.
“People around the league were watching this go down and scoffing at it,” recalled longtime NBA columnist Sam Gray. “This Texas cattle baron had bought a team and immediately, in a huge display of nepotism, named his youngest son the defacto decision maker. Nate Hale had no basketball experience, no executive credentials … he was a very talented stock trader. Good with numbers, with money, but running a basketball team? It was a joke.”
In comparison, the Mavericks kept the Dallas front office and coaching staff intact. Trent Lewis, acting as the owner of the Mavericks (Lindsay had no interest in running the team at all and appointed Trent her representative), wasn’t going to make any major shakeups.
“Trent, wisely, kept on the GM who had helped get Dallas to 60-wins, Saul Mathis,” said Gray. “The other league executives saw this and liked it; anytime a new owner comes in, there’s a chance for chaos … blood in the water. Dallas wasn’t going to be the chum, but Houston sure looked tempting.”
The reports out of Houston weren’t comforting. Wrote Houston Chronicle columnist Chris Judge:
The biggest question the Rockets have is what to do about Hakeem Olajuwon. The Dream is, without a doubt, the franchise’s single most important player and after a year that saw the Rockets go 38-44, miss the playoffs, and watch Dallas become the best team in Texas, Hakeem may want out. Rumors of a trade request swirled, but never materialized last season — previous ownership was unwilling to make that move. Will Sam Hale and his son feel differently? Will Hakeem?
That was the question that dogged Hakeem Olajuwon. A legend in Houston, both for his amazing college career and his incredible NBA career, Olajuwon was without a ring — he made the Finals in 1986, losing to Larry Bird and the Celtics, and hadn’t been back since. Drugs had sunk that team and left Olajuwon with years of frustration.
“He carried bad teams as far as he could alone,” said Gray. “And his frustration in the summer of 1990 was at an all-time high.”
A meeting was arranged between Olajuwon, his agent, Sam Hale, and the new GM of the Rockets, Nate Hale.
Years ago, Olajuwon was asked about that meeting and how he would rate it, on a scale of one to ten.
“No, no, none of those. Zero. Zero,” answered Olajuwon. The meeting was a legendary faceplant and it was, largely, because of how Sam Hale approached it.
“My father,” Nate Hale recalled with a shake of his head, “opened our meeting with telling Hakeem about his prized bull, Howitzer, and how he could recognize his greatness. He compared Hakeem to Howitzer — and he meant it as a compliment, you have to realize that — but Hakeem took it poorly. He told us he ‘was not cattle’ and would not be treated as such, got up, and left.”
Sam Hale was a cattle rancher. A wealthy, well-spoken, cattle rancher — but a cattle rancher who wasn’t part of the world of basketball. The blow up at the meeting reinforced this and Hale felt so bad that he sent Olajuwon a hand-written letter of apology and a promise that he’d honor whatever request the prized-center (not bull) would make.
Olajuwon accepted the apology, didn’t make a mess of it in the press, and requested a trade to a contender.
Just like that, the greatest center — nay, basketball player — in Houston history was ready to go.
The news got out, as it does with these things — maybe it was Olajuwon’s agent, maybe it was a staffer looking for a quick payday, but the news hit the press all the same. Hakeem Olajuwon wanted out and the Houston Rockets had to find him a new home.
The request was disappointing, but not surprising to Nate Hale. “I expected it — the first meeting was bad, so that didn’t help, but really he had been stuck on bad team after bad team for years, and he wanted a title. Houston was his home but sometimes you become your best away from home.”
Nate Hale would know about that; unlike his brother, Nate wasn’t really interested in cattle ranching. He was interested in numbers; money-making numbers. He graduated high school and college early and at just 20-years-old made his way to New York City to trade stocks on Wall Street and make his family (more of) a fortune.
Most stories like that end poorly, but Nate Hale’s story was a success almost from moment one; he was a savant. Or lucky. Or both. Stock traders came in many shapes and sizes, but almost all of them had a method that could be replicated — someone could always copy someone else’s playbook. But Nate Hale’s playbook seemed unique to the point of disbelief; he’d bet big, bet small, and still make bank.
“He was truly gifted,” recalled Nate Hale’s former boss, Leo Spencer. “I’d never seen anyone with his talents. In the span of a few years he was among the top traders at our company … if he had stayed on, he’d be a living legend on Wall Street.”
Nate Hale didn’t stay on, though — he wasn’t interested in conquering the stock market or even making ungodly amounts of money. He wanted to be in charge of an NBA team and he knew the quickest path to that was through the Hale family fortune; it had been sitting there, building up higher and higher, and he knew that the money would need to be invested in something one day.
He wanted that investment to be a basketball team; specifically, the hometown Rockets.
“I looked at the markets and realized that money alone wasn’t going to be enough soon. It was going to be about assets,” said Nate Hale. “Assets would generate far more money than money alone, assets would be what people would want to invest in … we, as a family, had to have something more than just the cattle ranching business.”
Convincing his father was a challenge, but one that proved easier than Nate expected; Sam Hale had entertained similar thoughts for a few years. “I told my boy, if he could get a number that wasn’t too crazy, I’d consider it,” Sam Hale said in an interview immediately after buying the team. “The number he got me was just crazy enough to get me to agree.”
Now, that number looked questionable; how valuable could the Houston Rockets be without its greatest player, Hakeem Olajuwon?
“That was the question that haunted me,” said Nate Hale. “Truth be told, I wasn’t sure where to go … we had an idea of how valuable Hakeem was, the league had an idea of how valuable Hakeem was, but who among the contenders were willing to pay something like that? The list was pretty short.”
Thanks to the lockout, league business was behind by almost a month and the draft was scheduled to happen on July 18th, 1990 — Houston, thanks to their losing season, had nabbed the first overall pick, so in that regard they were negotiating from a position of strength. But teams around the league were convinced the Rockets were going to bungle that pick, much like the Hakeem situation.
“We really had little respect,” Nate Hale recalled. “We had to earn it and we got that, but some of the trade offers that other teams gave us … we just had to laugh, if we didn’t we’d punch a hole in something.”
Nate Hale didn’t let the poor offers distract him nor did he let the media guide him; his list of potential suitors was short. He began with the contenders that could offer him something tangible — younger players that were proven to a degree, but not necessarily superstars.
There were the defending champions, the Pistons, but they had veteran players and not very valuable picks. The Cavaliers were possible — certainly they had the younger, star players but sending Hakeem to Cleveland seemed like a punishment. Boston was possible if they were willing to include Reggie Lewis and multiple picks, but that seemed unlikely.
Nate Hale’s thought processes virtually eliminated any team in the Western Conference — he and his father both agreed that Hakeem in the West was going to be a problem.
“We could have sent him to the Lakers or the Suns, hell even Portland,” said Nate Hale. “But every time we spoke of that scenario, the fear was we would get burned by Hakeem — that he’d be the obstacle we’d need to clear to achieve a playoff berth or advance in the playoffs and we’d be unable to get by him. We were guided by that fear.”
Trade rumors swirled — the league was abuzz with potential deals, but no solid offers were on the table.
At least, no official offers. Unknown to virtually all the NBA, a team had used a back-channel connection to inform Nate Hale that there was interest from their side in a deal — a deal that would solve problems for everyone, a rare win-win in the NBA.
It was a deal that was shocking at the time and became more legendary — and infamous — as the years went on. It was a deal that would define the NBA, one that was the first in a growing arms race that would make the league the 24/7 sensation it is today.
NBA historian Stanley Sloan put it this way: “This was an event that everyone knew would usher in a new era. It was the basketball equivalent of a nuclear bomb being deployed, except no one could escape the fallout — it covered everything, everyone, every team. It reverberates to this day.”
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