Recently crowned Hall of Fame coach Rudy Tomjanovich is best known for one line, uttered seconds after his Houston Rockets won their second consecutive NBA championship in June 1995.
“Don’t ever underestimate the heart of a champion!”
As it turns out, the historic one-liner wasn’t a “Rudy T” original. In a new Q&A with the NBA’s official Twitter account, Tomjanovich explains that he originally heard the phrase from All-Star point guard Kevin Johnson of the Phoenix Suns. Now 71 years old, Tomjanovich recalls:
I’m often asked where that statement came from, and it was not original. It came from Kevin Johnson of the Phoenix Suns after we had beat them two years in a row, when they had us on the ropes and had us down. He said: ‘The Rockets have the heart of a champion. You think you got ’em, but you can’t close them out.
His teammate, Charles Barkley, had another saying. He said, ‘They’re like those Texas roaches. You stomp on them and you think they’re dead, but you lift your foot up and they scurry away.’
I thought of those analogies, the best one was the heart of a champion and not, ‘Let’s go roaches!’
The Suns faced the Rockets in the second round of the Western Conference playoffs in both of Houston’s 1994 and 1995 championship runs. On both occasions, Phoenix won the first two games before the Rockets took four of the next five to advance.
In the 1995 series, the Suns took a 3-1 lead before the Rockets won each of the next three games while facing elimination — including Game 5 and Game 7 in Phoenix. Johnson led the Suns with 46 points and 10 assists in that Game 7, but it still wasn’t enough.
In postgame comments, Johnson appropriately credited the brilliance of his team’s opponent. And unknowingly, he put the wheels in motion for one of the NBA’s most memorable lines.
