Page 101 - How to Drive the Bottom Line with People

Knowing Players from Fans

street from my house in Houston. At the time,
McLemore was playing for the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks.

However, a trade to bring him to the Houston Rockets
was already in the works. Since I was a high school bas-
ketball player at the time, the idea of a professional bas-

ketball player as my neighbor was a dream come true.
McLemore proved to be exceptionally nice to me.
In addition to introducing me to some of the NBA’s
greatest players, he routinely invited me to pro clinics,
autograph sessions, and Rockets games. McLemore

drove a Lincoln Continental that seemed 20 yards
long to me. His personalized license plate read: NBA.
77
Houston was slow to warm to the Rockets. Crowds =

were generally small and surprisingly vocal. In those
days, the Rockets played at Hofheinz Pavilion, a small
arena built primarily for the University of Houston
Cougars. I recall Rudy Tomjanovich, an emerging star
at that time, saying once that several players were sit-

ting on the bench talking about where they wanted to
go eat after the game. “It was so quiet,” Tomjanovich
said, “a guy way up in the stands yells out, ‘No, no,

don’t go there. That’s not a good place to eat.’”
To be sure, seats were not hard to come by. One
night, McLemore invited me to a game against a divi-
sion rival. During the game, it seemed as if one of