How Sweet It Is ...

Whenever I think of Jim Foley, I smile.

Whether it was a memory from the 1982 NBA league meetings or the 1986 NBA Finals or the 1989 NBA All-Star Weekend or the Rockets' championships in the 90s, the memories are just great.

Foley is retiring from his post as the radio color commentator of Houston Rockets basketball after the season comes to a close and, from the looks of things, the Utah Jazz want to send Foley to an early retirement party.

One of my fondest recollections of the Rockets and Foley was the 1983 and 1984 NBA coin flips where Jim brought along his Irish luck and stopped off at Jimmy Weston's saloon in NYC for a pre-flip bite. Foley and his party, which included Rockets GM Ray Patterson, sat in front of a wooden clock which happened to be shaped like Ireland. Of course, when the Rockets won the flip, and the rights to draft Ralph Sampson, Weston gave the clock to Foley as a good luck gift.

The kicker, was that Sampson and the clock didn't provide the luck for a full calendar year. That was when, as fate would have it, the Rockets and owner Charlie Thomas returned to NYCfor yet another coin-flip for the rights to the first pick of the 1984 NBA Draft.

The clock struck twice, so to say, and the Rockets selected Hakeem Olajuwon to pair with Sampson and they would be in the finals just two years later. Of course, the flip-side to the coin-flip, is the cold truth that Portland, as runner-up, passed on eventual #3 choice, Michael Jordan and selected Sam Bowie at their #2 position.

As a bit of a tangent to this story on my buddy, Jim I always thought that the Rockets blew it - and not because of the fact that they, too, passed on MJ. They've always been given the benefit of the doubt on that because of the fact Olajuwon became an NBA champion and will be inducted into the Hall of Fame this year. My thought has always been:

1. Portland needed a center, and Olajuwon was heads and tails better that Bowie.
2. Portland had Clyde Drexler, a Houston native and U of Houston star.
3. At that point in time, I think the Rockets could have traded forward Rodney McRay and the #1 overall pick to Portland for Drexler and the #2 overall pick.
4. The Rockets would have ended up with: Sampson, Drexler and Michael Jordan as they would've been savy enough to pass on Bowie.

It is ridiculous to second-guess the Rockets as they hung a pair of championship banners with Olajuwon as their center-piece and, of course, Sampson took a nasty fall at the Boston Garden and was never the force he could've been in the NBA after it, but I often wonder what would've happened if the Chicago Bulls and my man Rod Thorn, then GM, would've been sitting at #3 in the 1984 NBA Draft and staring at Sam Bowie as the best available athlete, rather than the greatest NBA player of all-time.

Anyway - back to our regular programming and my salute to a dear friend. One of the greatest people that I've ever met. One of the guys who is fun to hang out with and fun to share stories with, the kind that last a lifetime and make you smile and think.

One of the very best people in NBA history - Jim Foley.

Here's to you Jim. My sincere congratulations on a job well done:

How sweet it is!
For three-plus decades, Rockets fans knew they could get excited about their team on the radio with Gene Peterson and Jim Foley. But that will end when this playoff run does

By FRAN BLINEBURY
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

The uniforms and team colors have changed. The coaches and players have changed. Hairstyles, shoes, home arenas and even the ball itself have changed.

But for Rockets fans of several generations, the constant has been Gene Peterson and Jim Foley on the radio.

"How sweet it is!" Peterson has declared after hundreds of victories over the years as the team's play-by-play voice.

"Oh, mother!" shrieked the jubilant color man Foley on June 22, 1994, at precisely the moment the Rockets defeated the New York Knicks to win their first NBA championship.

Peterson, who will turn 67 on Thursday, and Foley, 68, have been singular in their style and familiar in their delivery through the decades, as identifiable with the team as any player who dunked or dribbled.
Whether it was Peterson with the classic voice that is smoother than honey oozing over velvet or Foley with a leprechaun's glee and his pot o' gold tidbits of information and insight, they have carried Rockets fans over the miles while in their cars and filled kitchens and living rooms with their enthusiasm.

Now, after 33 years as the play-by-play voice for Peterson, and 39 years in the roles of media relations director and analyst for Foley, the broadcasting team will retire at the end of the Rockets' season. Foley, recovering from bladder and prostate surgery a month ago, did his last broadcast March 18.

"They have been doing the games for so long and their voices are so familiar, it's going to be like walking into your house and calling, 'Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!' and have somebody else answer," said former Rockets guard and TNT analyst Kenny Smith.

'It's been wonderful'
They have been there since the early days when it was uncertain whether professional basketball could survive in Texas to see the club win back-to-back titles. They have suffered through the misery of 14-68 in 1982-83, to watching the franchise blossom into a worldwide attraction with the addition of Yao Ming in 2002.

"I've had 45 years in this crazy business, and it's been wonderful," Peterson said. "As I go back over it all now, I find myself spending a lot of time thinking about the early times in the '70s when the NBA was still very much like a small, family oriented business. We had 12 players, two coaches, Tricky Dick (trainer/traveling secretary Dick Vandervoort) and me. We were still flying commercial. We had five people working in the front office.

"Everything seemed so small back then — the team, the league and our young family. We were all learning and growing together. All of the friendships that we made, the places we went to, all the things we got to see over the years, it's been so special. I've watched the Rockets' family grow, and I've watched my own family grow through it all, and I know I've been blessed to live this life."

Gene and Marsha Peterson, married 45 years, with three children — Todd, Jennifer and Paul — and seven grandchildren, met in his native Minnesota and hopscotched from town to town in getting his broadcasting career off the ground.

They started out in Brookings, S.D., home of the South Dakota State University Jackrabbits, a town of roughly 8,000.

"It was a seven-day-a-week job," Peterson said. "I was a morning jock and the sports director. I turned the station on in the morning and turned it off at night."

They bounced to Eau Claire, Wis.; Albuquerque, N.M., and then Kansas City, Mo., where Peterson worked six years at KCMO.

"I had an instructor once who told me, 'You'll never be successful in this business until you've been fired at least once,' " Peterson said.

On the day Marsha was to pick up Gene at the station to take off for a family vacation in Houston to visit her parents, Peterson was one of many let go in a purge at the station.

"Lo and behold, it happened to me just at the time that we're going to Houston anyway, and almost as soon as I got there, I wound up getting a job as sports director at KPRC radio," he said. "So I was never really out of work, and maybe God just meant for me to go to Houston.

What a ride
"A year later, I got a call from (Rockets team president) Ray Patterson and right after the NBA draft I'm working for the Rockets, and it's been one heck of a ride."

Jim and Carolyn Foley, who will be married 40 years in June, celebrated their first anniversary at an NBA rookie scrimmage — $2 a head — that marked the pro debut of the Milwaukee Bucks' newest draft pick — Lew Alcindor. Foley was the team media relations director.

A quarter-century later — June 22, 1994 — the Foleys celebrated their 26th anniversary with confetti raining down from the rafters at The Summit as the Rockets won the NBA title.

A native of LaSalle, Ill., Foley served in the U.S. Navy and worked in public relations for a year with the New York Central Railroad before catching on as sports information director at his alma mater, Marquette University, where he worked for a young coach named Al McGuire.

He moved across town to work for the Bucks under Patterson and in 1972 made the move to Houston.

"We both had ties to Milwaukee," Foley said. "Carolyn had never been to Texas. I had been there once when the Bucks played the San Diego Rockets at the Astrodome. We thought, 'Why not?' "

Those were the days when the NBA operated on a shoestring budget and the Rockets were more like broken shoestrings tied in knots.

The Rockets played home games in the Astrodome, Hofheinz Pavilion and the Astroarena, and even Waco and San Antonio in those early days, before moving into The Summit.

"Then we beat the Washington Bullets in the first round of the playoffs in 1977 and won the last game on the road," Foley said. "We flew back into town and the team bus took us all back to The Summit, where we'd parked our cars.

"I remember coming around the corner and seeing lines of people wrapped around The Summit. They were lining up to buy tickets for the next round. That was one of my happiest moments. I knew we'd made it."

They've been friends and traveling companions who needed and needled each other through the years. Foley occasionally dropped into the radio broadcasts to provide color before taking on the job full-time in 1987.

In the split second that Ralph Sampson's miracle shot bounce-bounce-bounced around the rim and fell in to beat the Los Angeles Lakers and send the Rockets to the 1986 Finals, it was Foley screaming: "We're on our way! We're on our way!"

Peterson has been like the dependable grandfather's clock all these years, rarely missing a tick, describing nearly 3,000 games. His "backing it in, backing it in, backing it in" has been imitated by Rockets fans for years.

Peterson had leaned on Foley for his boundless resource of statistics and information.

"It's amazing," Peterson said. "All the things he knows. All the things he remembers. It's all in his head."

So many memories
Peterson runs through a list of names of so many Rockets, from Ed Ratleff and Kevin Kunnert in the early days to Hakeem Olajuwon and Robert Horry in the glory days to Yao Ming today.

Perhaps their most famous call was May 29, 1994, when the Rockets were protecting a two-point lead with 12.7 seconds left in Game 4 of the Western Conference finals at Utah. The Jazz inbounded the ball, and the clock operator never started the clock.

Peterson and Foley shrieked, screamed and hollered as the clock remained frozen for nearly 10 seconds while the Jazz missed shots until the Rockets rebounded and won.

"That was the most blatant example of cheating I've ever seen," Peterson said.

"That's one of the few times we've disagreed," Foley said. "It was too blatant to be cheating. I think the guy on the clock was just a Jazz fan who got caught up in the game and he froze."

Through all the games and all the years, they've been as much the sounds of Rockets games as dribbling or the swish of a ball through a net.

How sweet it's been.

Photo above: (Jim Foley, left with Geno Peterson)