‘I was in the game playing!’ Vernon Maxwell looks back on ’94 NBA Finals, OJ chase

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (CHARLOTTE SPORTS LIVE) — Two NBA basketball players with ties to North Carolina recall where they were on that strange night, 30 years ago.

Bizarre doesn’t even begin to describe what happened on June 17, 1994.

“That was a crazy moment man,” said Charlotte resident Vernon Maxwell.

On this day, on national television, news, sports and pop culture collided in the most unprecedented fashion. And caught in the middle of all of it, were a couple of basketball players with North Carolina ties. 

“I was in the game playing,” Maxwell recalls. “The guys on the bench, they were talking about it.”

“It” would be the O. J. Simpson slow-speed car chase.

But at the moment, the fate of the pro football Hall of Famer was the furthest thing on Maxwell’s mind as he and the Houston Rockets were playing in game five of the NBA Finals against the New York Knicks. 

Suddenly, there was a buzz at Madison Square Garden, and it wasn’t just because the series was tied at two games apiece.

“There are televisions on the stanchions right on the courtside,” explained fellow Rockets guard and UNC alum Kenny Smith. “So you got to see the chase going on during the middle of the game.”

The whereabouts of the accused double murderer were now everyone’s concern as NBC kept dipping in and out of basketball coverage to show O. J. on the run.

It even got to the point where Houston head coach Rudy Tomjanovich tried to take matters into his own hands.

“At half,” Maxwell remembered. “Rudy T hit the switch and cut the TV off real fast.”

But it was all in vain. That night, the Rockets would lose the game to New York,

“They made some big plays down the stretch,” Maxwell said.

As well as the headlines to Simpson.

“Like why you running?” Maxwell remembers thinking about Simpson. “Why you putting a gun to your head?”

30 years later, these are questions that largely remain unanswered. Simpson is now gone but the memory of the chase remains attached to the legacy of that year’s Finals, which in fact, Houston would go on to win in seven games five days later.

“It overshadowed everything we were doing but at least not in the moment we won the NBA championship,” Smith says.

And so like it or not, their story is a footnote.

“It’s history,” Maxwell says.

Part of a wild, weird night, that no one will ever forget.