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Saturday, May 24, 1997

Father and son fly in from Australia to support Rockets

By JOHN MAKEIG / Houston Chronicle

HOUSTON - A pair of the most diehard Rocket fans on the planet have arrived to tell despairing Houstonians that the Utah Jazz's playoff hopes are in serious trouble.

Despite spending most of a full day in transit from Sydney, Australia, to Los Angeles to Houston, Bryan Cullen, 50, and his son, Andrew, 21, arrived fresh - and convinced they will reverse the Rockets' awful luck in the first two games of the NBA playoffs.

Billing themselves as "the thunder from Down Under," the Cullens are predicting a glorious come-from-behind victory in the series for the Rockets.

"They've got to win for us," Bryan Cullen explained. "I say Houston may take the next four."

Less positive, his son thinks it may take seven games before the Jazz are vanquished.

They have quite a stake in the outcome. It cost them $2,500 just to fly to Houston to root for their team. Andrew Cullen even took a part-time job packaging rat poison to help finance their intercontinental sporting expedition.

Never mind that they got here without game tickets or any guarantee that any can be obtained at any price.

The Montreal-born woman who is putting them up, Dannie Gober, has been busily calling the Rockets, every media outlet in town and even Mattress Mack McIngvale to wrangle tickets, receiving no promises from anybody.

According to Gober, days of effort paid off Thursday afternoon when Rockets star Charles Barkley became aware of how far the Cullens had come and somehow arranged for them to get tickets to both Friday's and Sunday's games.

Australia may be populated mostly by rugby and cricket fans, but the Cullens say basketball has been coming into vogue in their neck of the Outback. Their family's interest dates to 1968 when Bryan Cullen's father went to the Olympic Games in Melbourne and came away awed by "this new sport" he had seen.

It seems to have become ingrained in their family's genetic line. Andrew Cullen now owns a sheep dog named Barkley.

"I've always been a Clyde Drexler fan," Bryan Cullen explained, "and Andrew's always been a Charles Barkley fan, even when he was with the Philadelphia 76ers."

How do they account for the two serious trouncings the Jazz inflicted on the Rockets this week? Aberrations, flukes, freak events. It simply cannot continue.

"You're talking about three of the all-time greats on one team - Barkley, Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon," Bryan Cullen said. "All they have to do is lift themselves 5 percent and they'll crush them. All Utah has is Karl Malone."

If their wildest dreams come true and the Rockets escape humiliation, then the Cullens will jet off to Chicago. With or without Bulls-Rockets championship tickets, with or without a friendly host to house them free.

"We'll sleep in the streets in Chicago if we have to," Bryan Cullen added.

They plan to spend three weeks in the United States, basketball or not.

The exact source of Bryan Cullen's inspiration to rush to Texas is uncertain, but it struck while he was midway through harvesting his annual rice crop while operating his "header" - that is Australian argot for combine - on his 250-acre plot 400 miles west of Sydney.

Pausing in the middle of a field, he got out his mobile phone and rang up Gober, wife of a friend who worked for a couple of years in Griffith, Australia, decades ago. He even invited himself to reside in her southwest Houston home for a while.

As he explained it, "She couldn't very well say no."

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