THE NBA / MARK HEISLER : Houston in Trouble on New York Court

Fade in: A middle-aged man stands on the ledge of a high rise. Around one of his legs is a rope tied to an anvil. He is listening to a portable radio.

Radio: “Seconds left, Olajuwon shakes and bakes, he misses!”

Man, straightening up in anguish: “THAT’S . . . IT . . . I . . . JUST . . . CAN’T . . . TAKE . . . IT . . . ANY . . . MORE!”

He throws the anvil over the edge, and the rope begins to play out.

Radio: “But wait, he was fouled!”

Man looks plaintively into camera.

Voice over: “Because everyone knows it’s not easy being a sports fan in Houston.”

They just can’t take it any more? Tough luck because, whoop, here it is again!

After the Rockets blew 18- and 20-point leads to the Phoenix Suns, and what fans consented to attend left booing, and Vernon Maxwell told the fans to go to hell, and the Rockets rallied, and the fans forgave them, the team started running the above commercial.

So what happened Friday night shouldn’t have been a surprise. Whoop, there went another anvil.

Another fourth-quarter fold, another home-court advantage surrendered. The Knicks practically arrived in town borne on litters after barely surviving two seven-game series, but they left with a 1-1 tie with the next three games in Madison Square Garden where the Rockets will discover the true meaning of the words, “road games.”

“All I say is here we go again,” sighed Rocket reserve Mario Elie.

“More stress. But I know we’re a good road team. I don’t think they can beat us three straight road games.”

Funny he should mention that. Actually, the Knicks will romp thrice unless the Rockets start playing the whole game. They’ve been out of college long enough to know they can’t keep hitting the wall at 40 minutes but, whoop, there they went again.

In Friday’s last 6:32, they went 0 for 12 with five turnovers. In Game 1, they went two for 13 in the fourth quarter. In the two fourth quarters, they’re seven for 37.

“Every game is a new game,” insisted Rocket Coach Rudy Tomjanovich. “You’ve got to judge them individually. You can build those statistics, but I think other teams do the same thing.”

Of course, the real answer is: We’ve got a superstar, Hakeem Olajuwon, and we’re used to having him carry us and when he can’t . . . uh, it’s getting close in here, can someone open a window?

The Knicks’ Pat Riley, a hard case, is trying to contain Olajuwon without double-teaming. He’s succeeding because he has found a defender who can spell Patrick Ewing, the improbably matched Anthony Mason.

At 6-7, 250, this is not Mase in Your Face, as they like to say in the Gah-den, but Mase in Your Belly. But Mason has pushed Olajuwon off the block, cut him off when he has tried to shake and bake his way to the hoop and turned him into a jump shooter, a Dream the Knicks can live with.

Moreover, the Knick rotation may be wearing Olajuwon down. In Game 1, he missed eight of his last nine shots. In Game 2, he got only eight shots in the second half.

Was that what Maxwell meant when he said “a couple of guys were fatigued?”

Said Maxwell: “I just feel that layoff hurt us a little, but I don’t want to make excuses. I just feel like guys are tired. My own feeling, if guys are tired down the stretch, we need to sub a little more.”

Olajuwon said he was fine and the important thing was they had to stick together.

Kenny Smith, the nominal team leader, sat out the fourth quarter while rookie point guard Sam Cassell ran the Rockets into a wall. Smith said he would like to have played more, and agreed that Cassell had had “a tough night,” but the important thing was that they stick together.

A good guess is that Tomjanovich, experienced in Rocketry, warned them not to blow it now with one of their old choruses of I-should-have-been-in-there or Rudy-called-the-wrong-plays. So they head east united if endangered.

Of course, New York will be a little different. The TV stations won’t be devoting whole news programs to features on children painting signs at school, or Elie doing an appearance in Sugar Land, or Olajuwon’s parents getting off the plane from Nigeria.

You poor Rockets. Gotham opens its pitiless arms to you. Whatever hard times you think you’ve known are about to be as nothing.