Real MVP of Elite 8 game after buzzer delay: Air horn. 'Got to stay ready'

HOUSTON – After a buzzer malfunction at Toyota Center caused an 11-minute delay during the first half of Saturday’s Elite Eight game between Iowa and Illinois , officials sitting courtside resorted to an old-fashioned solution. Kevin Johnson sat at the scorer’s table armed with two blue-and-white air horns, which he used to signal timeouts, substitutions and the end of each half. Johnson, who has worked for the Houston Rockets as a game clock operator for 25 years, said the game operations crew always keeps air horns and stopwatches available in the arena just in case.

On Saturday, as the delay dragged on, Johnson had a feeling they would be needed. He relayed a message into his headset and an employee scurried through the back hallways of Toyota Center to fetch the two emergency horns. “They tried to go up and they were going to cut (the scoreboard) off.

I said, ‘OK in the meantime, just get the air horns out here in case there’s a problem,’” Johnson said. “They were going to try and switch them back but the horn is tied to the whole thing. When they turned the screens back on, the horn is not going to stay cut off.

” Johnson was working the NCAA regional games in Houston along with the rest of the Rockets’ regular scorer’s table crew. He and shot clock operator Larry Stick, another longtime member of the Rockets’ staff, said a similar malfunction happened once before at a Rockets game many years ago – but they emphasized that incidents like that are rare in NBA arenas. However, Johnson and Stick said it’s not unusual for scorekeepers and clock operators who work high school games to use manual air horns.