Bringing back the '90s
Decade has slipped into realm of trivia just 5 years out
It was a decade that brought us such diverse stars as Vanilla Ice and Celine Dion, and clothing such as flannel shirts and MC Hammer pants. It brought a resurgence of interest in baseball via Cal Ripken Jr.'s streak of consecutively played games and the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa home-run record chase.
The '90s made celebrities of perennial houseguest Kato Kaelin and White House intern Monica Lewinsky. They recognized that "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus." And brought us Spice Girls dolls and slap bracelets.
It was the decade of the Dream Team of Olympics basketball fame. And a time when the great Titanic sailed again, at least on the silver screen.
The macarena was danced, coffee became a gourmet industry and frogs sold beer. Electronics added a whole new vocabulary, with dot.coms and PDAs and Windows 95. Y2K cast a long shadow into the late '90s, but it mostly fizzled.
No other decade has offered such a wealth of technological advances, questionable clothing trends (well, except maybe the '70s) and diverging musical stars as the 1990s, says Mark Blecher, senior vice president of marketing for Hasbro Games.
On hand for the event was Mark Eaton, former center of the Utah Jazz, who donated one of his practice jerseys from the '90s — "with the original Jazz logo, about four or five logos ago" — to the exhibit.
"The '90s were a fun time," said Eaton. "There are a lot of things your forget about, even though we just lived through them."
Eaton's favorite basketball moment from the '90s was the series with the Blazers in 1991. "And, of course, the Jazz going on to the Finals.
Even though I had retired and wasn't on the team, that was a lot of fun."
As for pop culture, Eaton noted that "I hated all the '90s music. I'm strictly a '60s-70s music guy." Probably the most significant thing about the decade, though, he said, "was the rise of technology. That's really changed how we live."
Eaton has been the subject of a Trivial Pursuit question in the past. "Something about blocked shots, I think," so he said he felt properly trivial. When he's not being the answer to trivia questions, Eaton is busy with his restaurants (he owns both Tuscany and L'Avenue). He's president of the NBA Retired Players Association, which includes former NBAers going back to the '50s and is both a support group and charitable organization.
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