The Punch

by John Feinstein

  Often, as a reporter, when you are meeting someone at practice, they will wait until the last possible moment to talk to you and then say something like, “Can we talk on the way to the bus?” I walked onto the court at twelve-thirty. Five minutes later Rudy walked over, put out his hand, and said, “I heard you wanted to talk to me.” No stalling or rushing here. At least I would get the chance to make my pitch.

  We sat down in a corner of the almost-empty building. I told him about hearing Kermit on the radio, and about Bill Buckner. I was at Shea Stadium on that October night in 1986 when Mookie Wilson’s ground ball bounced under Buckner’s glove. I had never forgotten being in the Red Sox clubhouse and watching Buckner deal with wave after wave of writers, never once snapping, never once saying, “I already answered that question.”

  Classy as he was, as good a ballplayer as he was (almost 2,800 hits), most baseball fans remember Buckner for that one moment. In fact, most people, including many who watched the game or were in the ballpark, believe that Buckner’s error cost the Red Sox the Series, that if he had made the play Boston would have won. The truth is, the score was already tied when he made the error. If he had made the play, the game would have gone to the eleventh inning, tied. There is no guarantee at all that the Red Sox would have won.

  But in the lore of the game, Buckner’s boot cost the Red Sox the Series. When you point this out to Boston fans—Esther, for example—they turn their noses up and say something like, “Don’t defend him.” He lives in their minds as the goat, and they don’t want anyone using facts to dissuade them from that belief.

  I told Rudy that I thought he and Kermit were like Buckner in that each had accomplished so many other things and yet, when people thought of them, they thought of this. I wondered how he had put it behind him and gone on with his life; who had helped him do that; what he thought now, all these years later, when it still came up over and over again.

  Rudy looked straight across the court at the empty seats. “Someone once told me,” he said, “that hating Kermit would be like taking poison and hoping someone else died. I’ve always tried to remember that.”

  I let those words hang in the air for a moment and then prepared to move on with my list. Before I could, though, Rudy looked at me and said, “Okay, let’s do it.”

  I was stunned. Heck, I had about eight reasons left. Later he told me that something in his gut told him this was the right thing to do, that he believed he could trust me to tell the story properly. I will be forever grateful to him for that. We talked logistics for a couple minutes, then shook hands and he went back on the court. I walked over to Tim. He had a sheepish look on his face.

  “I was really upset,” he said later. “I thought Rudy would give you more than ten minutes before he turned you down.”

  Before Tim could say anything, I said, “He said yes.”

  Tim’s answer was direct: “He said what?”

  And so, this book was born.

  It was different from any book I’ve ever done because I had to track down clips, locate people, and try to piece together events that took place almost twenty-five years before. I was amazed at how different the story was from what I first perceived it to be. I had no idea how seriously Rudy was hurt that night or what he went through emotionally long after the worst of the physical pain had subsided. I could not possibly have realized how traumatic the event was for the other players on the court, for the coaches, even for the referees, and for all of basketball. There had never been anything quite like it before in the sport. Thank God there has never been anything quite like it since.

  One of the first people I spoke to during my research was Jerry West, who was coaching the Lakers the night the incident took place. West candidly admitted that just talking about it again, even after all these years, was upsetting. I could tell by the quaver in his voice that he meant what he was saying.

  “The worst part of it all,” he said, “is that these were two very good men. In different ways, they’re both victims of that night. I don’t think either one of them has ever been able to find closure with this. And I’m not sure they ever will.”

  I have now spent hours and hours with both of them, talking about that night and their lives before and since. As a reporter, I would be lying if I didn’t say I found the story fascinating, the notion that one moment, a matter of just a few seconds, can so radically change lives. As a friend, and I now consider both of them my friends, I sincerely hope that all the time they spent talking about what occurred, and now reading what follows, will give them some kind of closure.

  They both deserve it.

  1

  What Hit Me?

  December 9, 1977

  He had always worried about the scoreboards. That morning, during shootaround, Rudy Tomjanovich caught himself staring up at the scoreboard in the Los Angeles Forum, wondering if the thing was really safe.

  “I always thought about it in the empty arenas,” he said. “For some reason, I worried that one day one of the damn things would break and it would come crashing down on us during a game.”

  Now it had. At least that’s what he thought when he came to, lying flat on his back, that night in the opening minute of the third quarter. The Houston Rockets and Los Angeles Lakers had been tied 55–55 at halftime, and he was having a great shooting night: 9-for-14 from the field. His jumper, one of the NBA’s sweetest, felt perfect every time he released the ball. The only surprise was that he had actually missed five times.

  The Rockets had gone up 57–55 to start the second half. There was a missed jump shot at the other end, and Kevin Kunnert, the Rockets’ 7-foot center, grabbed the rebound. Tomjanovich began sprinting down the right side of the court, knowing that Kunnert would feed the ball to John Lucas, his team’s point guard, and there would be a chance to beat the L.A. defense down the court. He was on the right wing, looking to see if Lucas was going to feed him the ball, when he heard a whistle behind the play.

  He turned and saw Kunnert, who had made it to midcourt, being wrestled from behind by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Another Laker, Tomjanovich wasn’t sure at that moment who it was, had his back to Tomjanovich and was throwing a punch at Kunnert. Tomjanovich saw Kunnert sag to one knee as the punch landed, and he started running in the direction of the fight. “All I knew,” he later said, “was one of my guys was in trouble. I just ran toward the fight, not sure what I would do when I got there.”

  He sprinted toward the skirmish, arms down, thinking he would perhaps wrap up the Laker who had hit Kunnert and pull him away, just as Abdul-Jabbar appeared to be doing with Kunnert. That’s the way most NBA fights began and ended: an elbow or a profanity thrown; a square-off; a punch, maybe two; and then cooler heads prevailing. Tomjanovich was always one of the cooler heads. Calvin Murphy, his 5-foot-10-inch roommate, was not. Murphy was also running back in the direction of the fight. Somewhere, in the deep recesses of his mind, Tomjanovich knew that if Murphy arrived before he did, it would not be as a peacemaker. He was at full speed as he approached center court.

  That was when the scoreboard fell on him.

  “Tricky, what happened?”

  He was lying in a pool of blood, Tomjanovich knew that. He could see Dick Vandervoort, the Rockets’ trainer, leaning over him, holding a towel to try to stanch the blood gushing from his nose.

  “Lie still, Rudy,” Vandervoort—Tricky to all the Houston players—was telling him.

  Still dazed, Tomjanovich sat up just a little bit, and the first person he saw was Walter Matthau, the actor, who was sitting in a front-row seat. He repeated his original question. “What happened, Trick, did the scoreboard fall on me?”

  “Kermit hit you.”

  Kermit Washington was the Lakers’ 6-foot-8-inch power forward. He was listed in the media guide as weighing 240 pounds, all of it rock-hard muscle from years of weight lifting. On that night Washington’s weight was down to 222, the result of hours of tireless off-season rehab work he had done after undergoing knee surg
ery the previous season. At any weight Washington was one of the league’s strongest men, a self-made player who used strength, intensity, and work ethic to make up for a lack of offensive skills.

  Washington often joked about his shooting ability. “I would always say to the referees, ‘Hey, I’m being fouled, call a foul,’” he said. “And they would look at me and say, ‘Kermit, if we call the foul, you’re just going to miss free throws and embarrass yourself. Keep playing.’”

  So he played. Very hard. He was part of a generation of enforcers, players whose job it was to protect their team’s star. Abdul-Jabbar was the Lakers’ star. Washington was his protection. That meant he did the dirty work defensively and on the boards, and if any kind of skirmish broke out, it was his job to make sure nothing happened to Abdul-Jabbar. There were limits to what he could do. On opening night in October, Abdul-Jabbar, frustrated by the physical play of Milwaukee Bucks rookie center Kent Benson, had hauled off and slugged Benson, breaking his hand. He had missed 20 games and the Lakers had struggled to a 9–14 start.

  It was Washington whom Tomjanovich had seen throw the punch at Kunnert. As Kunnert’s knees buckled and Abdul-Jabbar, who had been trying to separate Kunnert from Washington, swung him away, Washington became aware of someone approaching from behind.

  “I saw a blur of red,” he said. “I grew up in the streets. You learn there that if you’re in a fight and someone is coming up from behind you, you swing first and ask questions later.”

  He turned and swung, a straight right hand that landed just under Tomjanovich’s nose. At the very last instant, as Washington turned and faced him, Tomjanovich sensed danger. He tried to throw his hands up to protect himself, but it was too late.

  “I don’t have any memory of throwing my hands up,” Tomjanovich said. “The only reason I know I did is because I saw it on the tape. The last thing I remember is running toward the fight. Then I looked up and saw Tricky. There’s nothing in between.”

  In between was a punch that landed with devastating force. It was thrown by a very strong man, pumped up on adrenaline from being in a fight, at a man running full speed right into the punch, completely unprotected. Describing what happened later, doctors likened the collision of Washington’s fist and Tomjanovich’s face to a collision between two locomotives traveling at full speed. The doctor who worked on Tomjanovich later that night, a specialist in head and neck trauma, said the injuries Tomjanovich suffered were not unlike those suffered by someone thrown through the windshield of a car traveling 50 miles per hour.

  “I’ll never forget that sound,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “I had turned Kunnert away from Kermit, and suddenly I heard this crack, like a melon landing on concrete. It’s twenty-four years ago, but I can still hear it.”

  The punch knocked Tomjanovich straight backward, and he landed on the back of his head, out cold within a second. Every person on the court and almost every person in the Forum that night remembers the next few minutes as if they were played out in slow motion.

  Upstairs in the press box, the writers looked at each other almost as soon as the punch landed and then began heading downstairs—almost unheard of in the middle of a game.

  “It was the sound,” Thomas Bonk, then the Rockets’ beat writer for the Houston Post, remembered. “No one had ever heard a punch that sounded like that. Even from where we were, all the way upstairs, the sound resonated. Punches aren’t supposed to do that. It was frightening.

  “We were used to fights. Back then, fights broke out in the NBA every night. When Kermit and Kunnert squared off, your first response was, ‘Oh look, another stupid NBA fight, what else is new?’ And then in an instant it all changed and it became terrifying.”

  While most of the writers used the stairs behind the seating area that would take them directly to the hallway where the team locker rooms were, Ted Green of the Los Angeles Times bolted out of his chair and ran directly down the center aisle of seats to get courtside.

  “The first thing that was stunning was that you could actually hear the punch from where we were,” he said. “None of us had ever heard a punch from where we sat. The second thing was the blood. It started spreading around Rudy’s head almost as soon as he hit the floor. I’d never seen anyone shot in the head, but if I had, that’s what I imagined it would look like.”

  Green estimates that it took him about forty-five seconds to sprint from his seat to courtside. He got to within twenty-five or thirty feet of Tomjanovich and saw him lying there, blood all over him and the court, while players milled around in shock and Vandervoort worked on him.

  “He wasn’t moving,” Green said. “He probably didn’t move for a total of two minutes, maybe three. But it felt like hours while I was standing there. I remember thinking, ‘He’s dead. My God, he’s dead. How could this happen? How could this possibly happen?’ It was completely out of context, this whole scene I was looking at, and it was absolutely horrifying all at once.”

  No one was more horrified than Jerry West. A Hall of Fame player in his second year as the Lakers’ coach, he had seen his share of fights. But never anything like this. “I was in shock when I saw it,” he said. “Absolute, complete shock. It was an awful feeling. I felt sick to my stomach.”

  Abdul-Jabbar felt the same sensations. “There was just so much blood,” he said. “I kept thinking, ‘How can there be so much blood from one punch? Something is wrong here.’ The only thing that kept me from panicking completely was that his legs were moving a little. Otherwise I would have been worried that he was dead. It looked that bad.”

  The whistle Tomjanovich had heard had been blown by Bob Rakel, the referee trailing the play. Rakel had seen Kunnert and Washington square off, and when Washington threw the punch at Kunnert he blew his whistle, in part to call a punching foul, in part to try to get the players to back off. Ed Middleton was the other official, and he had been in full sprint trying to get to the other end of the court to pick up the completion of the Rockets’ fast break. He was almost at the baseline when he heard his partner’s whistle and turned to see what had happened. When he saw the melee at midcourt, he turned and followed Tomjanovich in the direction of the fight. The next thing he knew, Washington had spun around and thrown the punch and Tomjanovich was on the floor.

  At that moment, everything stopped. No one on either team had any desire to fight anymore. While Rakel was telling Washington he was ejected from the game, Middleton stood behind Vandervoort, who had raced off the bench the minute Tomjanovich went down. “I remember telling someone we were going to need more towels to mop up all the blood,” Middleton said. “Then I looked down and got a good look at Rudy’s face. I had to go over to the scorer’s table and lean over to get my breath back. I was afraid I was going to be sick.”

  Calvin Murphy, the little guard whom no one in the NBA wanted to fight, had raced past Washington to get to Kunnert, who was staggering in Abdul-Jabbar’s arms. When he heard the punch and saw Tomjanovich go down, he left Kunnert and reached his best friend’s side no more than a second or two before Vandervoort. Washington was a few feet away, being ejected by Rakel. Murphy stood rooted to the spot, staring first at his unconscious teammate, then at Washington.

  “My first thought was, ‘I’m going to kill the sonofabitch,’” Murphy said. “There was no question in my mind about it. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. I couldn’t believe he had done that to Rudy. I saw the security people starting to take him off, and I took a step toward him, because I was going to kill him. That was absolutely my intent: kill the sonofabitch who had done that to my buddy.”

  But when Murphy tried to put one foot in front of the other, he found he couldn’t move. His legs were rubbery. It certainly wasn’t fear. Murphy was one of the league’s smallest men, but he was every bit the enforcer that Washington was. He had been a Golden Gloves boxer as a teenager, and unlike most of the league’s players, he actually knew how to fight. Unofficially he had been in seventeen full-fledged fights during eight y
ears in the league and had never lost. The fight that people remembered most was one against Sidney Wicks, then of the Boston Celtics. Like Washington, Wicks was 6-8 and about 225. Murphy had jumped into the air, grabbed Wicks by his Afro, pulled him down to his level, and punched him into submission.

  Now he stood frozen as Washington left the court. “It was an act of God,” Murphy said years later. “It had to be. On any other night I would have killed him. But something happened and kept me there, right where I was. It had to be an act of God. There’s no other explanation.”

  John Lucas had been in the lane when the whistle blew. He continued to the basket, put an uncontested layup through the hoop, and caught the ball as it came through the net. He turned and ran back to the scene with the ball still in his hands. “My first instinct was to turn and run,” he said. “I saw Rudy, I looked at Kermit, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, what has happened here?’” he said. “I remember I had the ball in my hands, and the first thing I thought was that I just wanted to get out of there. I just didn’t want to be at that place. It was too gruesome.”

  Tomjanovich knew none of this when he came to. He wasn’t in that much pain when Vandervoort got him into a sitting position, but he was confused. It hadn’t been the scoreboard; it had been Kermit Washington. “I was dazed and woozy, and Tricky was telling me Kermit hit me. All I could think was, ‘Why would he hit me? I wasn’t even fighting with him.’”

  It was several minutes before Tomjanovich could stand up. Nowadays, he wouldn’t have been allowed to move. He would have been told to stay down and a stretcher would have been brought out for him. But this was 1977. He got up slowly, aided by Vandervoort, with a towel over his face to try to stop the blood. Getting up, he looked right at West. It was then that he understood for the first time that this was more than a bloody nose.

  “He just had this look on his face,” Tomjanovich said. “It was the kind of look you see when someone can’t believe what they’re seeing. I remember thinking I must look pretty bad. But I had no idea how bad.”