The Punch

by John Feinstein

  Rakel’s telegram, which he sent as soon as he returned to his hotel room, read as follows:

  Relative to game Friday evening, Houston at Los Angeles. In third quarter a scuffle broke out at mid court between Kevin Kunnert and Kermit Washington resulting in a punch thrown by Kermit Washington at which time play was stopped and Kermit Washington was ejected and charged with a punching foul. Immediately after this scuffle was broken up, he pivoted and contacted a most vicious blow into the face of Rudy Tomjanovich. In 10 years of refereeing basketball, I have never witnessed a more vicious act. I strongly recommend severe punishment.

  Middleton’s telegram, sent a few minutes later, wasn’t much different:

  Game, Houston at Los Angeles, December 9th. With approximately 11 minutes remaining in the 3d period, a scuffle broke out at mid court area between Kevin Kunnert and Kermit Washington. Kermit Washington punched Kevin Kunnert. It was broken up by fellow referee Bob Rakel. I got to the area and as I got there Kermit Washington turned and punched Rudy Tomjanovich in the face. This was a most severe act by this player and should be treated accordingly. A punching foul was called against Kermit Washington and Kermit Washington was ejected from the game.

  From Washington’s point of view, the most damaging part of the two reports—other than the description of the punch itself—was Rakel’s recounting of the Washington-Kunnert skirmish. There was no denying the severity of the punch or the damage it did. But Rakel made it clear that—in his view—only Washington had thrown a punch prior to Tomjanovich’s arrival on the scene. Rakel liked Washington and wasn’t crazy about Kunnert. “He was kind of an agitator,” he said years later. “He was the kind of guy who would set a screen in the post and if he thought you weren’t looking an elbow might come up. He could be sneaky. He wasn’t a problem or anything, but at times he was an agitator.”

  And yet there was no mention in Rakel’s report of Kunnert throwing an elbow. He said only that a scuffle broke out between Kunnert and Washington and Washington threw a punch at Kunnert, resulting in his ejection. In other words, Washington was going to be ejected even before Tomjanovich came into the picture. It is certainly possible that Rakel didn’t see Kunnert’s elbow or elbows, but the fact that he was the official following the play and didn’t see Kunnert do anything that merited either a foul call or mention in his report did not help Washington then and, perhaps more important, does not help him now.

  “I still remember most of it very well,” said Rakel, who retired from officiating in 1984 and lives now in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “What I questioned myself most on was the scuffle between Kunnert and Jabbar. They were tangled up. If I had blown the whistle then, maybe the whole awful thing wouldn’t have happened. But as a referee you don’t want to stop play at one end of the court when the ball’s at the other end. And the two of them did get clear of each other, so in that sense I did the right thing. You try not to use the whistle unless you have to. Then Washington and Kunnert got tangled, and it all happened so fast. Jabbar came in to get Kunnert away, but Kermit got in that punch.

  “As a referee, you always tried to get in between two players if they looked like they were going to throw punches before a punch is thrown. You’ve got to use your instincts. In this case, I didn’t have a chance. One minute it looks like they’re running downcourt, the next they’re squared off and Kermit throws the punch. Then, when I tried to move in between them, here comes Rudy….”

  Rakel’s voice trailed off at that point. “I think it changed the way I officiated. I was always a little more cautious after that when a skirmish broke out. I think I decided, maybe subconsciously, that if I was going to make a mistake, it was going to be on the side of caution, break them up when they didn’t need it rather than not break them up and wish later that I had.

  “What we all saw that night isn’t something you ever forget,” he said. “The whole thing is still pretty clear in my mind.” His voice was very soft. “I just hope,” he said, “that I never witness anything like that again in my life.”

  Middleton was also affected by the incident. “I always thought I had a pretty good instinct for trouble coming,” he said. “After that, if I saw a player nail another player, I would say to the player who had been nailed, ‘Do not retaliate. If you do, you are going to be in trouble, no matter what the other guy did.’ I tried to cut trouble off before it started whenever I could.”

  After receiving the reports from the two officials, Norm Drucker followed up with a phone call to Rakel. Drucker passed his handwritten notes on the conversation on to Jack Joyce, a former FBI agent, who was then the NBA’s director of security. Rakel’s oral report, as recorded in Drucker’s notes, was almost identical to his written report:

  In the 3d quarter, I was trailing the play when I noticed Washington and Kunnert scuffle at mid-court. Washington then punched Kunnert in the eye. Jabbar and I acted as peacemakers. At this point, Tomjanovich, who was in the game, came back from front court. At this point Washington pivoted and Tomjanovich, coming toward him at a trot, was punched by Washington. It was the most despicable act I’ve ever seen in a pro game. On TV I saw a clip of this punching act. In my estimation, Washington decided to punch any Houston player and hit Tomjanovich as he was the closest.

  The TV tape was now beginning to make the rounds. It was crude, almost blurry, but there was no missing the ferocity of the blow or what it did to Tomjanovich. It was also incomplete in that it showed none of the events that led to the moment when Washington turned and punched Tomjanovich. All it showed was Kunnert being swung away from Washington by Abdul-Jabbar and Washington turning as Tomjanovich approached. At the last second, Tomjanovich’s hands came up as he saw the punch coming, but it was too late. The punch connected, Tomjanovich’s head snapped back, and his whole body flew through the air before he landed on the back of his head a few feet away, crumpling into almost a fetal position.

  No one had ever seen a punch like this one in a basketball game. By Saturday night, the tape was showing up on TV around the country and reports were beginning to filter out of Los Angeles that Tomjanovich was in intensive care in Centinela Hospital because of the severity of the blow. In New York, Brent Musburger, who was then the play-by-play man for CBS’s NBA network broadcasts, saw the tape and couldn’t believe it.

  “There were guys in the league I believed capable of doing something like that,” he said, echoing Chick Hearn and many others. “Kermit Washington was absolutely not one of them.”

  Musburger was the host at the time of CBS’s football pregame show. There was almost no reason to ever show an NBA highlight on the show, especially in December. He knew the minute he saw the tape that this would be an exception to the rule.

  “When you as a network have a contract with a league to do their games, you are in a very real sense a PR arm of the league,” Musburger said. “I mean, let’s be honest. If the public likes the league, the network gets better ratings and then everyone is happy. So you tried to put the best face on things that you could without crossing the line to being a total shill. There was no way to put a good face on this. You had to show the tape and let people judge for themselves. I hated doing it, I really did, because I liked Kermit so much and knew how damaging it was going to be for him. But there really wasn’t any choice.”

  That was pretty much where everyone found themselves that weekend: without a choice. Neither Bob Rakel nor Ed Middleton had any desire to condemn Kermit Washington. Brent Musburger didn’t want to hurt him or the NBA. But none of them felt they had a choice. Events had clearly overtaken them all.

  The other person who had a clear view of what had happened between Kunnert and Washington was Abdul-Jabbar. Once he and Kunnert untangled, Kunnert raced upcourt with Washington a step behind and Abdul-Jabbar about three steps back.

  “Kermit did reach out and grab him by the trunks to try to push past him and get upcourt,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “Kunnert’s first response was understandable. He slapped his hand away and hit him
just below the shoulder with an elbow. But then he turned around and threw a punch to the right side of Kermit’s face. That’s what really started it, no two ways about it.

  “But at that point I really didn’t care who started it. I didn’t want it to go any further. Kermit, away from the court, is one of the kindest, most decent people I’ve ever met. I think he actually made a point of not intimidating people with his size. But on the court he had some bully in him, especially when he was provoked. I saw that he had been provoked, and I tried to get there and get Kunnert out of the way before anything more could happen. I was being selfish. I didn’t want a fight because I didn’t want Kermit to get thrown out of the game.”

  As Abdul-Jabbar came up behind Kunnert, intending to get him out of Washington’s reach, Washington threw a punch at Kunnert that missed. Abdul-Jabbar regrets what happened next. “I grabbed Kevin’s arms so I could swing him away. But I wasn’t fast enough. I ended up pinning his arms so he couldn’t defend himself, and before I could get him out of the way, Kermit nailed him right in the eye. At that point I was able to swing Kevin out of there while Kermit tried to get in a couple more punches. I got him turned away, and that’s when I heard that sound.”

  Kunnert’s version of the seconds leading to the punch is identical to Abdul-Jabbar’s except for the assertion that he threw a punch at Washington’s face. “That’s just not true,” he said. “Kareem says I threw a punch. Kermit says I threw an elbow. The only elbow I threw was the one to Kermit’s shoulder. I did that just to get him off me. If I had wanted to elbow him in the face, I could have. But I didn’t.”

  The bottom line, even twenty-five years later, is that it wasn’t absolutely clear then what happened between Kunnert and Washington and it isn’t clear now. Four men were in position to see what happened. Abdul-Jabbar remembers Kunnert giving Washington an elbow to the shoulder and throwing a punch at his face; Washington remembers taking two elbows in the face; Kunnert remembers slapping Washington on the hand, uttering a profanity, and then elbowing him in the shoulder. The only man who clearly has no ax to grind among the four is Rakel, and all he saw was “a scuffle,” followed by Washington punching Kunnert.

  All of that led to the moment not in dispute: The Punch. From the time the incident occurred, beginning with the scene in the hallway when the bloodied Tomjanovich demanded to know why he had hit him, Washington has asserted that Kunnert is as culpable as he is because the two elbows he alleges Kunnert threw led to the fight and The Punch.

  “It’s never been about Kevin Kunnert and me, it’s always been about me,” Washington said. “I know I have to take responsibility for what happened to Rudy, and I’ve certainly paid a price for that. But what about Kevin Kunnert? He’s the one that started the fight. Kareem testified to that in the trial, but no one believed him. Why not? I’ll tell you why not, because it was the word of two black men against a white man, and most of the people in our society will believe the white man, not the black men. That’s just a fact.

  “The same with the NBA. Who buys the tickets to the game— white people or black people? The answer is white people. So they were going to come down on me, the big black guy who beat up the two white guys. It only made sense. That’s why I knew I was in trouble that night. If I had hit a black guy that way, it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad. And if I had been the white guy and Rudy had been the black guy, I might have been fined fifty dollars. There are people out there who would have made me into a hero for it. But that’s not the way it happened. The NBA was going to get me.”

  The NBA was going to get him. And there’s no doubt that, especially in 1977, there were plenty of white people more than willing to make a black man into a villain in a heartbeat. John Lucas, who is black, doesn’t think race had anything to do with what happened. “It didn’t matter what color you were when you saw what happened or watched that tape,” he said. “An awful thing occurred. It doesn’t mean Kermit is a bad guy, because he’s not, he’s a good guy. But he did a bad thing that night. It wasn’t about the NBA being out to get him or anyone else. It was about him doing something he should not have done. Period.”

  6

  Sixty Days

  and Ten Thousand Dollars

  By Sunday morning most of the country knew that something extraordinary had taken place in Los Angeles on Friday night. The tape was being played and replayed, not just on sports shows, but on news shows—including the network news shows—because it was so shocking in nature. The Los Angeles Times had confirmed that Tomjanovich was in intensive care.

  And both teams had games to play—the Lakers at home against the Buffalo Braves, the Rockets on the road against the Seattle SuperSonics. The Rockets had played in Phoenix on Saturday night and been routed 110–93 by the Suns.

  “We were all still in a daze,” Tom Nissalke said. “We still didn’t know exactly what was going on with Rudy. But we knew it wasn’t good, because Murph had talked to him and he had told him he was done for the season according to the doctor. That pretty much floored us all.”

  Kermit Washington was in the starting lineup that Sunday night. He had received a phone call on Saturday from Jack Joyce, the league’s security chief, asking for his version of events. Washington says now he didn’t spend much time talking to Joyce because he was convinced the league had already made up its mind about who was right and who was wrong in the incident. He had also received a call from Donald Dell, his agent, who had been informed by the Lakers that his client was in trouble.

  “I told him to keep his mouth shut, not talk to the media, and let me handle whatever came next,” Dell said. “I hadn’t seen the tape yet, but I’d been told the punch was devastating. I told Kermit to be patient, to let me deal with [NBA commissioner] Larry O’Brien, and we’d do whatever we had to do. I knew he was facing something severe, because Larry had made it clear before the incident he wasn’t going to tolerate any more fighting. But I knew Larry pretty well, and I was convinced he would be fair—if Kermit didn’t go around publicly rocking the boat.”

  Dell was, in fact, a friend of O’Brien’s. In 1968, when O’Brien had been running Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign in the Midwest, one of his advance men was Donald Dell. O’Brien had gone on to become the chairman of the Democratic Party, and it was his office in the Watergate office building that had been burglarized on the infamous night of June 17, 1972. Three years later O’Brien had gotten out of politics to become commissioner of the NBA. To date it had not been a smooth ride. It was about to get rougher.

  Washington also got a call from Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke. According to Washington, Cooke said essentially the same thing to him that Dell had said: Stay quiet, lie low, and we’ll work things out. Dell remembers getting a similar call from Cooke. Both men say that Cooke, who died in 1997, never called again.

  “I really thought at first that Mr. Cooke would stand by me,” Washington said. “He liked me. I remember once he called the locker room at halftime of a game against the Celtics. Cowens was just killing us, and he asked to talk to me. He said, ‘Kermit, we cannot allow this to happen. You must play that Cowens fellow more physically.’ I think he wanted me to go out there and hit him, but I wasn’t going to do that. I just told him we would all try to do a better job.”

  Washington’s memories of that weekend are a blur. Since he hadn’t heard anything from the NBA other than Joyce’s phone call, he showed up at the Forum on Sunday for the game against Buffalo. Before the game he ran into Ted Green. He had read Green’s story in the L.A. Times that morning describing Tomjanovich’s condition and speculating on his future.

  Green’s lead was direct and to the point: “Rudy Tomjanovich is in intensive care and Kermit Washington is in extensive trouble.”

  The story went on to say that Washington was almost certain to be fined and suspended once the NBA had gathered all the facts, especially given O’Brien’s vow to crack down on fighting. It pointed out that Abdul-Jabbar had been fined $5,000 for giving Kent B
enson a black eye and that O’Brien had said then that he would have suspended Abdul-Jabbar if he hadn’t broken his hand in the fight and sidelined himself for 20 games. Green also raised the specter of a lawsuit. No NBA player had ever sued another player or a team, but the Rockets were already talking about the possibility the day after the fight.

  “Once we heard that Rudy was going to be out for the season, the thought of a lawsuit started to come up,” Nissalke said. “The feeling we all had was that Rudy certainly had a lawsuit and so did the team. Clearly we had both been damaged.”

  Like everyone else at the game, Nissalke had no idea how badly Tomjanovich was hurt after he walked off the court. The blood had scared him, but when Tomjanovich got up and walked off under his own power, Nissalke breathed a sigh of relief. “I figured worst-case scenario he’d be waiting for us in the locker room when the game was over,” he said. “Knowing how tough Rudy was, if he’d come back to the bench before it was over, I wouldn’t have been surprised.”

  He was more than surprised—stunned—when Jerry West came looking for him after the game. West had talked to Dr. Shields, who had said he was convinced Tomjanovich’s injuries went well beyond a broken nose. When West told Nissalke that Tomjanovich had gone to the hospital in an ambulance and that Shields was very concerned about his condition, Nissalke felt sick to his stomach.