The Punch

by John Feinstein

“The guy should be suspended for the rest of the season, especially if Rudy can’t play again,” Nissalke angrily told the media that night. “The guy is an idiot.”

  No one was more shocked or upset by what had happened than Pete Newell. He had been working Friday night doing color commentary on the University of Southern California radio network. Driving home from the Los Angeles Sports Arena, Newell flipped on his car radio to find out who had won the Lakers-Rockets game.

  “I’ll never forget it,” Newell said. “The first thing I heard was Chick Hearn saying that there was no further word on Rudy Tomjanovich’s condition, that he had been taken to Centinela Hospital. I thought, ‘My God, what in the world happened to Rudy?’ This was one of my favorite guys, after all, someone I had taken with the second pick in the draft even though a lot of people thought I was crazy to do it. So I was very concerned about Rudy. I kept listening to hear if they had any more information. A little while later, just before I got home, they said something about how devastating the punch Kermit Washington had thrown had been. Oh, what an awful feeling that was. There wasn’t anyone in the league I was closer to than Kermit. Now I’m hearing that he’s the reason Rudy’s hurt so badly.”

  Newell pulled into his driveway a few minutes later. His wife, Nell, was waiting for him at the door. She had watched the game, had seen the punch. Her description was harrowing. Later Newell saw the tape. When he did, he was convinced that he knew exactly what happened.

  “All those summer mornings, Kermit and I spent a lot of time in the car going to and from our workouts,” he said. “He talked a lot about growing up in Washington, what it was like, how scared he was all the time. He told me a story about being in a fight in the schoolyard one time and someone came up from behind and pinned his arms and he ended up getting beaten up. He was just a skinny kid back then. Now he had this great physique that he had built up through the years. Then he got jumped from the back in Buffalo. He said that reminded him of when he was a kid. I remember him saying to me, ‘Pete, one thing I guarantee you, no one will ever get me from behind again.’

  “When I saw that tape, I knew what had happened. Rudy came from behind. He wasn’t going to hit him or try to hurt him, I know that. Kermit knew it too—later. But not then. At that moment he was back in the schoolyard, and he was going to be sure that no one was going to pin his arms again. He reacted.”

  Washington went to practice on Saturday after making one more attempt to call Tomjanovich in the hospital. He was told, as he had been told Friday, that Tomjanovich was in intensive care and not taking phone calls. At practice that day, he asked Ted Green what he thought might happen to him. Green had been making phone calls the entire morning, asking just that question. The NBA was still fact finding and waiting for the tape to arrive from the West Coast, but Green had a pretty good sense that Washington was going to be treated very severely.

  “All you had to do was look at the track record that year,” Green said. “O’Brien made it clear he would have suspended Kareem, and he had suspended Adrian Dantley a week earlier for a fight that never really got started. I told Kermit I thought he’d get the maximum fine and a lengthy suspension.”

  What, Washington wondered, did lengthy mean? Could it be the whole season, which was what Nissalke was lobbying for?

  There was no way to know. West told Washington to just play hard and play well—and stay out of trouble—until they heard something from the league. The Lakers beat Buffalo the following night in overtime. Washington started and had 11 points and 8 rebounds. He spoke to the media after the game and kept his comments low-key: He was very sorry Rudy had been hurt. He had tried to call him in the hospital. He had no idea what the NBA would do. He had never intended to hurt Rudy.

  He was scared that night, as scared as he had ever been in his life.

  “I had worked so hard to get to where I was,” he said. “It’s not as if I had all this great talent. I’d put in all that time with Pete in the summer. The first year I had torn up my knee, now I was facing a long suspension. And I knew it was going to be long. I was convinced Larry O’Brien had his mind made up about me, and he had never met me. I just felt so helpless. People were acting as if I had just turned around and punched Rudy for no reason. It wasn’t that simple a story, but no one wanted to hear it.”

  The following morning Washington flew with the team to New Orleans. The Lakers were scheduled to play the Jazz on Tuesday, then fly to Houston and play the Rockets on Wednesday. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that the suspension would be handed down before the Lakers got to Houston. There was no way O’Brien or the league wanted Washington in uniform in Houston with Tomjanovich still in the hospital in Los Angeles.

  By Monday morning, the league had all the information it felt it needed. Jack Joyce had spoken to the players involved—except for Tomjanovich. The referees’ reports were in hand and so was the tape. The only real question was how hard O’Brien would come down on Washington.

  “You have to remember what was going on in the league back then,” David Stern said. “Everyone—the owners, Larry, the players too—was concerned about fighting. I’ve heard Kermit say through the years he didn’t intend to hurt Rudy the way he did and that the punch was a by-product of a fight that had already started. I believe every word of what he says. But in the end, when Larry had to make his decision, what mattered was the result—which was devastating. If he had seen it as an act of self-defense, that he would have been hurt had he not acted, it might have been a little different. But I don’t think he saw it that way.”

  Russ Granik, who is now Stern’s number two man in the league office, was working as a lawyer in the office at the time. He goes a step further than Stern when discussing what the league did and why. “I would say most of the rules we have today governing violence and fights really grew out of that incident,” he said. “We were aware before then that we had a problem, but this incident made it crystal clear the potential dangers of letting men this size take full swings at one another. There are times we get criticized for being too hard on those who are on the periphery of a fight, but remember, Rudy wasn’t in the fight that broke out. The more people who get involved, the more dangerous a fight becomes. We had to take steps to keep these sorts of things from happening again.”

  Granik paused. “Try to imagine the result if Shaquille O’Neal landed a clean blow on someone. That’s not to say Shaquille would do something like that. But there are too many players with tremendous strength in this league to take any chances at all.”

  Several months after Granik made his comment, an enraged Shaquille O’Neal took a wild swing at Chicago’s Brad Miller. The punch didn’t land cleanly, but the incident reminded people again why the NBA tries so hard to keep brawls from breaking out. Basketball fights aren’t like hockey fights, because it is difficult to get leverage on ice skates. And they aren’t like football fights, where the players are wearing helmets. In the aftermath of the O’Neal incident, trying to explain what the worst-case scenario might have been, almost everyone brought up the same thing: Kermit Washington and Rudy Tomjanovich. Even now it remains the benchmark for how horribly wrong a fight can go.

  “Sometimes we have to suspend people in situations where it hurts us competitively,” Stern said. “[Like] the Miami-Knicks playoff fight a few years ago, when Patrick Ewing wandered onto the court and never threw a punch and we had to suspend him because that’s what the rules said we had to do. Was it good for us to suspend all those people that night? No. But Kermit and Rudy was far worse. We can’t ever let that happen again.”

  And so it was no surprise when the word from New York reached New Orleans on Tuesday morning. Washington was coming out of the locker room after the morning shootaround when he ran into Ted Green.

  “Did you hear?” Green asked.

  Washington knew exactly what Green was talking about as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “The fi
ne’s ten thousand dollars,” Green said. “The suspension is at least sixty days. You can apply for reinstatement then.”

  The $10,000 was no surprise. The sixty days was crushing. It would be mid-February before he could play again. The season would be almost over. And it was sixty days without pay. Washington lived comfortably, but he wasn’t so wealthy that losing more than one-third of his annual salary was something he could simply brush off.

  He wondered if he would ever play in the NBA again.

  Those same thoughts, for very different reasons, had entered Rudy Tomjanovich’s mind often in the three days that had passed since the fight. The leakage from his brain capsule had stopped by Sunday night, and on Monday he had been moved out of intensive care. That was the good news. The bad news was, he had gotten a look at himself in the mirror.

  “I really did look like the Elephant Man,” he said. “My face was swollen like a melon, about twice its normal size.”

  He had almost laughed when a hospital worker came into his room and asked him if a truck had hit him. No, he answered, he had been hurt in a basketball game.

  “Basketball game?” the man had answered. “What happened, the scoreboard fall on you?”

  Back in Houston, Sophie Tomjanovich was trying to organize her life so she could fly to Los Angeles to be with her husband. She had called her mother in Detroit on Saturday to see if she could fly down to take care of the girls. Her mother was able to get a flight on Sunday, so Sophie made plans to fly to L.A. on Monday. Some of the other wives came by the house to see how she was doing, which was not very well.

  “I was doing the brave thing when people were around,” she remembered. “But I was really quite scared. I had no idea how badly Rudy was hurt or what was going to be involved in getting him better. He had said they were telling him he couldn’t play the rest of the year, but I wondered if that was just softening him up to tell him he’d never play again. I felt like there was no way for me to have an understanding of what was going on until I got out there.”

  Just before Sophie left for the airport on Monday, Calvin Murphy came by the house. The team had flown home from Seattle on a red-eye, and Murphy came to the house with Rudy’s travel bags. “It was almost as if he had died,” Murphy remembered. “I told myself the whole way over there I had to be strong for Sophie, tell her everything was okay. So I got about two steps inside the door and lost it completely.”

  Seeing Murphy was comforting for Sophie. It made her feel less alone, knowing that she wasn’t the only one shedding tears and not sleeping at all. She promised to call the Murphys and give them a full report as soon as she got to Los Angeles and had a chance to see Rudy. “I was girding myself,” she said.

  All the way to Los Angeles she prepared herself. She checked in at her hotel, changed clothes, and took a cab to the hospital. “I wanted to look like I was doing okay even if I didn’t feel like I was doing okay,” she said. “I let myself cry one more time at the hotel and then said, ‘Okay, enough. He can’t see how scared I am, because it will scare him.’”

  She took a cab to the hospital and found Paul Toffel waiting for her. As soon as Toffel saw her coming down the hall, he knew who she was without ever having met her.

  “For one thing, she was tall [5-8], someone you would think would be married to a basketball player,” he said. “But she also carried herself in such a confident, poised way, I just knew she was Rudy’s wife right away. When we shook hands, you would have thought she was there to pick her husband up after a routine physical. She was a picture of calmness.”

  “Yeah, right.” Sophie laughed. “Calm outside, collapsing inside. Thank goodness he was there to talk to me before I went in to see Rudy.”

  Toffel gave Sophie a short pep talk to let her know what she would be facing once she walked into the room. He started with the good news: Rudy’s condition had improved greatly since Friday. He was going to need surgery, probably several times, but none of it was likely to be life-threatening. That time, he was convinced, had passed. But what she was going to see wasn’t going to be pretty. What’s more, it was absolutely imperative that she not recoil in horror or shriek or run from the room or, most important, break down and cry.

  “You would be entitled to do any or all of those things,” Toffel told her. “But you just can’t.”

  Sophie understood. She told herself she had done all her crying in the hotel and in the cab. She walked into the room and there was Rudy, who had gotten out of bed in anticipation of her arrival. She embraced him gently, then pulled back to take a look. Rudy’s swollen, battered face was filled with concern.

  “You know something, Rudy,” she said. “I think this is an improvement. Really.”

  Rudy tried to smile. Then he groaned. “My God,” he said. “Everyone around here is a comedian.”

  The day before, when Toffel had started to explain to Tomjanovich what sorts of surgery would be necessary to repair his face, he had said, “You know, I’ve seen pictures from before this happened, Rudy. This is no great loss.”

  Tomjanovich understood exactly what his wife and his doctor were doing. Just as he understood when Sophie sided with a gruff nurse who insisted on poking and prodding him constantly. “Good,” Sophie said when he complained. “There are enough people running around here spoiling you half to death.”

  The joking was medicine for Tomjanovich, a different form of painkiller. Toffel had told him that he would need surgery to fix his jaw and to realign his skull. He would also need plastic surgery for the shattered bones in his face. “I want to be home for Christmas,” he told Toffel. “I want to be with my girls.”

  Toffel said it would depend on how he came through surgery but he would certainly try.

  While Tomjanovich was in the hospital dealing with great physical pain, Kermit and Pat Washington were dealing with pain of a different kind.

  It first hit Pat a couple of days after the punch when she went into the grocery store. As she was checking out, she noticed two other women whispering to each other and pointing at her.

  “Are you talking about me?” she asked. “If you are, why don’t you say what you have to say so I can hear.”

  The two women said nothing, but the looks on their faces convinced Pat that her instinct had been correct.

  That was difficult. So were the threatening phone calls—“To this day I don’t know how so many people got our phone number,” she said—and the hate mail that began to pile up. Not surprisingly, a good deal of it was racial. “Lots of N-words,” she said. The mail got to be so bad that several neighbors volunteered to go through it to separate the hate mail from the real mail. They would throw the hate mail away, then bring the rest to Pat.

  But nothing prepared her for her next trip to the obstetrician. Her due date was a little more than a month away. When she arrived for her appointment, she was surprised when an associate of her doctor came into the examining room to see her. “I’m really sorry, Pat,” he said. “My partner doesn’t want to deliver your baby because of what happened with your husband. I tried to tell him that you don’t let anything affect your relationship with a patient, but he didn’t want to hear it. I’ll take care of you from now on, and I’ll deliver your baby for you. I’m truly sorry.”

  Pat wondered how anyone could be so cruel.

  Kermit became a virtual shut-in. He hated going out in public, because he was convinced everyone was pointing at him and whispering about him. “There weren’t a lot of six-eight black men wandering around in the Palos Verdes area,” he said. “It wasn’t like I could go out and not be recognized, especially since my picture was in the paper every day and the tape was on TV every night. I would wake up early, because I couldn’t sleep, sit around and worry all day, and then go to bed at five o’clock. I was exhausted from doing nothing.”

  The low moment came eight days after the fight. Kermit and Pat were home watching television. Kermit was still awake, in large part because he wanted to stay up to watch his favorite
show, Saturday Night Live. The phone rang. It was Kermit’s brother, Chris, calling from St. Louis.

  “Well, you’re really famous now,” Chris said, trying to sound cheerful.

  Kermit knew better. “Why?” he asked.

  “You’re on Saturday Night Live.”

  Sure enough he was. During the Weekend Update segment, Garrett Morris had come on to do the sports. His lead story was on the fact that once again a black man was being unfairly depicted as overly aggressive. As Morris railed on, the tape of Washington throwing the punch at Tomjanovich was run over and over and over again. Each time, Rudy appeared to fall backward a little bit farther and land a little bit harder.

  “Look at that, look at that,” Morris said at one point as Washington’s fist crashed into Tomjanovich. “The brother barely touched him.” Pause. “Maybe we need a different angle.”

  “A living nightmare,” Washington said. “That’s what my life had become, a living nightmare. I felt as if Pat and I were out on an island all by ourselves. A few friends called, but not many. What could they say? I never heard from the Lakers except for the first call from Jack Kent Cooke telling me not to worry about a thing, that he would take care of everything. Kareem called. Ernie DiGregorio called and came by the house. So did Don Chaney. They were great. That was it. I just felt as if my whole life had turned upside down, and I had no idea how to turn it around again.”

  Pete Newell called, counseling patience. He was convinced the Lakers would do the right thing and stand by him. “For one thing, Kermit, they need you,” he said. “Without you they have no one to protect Kareem inside.”

  In fact both teams were struggling. The Rockets had lost five straight in the aftermath of the game in Los Angeles, including a loss at home to the Lakers. That game was one of two the Lakers had won in their next six after the fight.

  “We were like zombies,” Tom Nissalke remembered. “To start with, we’d lost our best player. Beyond that, we were an emotional shell. After Calvin went off the rest of the game in L.A., he just wasn’t there the next few games. Everyone on the team felt close to Rudy. Knowing he was still in the hospital made it very tough for anyone to focus on basketball.”