The Punch

by John Feinstein

  “It was all fantasy stuff, kids talking because the actual reality of our lives was so depressing. But now, all of a sudden, here it was. College, a scholarship, the whole deal. Every morning I woke up and said to myself, ‘Is this really happening to you?’”

  9

  Welfare Memories

  When Rudy Tomjanovich coached the Houston Rockets to their first NBA title, in 1994, most of the profiles written about him described “the shoemaker’s son.”

  They were not inaccurate. Rudolph Tomjanovich Sr. was a shoemaker early in Rudolph Tomjanovich Jr.’s life, and the son still has memories of watching his father work on people’s shoes in the small store he had a few blocks from the house where the family lived in Hamtramck, Michigan, a decidedly blue-collar area of Detroit. “Blue-collar” is white for “inner city.”

  Rudy Tomjanovich Sr. came to Detroit from Calumet, a small town in Michigan’s northern peninsula, as a young man and got a job in an automobile factory. Since he was of Croatian descent, his pals decided to set him up with Catherine Modich, a young woman who worked on the other side of the factory and whose family background was also Croatian. They were married soon after they met.

  Born November 24, 1948, Rudy Jr. was the first child of Rudy and Catherine Tomjanovich, eighteen months older than his sister, Frances. He has almost no early memories of his father, because his parents were separated for long stretches shortly after he was born. “I still have this memory from a morning when I was about four years old,” he said. “I went into my mother’s room and there was a man sleeping in her bed. I really wasn’t sure at first who it was. Then she told me it was my dad. After that, he stayed for a long time, and I can remember being very, very happy about it.”

  Money was very tight in the Tomjanovich home at all times. Rudy Sr. worked as a shoemaker for a while, but there were also times when he was unemployed. Health problems, specifically problems with his back, often caused him to spend stretches of time in the VA hospital. At other times he picked up garbage for the city. Often he wasn’t home at night. It wasn’t until he was much older that Rudy figured out why.

  “My father drank,” he said. “Back then, you never labeled someone an alcoholic. You never talked about rehab or anything like that. In Hamtramck there were four bars on every block. It was a tough life there day-to-day, and people went into the bars and drank. I first started going into the bars and drinking when I was fifteen. No one was going to turn you down, because if they did you’d just go to the next place. They needed the business.”

  Hamtramck was every bit as tough a place to grow up as the inner city of Washington, D.C. There weren’t any gangs, but there was plenty of drinking and fighting, and street violence wasn’t uncommon. “I remember Rudy telling me recruiters didn’t want to come into his neighborhood to see him because they were afraid the windows of their cars would get smashed,” Calvin Murphy said. “He never talked about it much, but I know it wasn’t an easy way of life. It’s just not like him to make a big deal about it.”

  In fact, in his autobiography Tomjanovich talks lovingly about both his parents; about his mother’s warmth and his father’s generosity. He says more than once that “I wouldn’t have traded my childhood for the world.” Only later would he come to understand how deeply his childhood had affected him.

  At times, when his father was unemployed, the Tomjanovich family went on welfare. His father had bought a small TV set—“I think it may have been hot, which is why he could afford it,” Tomjanovich said—and the family always kept the TV on a counter in the kitchen behind some curtains. The reason for the curtains was simple: if you were on welfare, you weren’t supposed to have a TV. The curtains were there in case a welfare inspector came to the house. One afternoon when Rudy was home alone watching TV, there was a knock on the door.

  “Come on in, it’s open,” Rudy shouted.

  The door opened and a welfare inspector was standing there. Whoops.

  “I guess the guy didn’t want me to get in trouble with my parents or something,” Rudy said. “Because he didn’t turn us in. I kept the front door locked after that if I was watching TV.”

  In his autobiography Tomjanovich writes about how embarrassed he would feel when he and his father would have to go across town to pick up the food provided to families on welfare. They would put the packages of food on a trolley and cart it back to their house. Pushing the trolley through the streets, Tomjanovich felt as if all eyes were on them, knowing where the generic packages came from.

  “It was very embarrassing,” he said. “I always felt like people were labeling us as failures because we were on welfare. The only thing that made it bearable was the fact that the food was better than anything else we ever ate.”

  There weren’t a lot of kids Rudy’s age in his neighborhood, so he often walked a couple of blocks over to DeQuindre Street, where there were plenty of kids to play with. Most of them were black, including his three best friends. It never occurred to Rudy that he was doing anything unusual until one afternoon when he and his pals were playing stickball in front of his house. A neighbor was walking by, and when Rudy waved in her direction, she looked away from him and thrust her nose upward as if to say, “I’m not going to talk to you when you’re playing with them.”

  The memory stayed with Tomjanovich for years. “There just wasn’t any question that she was looking down on me because I was playing with black kids,” he said. “I felt so humiliated at the time, as if something was wrong with me. Of course later I understood that the problem was hers, not mine. But being a young kid at the time with no understanding of things like that, it all sort of fell on me.

  “The funny thing, looking back, is that I can’t be certain that’s what she was doing. Maybe she didn’t even see me. Maybe she was looking up at the sky to see if it was raining. But standing there in the street that day, there was no doubt in my mind that she was sticking her nose in the air at me because I was playing with three black kids.”

  Now Tomjanovich understands the incident was part of a pattern that shaped him. He understood that his family was poor: the welfare food, sharing a house with his grandparents, his father changing jobs or not having a job. When he was a little older, he heard whispers around the neighborhood about his father’s drinking. He knew his father wasn’t the only person in Hamtramck with a drinking problem, not by a long shot, but nonetheless the whispers hurt. He vowed then that no one would ever whisper about him that way.

  Always he felt put down, as if the world was collectively looking down its nose at him the way the woman in the street had that day. He would prove them all wrong. He would prove that he had—his word—value. He wasn’t going to be just another poor kid whose parents had met in the factories of Detroit who grew up and went to work in a factory too.

  And so he became the most driven kid in his school. Often driven kids are the product of driven parents. They have to succeed because no matter how much they succeed, it isn’t enough to please their parents. But Rudy and Cathie Tomjanovich weren’t like that at all. As long as their children stayed out of trouble, they were happy. “My guess is they would have been perfectly happy if I had just grown up and gone to work in a factory,” Rudy said. “I think in some ways they worried about me moving away, going out into a world they didn’t know anything about.”

  Rudy’s drive came from within. It came from the looks he and his father got wheeling the welfare food through the streets. Or from the looks he thought they got. It came from the woman with the turned-up nose. It came from the whispers about his dad.

  “I had to make A’s in school,” he said. “That was the way I proved my worth. Later, sports came into it, but at first it was just school.”

  Every single week in school was a new challenge, another opportunity to fail if he didn’t make A’s. Sunday nights, before going to bed, Rudy and his family would watch The Ed Sullivan Show and then What’s My Line? As What’s My Line? moved into its final minutes, Rudy could feel his s
tomach twisting into a knot. The end of the show meant it was time to go to bed. When he woke up it would be Monday morning. The start of another week in school. He had to do well that week, he couldn’t fail. He wouldn’t have anyone looking at him and thinking he wasn’t a good student, thinking that he had no value. Every Sunday night was the same: Ed Sullivan; What’s My Line?; stomachache.

  “The worst part was, there wasn’t really anybody I could talk to about it,” Tomjanovich said. “My parents didn’t understand. All they knew was I was making good grades in school and they were happy about that. My friends didn’t understand, they just wanted to get out of school every day and go play. So it all just sat inside me all the time.”

  As he grew older, sports became his other outlet, the other venue where he could prove his worth. He played baseball first. He had a cousin, Mark Modich, who was two years older than he was who played on a team that won the Little League World Series when Rudy was ten. One of the coaches of that team was Mark’s father, Joe Modich, Rudy’s uncle. It was Uncle Joe who coached Rudy, bought him equipment, and encouraged him. It was also Uncle Joe who saw sports as a way out of Hamtramck for Rudy. “You’ve got good grades,” he would tell his nephew. “If you keep them up and you excel at a sport, you can go to college on a scholarship.”

  The only problem, at least in Rudy’s mind, was that he wasn’t that good a baseball player. He was okay, good enough to make all-star teams as a twelve-year-old. But there were certain players— his cousin included—who were clearly on a different level. In all probability, he would have become a very good baseball player if he had continued to play. He hadn’t hit his big growth spurt and wouldn’t until he was a junior in high school. He was a talented athlete with a great work ethic. But something told him baseball wasn’t what he wanted to do, that it wasn’t his sport. The toughest problem was telling his uncle Joe, who had worked so hard to help make him a baseball player.

  “Rudy, I really think you need a sport,” his uncle said when Rudy finally worked up the courage to talk to him about not playing baseball anymore.

  “I know,” Rudy answered. “I’ve got one. Basketball.”

  He had never played the game in any organized fashion, but the bug had bitten him. He liked the fact that he could play alone if he wanted to, that he didn’t need any equipment other than a ball and a net to play. In many ways the solitude of going off on your own with no one watching, no one grading you or judging you, to just work on your shot or your game had great appeal to him. Something inside told him this was the right sport for him.

  “Of course the funny thing about it was, I wasn’t any good at the time,” he said. “But I wanted to play. I really wanted to play.”

  And he wanted to get good. He had been good at baseball, but not good enough. He felt he had seen his ceiling and it wasn’t high enough. In basketball he had no idea how high the ceiling was, because he had never really worked at the game, never been coached the way he had been in baseball.

  He began spending all his free time hanging out at The Courts. The Courts were located in the schoolyard at Copernicus Junior High School. As with all local basketball meccas, no one knew exactly why they had become the place for basketball players to gather. “It was smack in the middle of a white neighborhood,” Tomjanovich remembered. “But guys from all over the city, most of them black, always came to play there. Maybe it was because you knew you were safe coming in and out of the area. I never did figure it out.”

  Like all places where multiple games are being played throughout the day and night, The Courts had a pecking order. There were two L-shaped basket supports that were reserved for the high-end games. Adjacent were three rims with straight-pole supports. The quality of play was best at the first of the L-support hoops, and it moved down to beginners at the far end of the yard. Everyone knew which court he belonged on. If you began to stand out on one court, it was time to try your luck at the next court. There you had to prove yourself again.

  Tomjanovich began to move up in the pecking order. He was soon playing with older kids and fitting in as his game matured. When he wasn’t at The Courts, he would find a rim near his house and work on his own. It was as if he had never played baseball.

  He had a setback in his freshman year at Hamtramck High School when he didn’t make the cut for the freshman team. He was stunned, hurt, disbelieving. In a now-famous story that has been told and retold in every profile ever written about him, Tomjanovich challenged the freshman basketball coach to a game of one-on-one, the deal being if he won the game, he would get a spot on the team.

  He lost the game. And made the team. “He saw how much it meant to me,” Tomjanovich has always said in retelling the story.

  There are many stories about great athletes dealing with failure at an early age. The one told most often has Michael Jordan being cut from his high school team as a sophomore. Jordan was actually sent down to the junior varsity, but the point of the story is how he dealt with the notion of failure. The best athletes have an extra gear of drive that seems to kick in when they are challenged or, more specifically, when they are told they aren’t good enough. Tomjanovich believed he had been considered not good enough his entire life. Many teenagers, after working as hard at a sport as Tomjanovich had at basketball, would have been crushed if they had been told they weren’t good enough to play freshman ball. It had the opposite effect on Tomjanovich: it made him want to work even harder.

  Making the freshman team as an act of charity wasn’t enough for Rudy. He felt as if he was back in the streets being looked down upon either for carting welfare food with his dad or for playing with his black friends. That same knot started crawling into his stomach before practice, the one he had felt watching What’s My Line? He had to prove himself, he had to show the coach and the other players that he had value. He just had to.

  The growth spurt from his freshman year to his junior year made a difference. He went from 6-1 to 6-6 without any noticeable loss of coordination. His jump shot, which he had worked on so hard for so many hours, improved steadily. More important, he was growing into his body. He was still skinny, but he was becoming an excellent leaper, someone who could not only jump high but could jump quickly. He became a starter on the junior varsity as a sophomore and began to show signs of becoming a real player.

  At the end of that season, he made some switches in his schedule so he could be in a gym class with the varsity players. One afternoon John Radwinski, the varsity coach, asked him why he was in the class. When Tomjanovich explained he was hoping to hone his skills playing against better, more experienced players, Radwinski told him he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “If you’re thinking of coming out for the varsity next season, don’t bother,” he said. “You’d just be wasting your time.”

  Radwinski was one of those tough-guy, old-school, tough-love coaches. Tomjanovich would come to understand that later. At that moment, though, he was rocked. Again he was being told he wasn’t any good, he had no value. It made him work even harder, to the point of obsession, at the game. The next fall he not only made the team but became a starter and a star. Radwinski never mentioned the gym-class comment. No doubt he thought he had done a great job motivating the insecure kid to become a better player. Whether Tomjanovich needed any extra motivation was questionable, but Radwinski had certainly supplied it.

  By this time Rudy had become one of the star players at The Courts. There are always schoolyard stories that people tell and retell through the years. Tomjanovich’s involved Reggie Harding, a local legend who was playing for the Detroit Pistons while Rudy was in high school. One afternoon, as the story goes, Harding and his pals showed up at The Courts looking to play. As luck would have it, Tomjanovich and two of his friends had winners on court one when Harding and company arrived.

  Harding was clowning and preening throughout most of the game, which, as with most half-court games, was played to 11. Tomjanovich’s team hung close until Harding started
to use his size (almost 7 feet) and bulk (about 250 to Tomjanovich’s 175) to control the game. But near the end of the game, Harding grabbed a defensive rebound and held the ball up with one hand, his back to Tomjanovich. Before he knew what had happened, Tomjanovich had come in from behind, snatched the ball from Harding’s hand, and in one motion dunked it.

  “The place went nuts,” Tomjanovich said, smiling at the memory thirty-five years later. “People were screaming and clapping. I loved it. Reggie didn’t. He immediately claimed that he had actually tipped it in, that it was his basket.”

  The argument wasn’t going very well, as Tomjanovich tells the story, until one of the older men watching from the stands walked onto the court, pointed a finger in Harding’s face, and said, “It can’t be your basket. You never brought the ball back out [beyond the foul line] after the missed shot. The boy dunked on you. Admit it.”

  Harding gave in. Then he backed Tomjanovich in the next three possessions and dunked on him to end the game. Still, Tomjanovich had had his moment. “He couldn’t take that away,” he said, “no matter how many times he dunked on me.”

  Basketball moments were becoming more and more frequent for Tomjanovich by then. Even though he had become a star on his high school team, he still didn’t see himself that way. He didn’t get a lot of feedback from his parents, because they weren’t basketball fans. In fact the first time his father came to a game, he walked in during the junior varsity game. Spotting a seat on the other side of the gym that looked good to him, he just wandered across the court while play was going on. Apparently, since he didn’t see his son playing he didn’t think the real game had started yet.