What’s more, unlike today’s athlete, who is coddled and told how wonderful he is from the moment he shows any skill, Tomjanovich wasn’t receiving a lot of kudos. He wasn’t drowning in recruiting letters or being flown around the country courtesy of various shoe companies.
If this had been the twenty-first century instead of the late 1960s, he would have been going to all-star summer camps, playing AAU ball around the country, and getting recruiting pitches from all the big-time college programs. But this was a different time. Recruiting was far more regional. Occasionally a superstar might go from one coast to the other, the way Lew Alcindor did in 1965, when he left New York City to enroll at UCLA. But that was rare. Most players stayed close to home, because there were no national camps to be seen in, no recruiting newsletters, and very few budgets that allowed coaches to travel more than a couple of hundred miles from their campus.
These days players start getting letters from colleges in eighth or ninth grade. Most have narrowed their choice of schools to a short list by the start of their junior year. Many announce their college decision as juniors or, at the very latest, early in their senior year.
That wasn’t the way it was when Tomjanovich finished his junior year at Hamtramck in the spring of 1965. He had played well as a junior, and he would grow to 6-8 by the start of his senior year. But it wouldn’t be until midway through his senior season that he would begin to think about colleges or they would begin to think seriously about him. He was pretty certain at this point that he would get a scholarship to go to school someplace. But he had no idea where that would be.
As it turned out he could have gone just about anyplace he wanted. As a senior he averaged 34 points a game—by then Radwinski didn’t seem to think he was wasting his time—and being 6-8 with a jump shot to twenty feet and a 3.5 grade point average, he was every college coach’s dream recruit. “The letters started coming in from everywhere,” he said. “I had never thought of myself as that kind of player.”
He narrowed his list to four schools in the Midwest: Michigan, Michigan State, Detroit, and Toledo. The reason Toledo made the list was that Tomjanovich’s high school teammate and friend John Brisker (who would later play in the NBA) was there. Detroit, which was a basketball power in the 1960s, would mean staying at home.
The national schools showed genuine interest, notably coach Guy V. Lewis at Houston, who already had Elvin Hayes in his starting lineup. But for a kid who had never traveled anywhere, the idea of going far from home was pretty much out of the question. He ended up choosing between the two in-state Big Ten schools: Michigan State and Michigan. He liked them both. He liked both coaches, Dave Strack at Michigan and John Bennington at Michigan State.
He actually felt more comfortable on campus at Michigan State. The students, it seemed to him, were more like the kids he had grown up with in Hamtramck, middle-class, blue-collar city kids like him. Michigan had more rich kids, more kids from out of state, and, this being the sixties, a noticeable hippie population. Tomjanovich had heard about hippies, but he had never seen one before.
“I was sort of fascinated by them,” he said. “They were just so different from me. It seemed as if they were from another world.”
In the end, Michigan won out for two reasons: it was closer to Hamtramck and it was, after all, the University of Michigan. Like most kids growing up in Michigan, Tomjanovich had fantasized about wearing the famous maize-and-blue uniform. Michigan was a national power in the midsixties, having gone to the Final Four in 1965 led by the great Cazzie Russell. The Wolverines had beaten the famous Bill Bradley–led Princeton team in the semifinals before losing to UCLA in the championship game. Tomjanovich wanted to be a part of that tradition. Michigan became an obvious choice.
But it wasn’t an easy choice. The easy choice would have been Michigan State, which didn’t have the tradition to live up to that Michigan did. Tomjanovich wasn’t completely convinced he was good enough to be a star at Michigan, but he knew he had to go there and find out. He had come a long way, from being cut from the freshman team to being recruited by all the national powers.
Now, though, he was starting over. He would be just another freshman at Michigan with gaudy high school numbers. He would be in a new place, back on square one, an unknown in a school with thousands and thousands of students. He would have to prove himself to everyone: teachers, classmates, teammates.
Again.
10
Dreams Can Come True
It is a very good bet that there was no freshman on the campus of American University in the fall of 1969 who was happier to be there than Kermit Washington. He was only a few miles from the house on Farragut Street N.W., but he might as well have been on another planet.
“It was the first time in my entire life that I felt wanted,” he said. “It was the first time I didn’t dread going home at night. I can remember hearing myself laugh at night, talking to people in the dorm and thinking, ‘What’s that sound?’ It was me, laughing, having fun.”
He was understandably nervous about how he would fit in at AU. His SAT scores were about 350 points lower than those of the average freshman at the school, and his grades were also considerably lower than most. That was only a small concern, though; he believed that if he worked hard at his classes, he would do just fine. It was the cultural gap that concerned him more. Most AU kids were from upper middle-class to upper-class backgrounds. They had traveled, been places in their lives. Washington’s only real memory of travel was the trip he and Chris had made with their mother as little boys.
The coaches were also concerned with how he would fit in. They knew he was an academic risk and admissions would be watching very closely to see how he did. They were convinced he would fit in socially, because he was bright and articulate. Class-work worried them.
It was Tom Davis who came up with the idea of getting Washington to enroll in a weight-training class. “I did it for two reasons,” he said. “One, I knew it would help his basketball a lot to put a little muscle on his body. Two, I figured he could use a relatively easy course, since the school didn’t have a lot of them.”
Little did Davis know that he had opened a door that would change Washington’s life forever. He was still at a stage where he was growing into his body as a freshman, and getting in the weight room accelerated the process. He became friends with a Ph.D. candidate named Trey Coleman, who had played football at Nebraska. Coleman—Big Trey to all his friends—took Washington under his wing, teaching him how to work with weights, how to push himself beyond what he thought were his limits, and how to work hard consistently rather than in spurts.
“He was a very serious guy,” Washington said. “He would come to the games and say to me things like, ‘Young man, I want you to go out there and work hard tonight for all forty minutes.’ I can remember not wanting to disappoint him.”
Since freshmen couldn’t play varsity ball back then (the rule allowing freshmen to play was enacted in 1972), Washington played on the freshman team, coached by Joe Boylan. It was quickly apparent to Boylan, as it had been to Tom Young and Tom Davis, that Washington was as talented as he was unpolished. “He would make great plays and awful plays,” Boylan remembered. “Sometimes at the same time. I remember in one game, he made spectacular steals and dunks on two plays in a couple of minutes. There was just one problem: he dunked on our basket.”
All three coaches learned another thing quickly: Washington was not a player who responded well to yelling and screaming. He would not, for example, have done very well playing for John Radwinski, Rudy Tomjanovich’s high school coach.
“When I got on guys, it was to motivate them, to try to get them to work harder,” Young said. “I figured out almost right away that you didn’t do that with Kermit, for two reasons. First, he was going to work hard no matter what you did. Second, if you did yell at him, he was going to take it personally and sulk and play worse. I remember one day after practice he came to me and said, ‘Coach, you don’t
have to yell at me. Just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.’ He wasn’t kidding.”
As raw as he was as a player, Washington improved with astonishing speed. He was still growing: by the end of his freshman year he was up to 6-7 and his weight was at 200 pounds and climbing. He became the best player on the freshman team, giving Young and his coaches hope for the future after the varsity finished the season 11–12. That was certainly an improvement on 4–19, but not what Young ultimately had in mind.
As well as he did in basketball as a freshman, Washington did even better off the court. His theory that hard work would pay off in the classroom proved correct. By the end of first semester, he had a regimen: classes in the morning; weight room after lunch; practice; dinner; study; jump rope; bed. “If you knew what time it was, you knew where I was on any given day,” he said. “I would go out on the weekends sometimes, but on weekdays and weeknights it was the same routine every single day.”
His obsession with weights reached a point that Young left orders that he wasn’t to be allowed in the weight room on game days. Washington didn’t want to miss a single day; Young wanted him rested when there was a game to play. “I got around him, though,” Washington said. “I had a key made and went in there before anyone was in there. It would have bothered me all day if I missed, even on a game day.”
Socially, Washington fit in from the start, but things got much better when he met Pat Carter, a petite, striking freshman from Long Island. Pat Carter’s grades were good enough to get her into almost any college she wanted. Her older sister was at Barnard and would go on from there to Harvard Medical School. Pat’s dream was to become a U.S. senator. Since AU had one of the best government schools in the country and she thought Washington, D.C., would be a nice place to go to school, she chose AU.
The story of how she ended up meeting Kermit is a complicated one. It happened because of a friend of a friend who had once dated someone who knew another friend of Kermit’s—or something like that. In any event, they were eventually set up to meet at the concession stands at halftime of a varsity basketball game after Kermit had played in the freshman game. Pat, who was as loquacious as Kermit was quiet, took one look at Kermit and said the first thing that came into her head: “My, you certainly are skinny.”
That was pretty much the end of Dream Date I. “He sulked the rest of the night,” she said. “He thought I had insulted him. I didn’t mean it as an insult, he was just very skinny. I felt bad about it because I had hurt his feelings. The next day I saw him reading a book and I tried to talk to him. He wasn’t having any of it. Later that night a couple of my friends and I went over to his room and we put on some music. I remember singing ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’ For some reason that loosened him up, and he started talking a little bit.
“To be honest, I think his interest in me at the start had more to do with my brain than anything else. He said he needed help with his schoolwork, and I was able to give it to him. I had the feeling that was the reason he was seeing me. Then one day I told him that my roommate had set me up with someone else and I was going to go out with him. He said, ‘That’s fine as long as you help me with my paper,’ and walked away. Then the next day he told me if I went out with this other guy, he would be very upset, that he wouldn’t be able to see me anymore. I said, ‘Even if I help you with your papers?’ He said, ‘Even if you help me with my papers.’ That was the first time he really admitted that he liked me.”
Kermit and Pat became inseparable soon after that. The coaches were delighted. Pat was smart and fun, made Kermit happy, and had a worldliness that he lacked.
“She was perfect for him,” Tom Davis said. “It was one of those relationships you knew right away was built to last. Kermit was lucky to find her.”
The coaches were feeling pretty lucky to have found Washington by the end of his freshman season. His game had developed rapidly, although it was still pretty basic: catch the ball in the low post, turn and shoot, and then go chase the rebound. His quickness made him very difficult to box out, and he probably got as many points off offensive rebounds as he did out of the offense. By the time Kermit returned for his sophomore year, his weight was up to 215 and he was 6-8.
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he would be AU’s starting center. In those days American played in the Middle Atlantic Conference, a forerunner of what became the East Coast Conference, a very competitive league that included traditional eastern powerhouse basketball schools like Temple and La Salle. The Eagles also played all the local schools in the D.C. area: Maryland, Georgetown, and George Washington. This was before the proliferation of conferences changed the pecking order in college basketball. AU was on a level similar to Georgetown and GW, though below Maryland, which was part of the Atlantic Coast Conference and was becoming a national power under Lefty Driesell.
Washington was American’s best player as a sophomore. He led the team in scoring and rebounding, and the team’s record improved to 13–12. The Eagles were competitive almost every night because it was almost impossible to keep Washington off the offensive boards. “Some nights our offense was simple: throw it up and let Kermit go get it,” Young said. “It was an amazing thing to watch. Two years earlier he had been running around the gym at St. John’s in those white shorts with no idea how to play. Now he’d become the second leading rebounder in the country.”
In fact only Artis Gilmore, the 7-foot-1 center at Jacksonville, the NCAA runner-up that season, averaged more rebounds per game than Washington. The Eagles had no on-campus gym back then, just a small practice facility. They played their home games— as did George Washington until it built an on-campus gym in the midseventies—across the Potomac River in the ancient gym on the army base at Fort Myer, Virginia.
The Fort, as it was called, was like no other home court in the country. American’s “locker room” was actually the weight room. Players would drape their clothes across weights and sit on various machines to listen to the coach’s pregame talk. Some nights the heat worked. Other nights it didn’t. Most nights there was no hot water in the showers. On one occasion the visiting coach, after a controversial call had cost his team the game, got so angry that he smashed a hole in the wall, walking off the court. A few minutes later there was a knock on the “visiting” weight room door. It was the military police, there to arrest him for damaging government property.
As the team got better, AU students and fans flocked to the Fort, which could seat about 3,000 people if the fire marshals weren’t looking. (How could they look? It was a military base.) Washington became a folk hero on campus and, even more amazingly, in his old neighborhood. High school buddies of his, many of them looking for work or waiting to be drafted—America’s military engagement in Vietnam had not yet ended—would show up at the games to cheer him on.
“I was their hero,” he said matter-of-factly. “They came because they were living through me. I was living the dream every kid in my neighborhood had growing up. I had gotten out. I was going to college, getting an education. I was a basketball star. People who wouldn’t even look at me when I was in high school wanted to be my friend now. It was a whole new world.”
And a new life. After all the years of feeling inferior, of feeling unwanted in his own home, thinking that he was a nobody born to a mentally ill mother, he had become someone. To most people at AU, Kermit was the guy everyone wanted to be friends with. As he became a bigger and bigger star, he became more outgoing and confident. About the only person who could sense the hurt he still felt from boyhood was Pat, the person he spent the most time with.
“It was very hard for him to show affection,” she said. “Sometimes I would ask him directly if he really cared about me, and he would say something like, ‘I think you’re really nice.’ It was hard for him to be more open than that. He had never been nurtured, never really been loved. I came to believe that if I nurtured him, if I loved him enough, he would get past all that. But I don’t believe he ev
er really did.
“I was important to him. He cared about me. He needed me. But in some ways I was more the mother he felt he had never had than his girlfriend or his wife. He was happy in those years at AU, very happy, but it wasn’t because he was with me. I was just part of the fabric.
“We would go to a party, sure… after he shot his hundred jump shots. There were two things that drove Kermit in those years: the adulation he got from being the star of the basketball team and the thought that he might play in the NBA. Once that became a real possibility, it was the driving force in his life more than anything or anyone. The strange thing is, as hard as he was working, all the hours he put in, all the obsessing, all the questions about ‘am I good enough, how do I get better?’ I missed what was going on. Because I thought when all was said and done, we’d graduate, he might play a little bit of ball somewhere, but then he’d go on to law school and we would go on with our lives.”
Most of these thoughts didn’t come to Pat until much later, when the marriage began to deteriorate. Back then she saw Kermit as a work in progress, someone she loved being with, someone who was smart and kind and good-hearted. That was enough for her. And she believed that loving him all day, every day, would be enough for him. She knew then that basketball was his passion. She thought as they grew older that would change.
It never really did.
It was during his sophomore year that it first occurred to Kermit that he might be able to play basketball for a living. He had averaged 18 rebounds a game against good competition, and he knew he was still learning and improving. And growing. By the time he came back for his junior year, his weight was closing in on 240. He was also starting to get a lot of publicity, much of it courtesy of Marc Splaver, American’s bright young sports information director.
Splaver, who had graduated from AU in 1970, knew a good story when he saw one. He began peppering the local media with stories about Washington; about how the coaches had discovered him almost by accident; about how he had completely remade his body in two years; about how he had come to school as a shaky student and was consistently making A’s and B’s. Kermit loved the media attention Splaver was able to get him, and he and Splaver became close friends.
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