The Punch

by John Feinstein

  He was sitting in the cafeteria one afternoon eating a quiet lunch when Josh Rosenfeld walked in with a huge grin on his face. By then, in addition to his duties as a team manager, Rosenfeld was working as a student assistant in sports information, helping Splaver deal with the PR monster he had created. Rosenfeld walked over, put out his hand, and said, “Congratulations, you did it.”

  “Did what?” Washington said.

  “Made All-American.”

  “My first thought was, ‘Oh, that’s really nice, I made academic All-American again,’” Washington said. “I was happy about it, but to be honest, I expected it. I knew I had the grades, so why wouldn’t I make it?

  “So I just said to Josh, ‘Oh, that’s really nice. Thanks.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Kermit, do you know what a big deal this is?’ I said, ‘Sure, academic All-American is very nice…’”

  Rosenfeld broke in. “Kermit, I’m not talking about academic All-American, I’m talking about basketball. You made first team All-American.”

  Washington was shaking his head. “No,” he said firmly. “You mean All-East.”

  “No!” Rosenfeld insisted. “Not All-East, All-American. Here’s the team: Bill Walton, David Thompson, Doug Collins, Ernie DiGregorio, and you. Does that sound like an All-East team?”

  Washington was floored. He knew how hard Splaver had been working to get him on the national map, and he had hoped to make some kind of All-American team—perhaps third team; at least honorable mention. But first team?

  “I just couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I knew I had good stats, and Mark had gotten me a lot of publicity, but I never thought of myself in the same sentence with players like that. Playing in the all-star games and doing well helped my confidence in terms of thinking about where I was going to get drafted, but I didn’t think in terms of All-American. Certainly not first team. It was like the perfect ending to a perfect college career.”

  Actually, there was more. On graduation day, Washington was awarded a postgraduate scholarship for academic excellence and chosen for the Bruce Hughes Award for meritorious service to the AU community. He was an academic All-American again and graduated with a 3.37 GPA in sociology.

  He had come a long, long way since the day four years earlier when Young and Davis had spotted him running around the gym at St. John’s High School in his all-white outfit. But there was still more to come. When the NBA held its draft, the Los Angeles Lakers, picking fifth, selected him. Donald Dell, whom he had chosen as his agent from among the four Young had brought in to talk to him—“because he was the only one who acted as if I would be helping him rather than he would be helping me”—told him he was going to demand a contract guaranteed for four years for an average of $100,000 a year.

  The NBA. A six-figure salary. Los Angeles. The Lakers—Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain. He really thought he was having a long dream and would wake up any minute in the tiny room at 237 Farragut and hear Barbara yelling at him to get out of bed and get ready for school.

  As thrilled as he was by everything that had happened in his life, there was an element of sadness to graduation day. Part of him wanted to stay at American forever. He felt so comfortable there, so safe, so loved. He knew it would all be very different in Los Angeles and the NBA.

  First-round draft picks didn’t become instant millionaires in the seventies the way they do now. So while Dell negotiated with the Lakers that summer, Washington stayed in D.C. and worked various jobs so he would have spending money until his contract was signed. Every night after work, he would drive (he could finally afford a car) over to American and slowly cruise through the campus, already nostalgic for his days as the Big Man on the Little Campus.

  He was in Massachusetts, working at Red Auerbach’s camp, when Dell called to tell him the deal was done. Four years guaranteed, salaries of $80,000; $90,000; $100,000; $110,000. There was a fifth-year option at $120,000. He was officially a wealthy young man. He called Pat and told her the news. He wanted her to meet him in L.A. once he was out there and got settled. They had never really talked much about getting married, it was more an unspoken given that they would get married sometime after college.

  He went back to Washington to get all his things together for the trip to Los Angeles. School was in session by now, and he went by the practice gym at AU one day to see his old teammates. He was given a hero’s welcome, but he felt more like an old man than one of the guys. His classmates weren’t there; they had all graduated and gone on to grad school or jobs. Tom Young wasn’t there either: AU’s 21–5 record had springboarded him to a job as head coach at Rutgers. Even Marc Splaver was gone. The Washington Bullets, recognizing a brilliant young PR mind when they saw it, had hired him to run their PR department.

  It was hard to believe that it had only been six months since that magic night in the Fort when his left-handed hook had put him in the 20-20 club. He certainly hadn’t been forgotten at AU, but clearly he was gone. Everyone was moving on with their lives. It was time for him to do the same. The best chapter of his life was closed. He wondered what the next one would be like.

  11

  From Hamtramck to

  Ann Arbor to San Diego

  Rudy Tomjanovich’s trip from Hamtramck to Ann Arbor in the fall of 1966 was a little bit longer than the trip Kermit Washington would take three years later from one side of northwest Washington to the other, but the forty-mile journey still represented a major change of life for him.

  Even though Michigan was a state school, it was—and is—the upscale state school. Students came to the University of Michigan from around the country, and it was justifiably proud of its national reputation as an academic institution.

  But there was no mistaking the fact that Michigan was a big-time jock school too. The football team was one of the country’s great traditional powers, although it was in a short-lived down cycle when Tomjanovich first arrived. (By his senior year, Bo Schembechler would start his reign as football coach and the Wolverines would be back in the Rose Bowl.) The basketball team had played in the national championship game in 1965 and by 1967 would be moving into Crisler Arena, a 13,000-seat showcase that would be one of the places to play when it opened.

  More than anything, though, Michigan was big. Even then it had more than 25,000 students. To someone whose world had for all intents and purposes consisted of several blocks in Hamtramck, the place was a little bit overwhelming at the start. “It was just a completely different world,” Tomjanovich said. “I think I was a little intimidated when I first got there, but looking back, I was probably like most freshmen in that sense.”

  Most freshmen were not highly recruited basketball players. Being part of the basketball team, even if it was just the freshman team, gave Tomjanovich a niche, a place he could go, one corner of the campus where people knew him and he had a very defined role. That helped, even if the freshman team only played three games that season. Even with that built-in basketball niche, right from the beginning, Tomjanovich had that feeling inside his stomach again, the need to prove his worth. He had become a star in high school, done everything that needed to be done to prove to people in his neighborhood that he was more than the kid whose family had to go on welfare some of the time.

  Now, though, he was back on square one. Sure, there were some expectations because he had been a highly recruited basketball player. But he often ran into kids with sophisticated backgrounds; kids who thought his 1200 SAT score was only respectable; kids who resented jocks, especially those on scholarship.

  The Vietnam conflict was moving into high gear, and college campuses were divided into two groups, prowar and antiwar, with most students falling into the latter category. Tomjanovich had stepped from a neighborhood still steeped in the values of the fifties onto a campus that was smack in the middle of the sixties. “Talk about culture shock,” he said, laughing.

  He was not about to be deterred from his goals by anything, not the size of the campus or the size of the campus prote
sts. He was going to work as hard as he needed to in order to do well in school and become a star basketball player. He played well as a freshman, but he understood the real tests wouldn’t come until the next season, when he became part of the varsity.

  Freshman year was important for another reason: he met Sophie Migas. They had actually met before at a party during Rudy’s senior year in high school. He had noticed her right away: she was tall and striking, with raven-colored hair and, as he would later write in his autobiography, “the best pair of legs I had ever seen.”

  Sophie and her three sisters had been raised in Hamtramck by their mother after their father died when Sophie was eight. Everyone in the Polish community knew the Migas sisters. Like their mother, they were all tall and striking. Sophie had been a cheerleader at St. Florian’s High School. It was shortly after Hamtramck had played St. Florian’s that Rudy and Sophie encountered one another at a party. Sophie mentioned that she was a cheerleader, and Rudy asked her if she remembered him from the Hamtramck game. No, she said, she really didn’t.

  “I was the only white starter and I scored fifty-four that night,” he said years later. “And she didn’t remember me?”

  Actually Sophie did remember him, but she wasn’t about to let on. In fact, after their second encounter at another party, she told a friend of hers, “I’m going to marry that guy.”

  Why? “I’m not sure,” she said, thirty years into the marriage. “I think there is something to the idea of meeting your soul mate. Something about him told me he was my soul mate.”

  “When she told me the story after we got married, she said it was something about my eyebrows,” Rudy said, shrugging. “Fine with me, as long as it worked.”

  He was shy then, as now, but in Sophie’s words, “never quiet.”

  “Once he became comfortable in a situation, had a little confidence that he belonged where he was, he had plenty to say. He’s always been that way. I think Rudy likes to study a room, figure out what is going on and who is in it. Once he feels as if he’s got it figured out, he gets past his initial shyness. Once we were dating, he wasn’t quiet with me. Just the opposite in fact.”

  Rudy knew nothing of Sophie’s future plans when he and Sophie came across each other again when he was home from Michigan on a weekend. He liked it that she seemed completely unimpressed with the fact that he was a basketball star, even if he was nonplussed by the notion that he had dropped 54 on her school right before her very eyes and she hadn’t noticed. Once they started dating, Rudy tried making it home whenever he could, which wasn’t easy since he didn’t have a car.

  “I bought a lot of seven-dollar bus tickets,” he said.

  Sophie was going to Detroit Business School and planning a career in New York. She was a year younger than Rudy, so he didn’t have to worry about her disappearing to the East Coast before he finished at Michigan. He had no idea what her long-range plans were—or what his own were. All he knew was, he was about to become a sophomore at Michigan and he wanted to be in the starting lineup from day one. Even if Sophie didn’t care if he was a basketball star, he wanted to show her that he was. Just as he wanted to show everyone else.

  As he had hoped, Tomjanovich was in the starting lineup for Michigan on opening night of his sophomore season. The Wolverines were opening Crisler Arena, and coach Dave Strack had scheduled a game against Kentucky to give the new place a big sendoff. The only problem was that Kentucky was at a different level than Michigan and won the game easily, 96–79. The sophomore starting at power forward had a pretty good debut, though, pulling down 27 rebounds.

  “It was all adrenaline,” he said. “I was running around in circles. I couldn’t buy a shot.”

  He also came out of the game with a strained arch, which made him doubtful for the next game—at Detroit. It seemed as if half of Hamtramck showed up for the game. Urged on by John Radwinski, his old high school coach, who now felt no need to play tough guy with him anymore, Tomjanovich decided to give it a try. Hobbling, he scored 30 points, and the Wolverines won, 104–99.

  He was locked in as a star after that. By now Sophie knew he was a basketball player, and on the weekends when he didn’t make the bus trip to Detroit, she often came to Ann Arbor, getting a ride most of the time from one of Rudy’s Hamtramck buddies. Most of his boyhood friends hadn’t gone to college, and a lot of them were getting drafted and being sent to Vietnam. When they were home they partied with great gusto, and they often came down to Ann Arbor in large groups to party. The only problem with that was that Rudy didn’t get as much time alone with Sophie as he would have liked.

  He had now become a big name in the old neighborhood because of his success in Ann Arbor. When he came home on a weekend during the winter break, he received an invitation to dinner from someone who wanted her two sons to meet the great Rudy Tomjanovich. He turned it down.

  “It was the woman in the street,” he said. “The one who had turned her nose up at me when she saw me playing with my black friends. I just wouldn’t go to her house.”

  He continued to play well throughout his sophomore year. Michigan was no better than a middle-of-the-pack Big Ten team at the time. Ohio State was a power, as was Purdue. In 1968 the Buckeyes reached the Final Four; a year later the Boilermakers, led by the legendary shooter Rick Mount, made it to the final before losing to UCLA in the last game of Lew Alcindor’s extraordinary college career (88–2 record, three national titles). In 1968 the Wolverines played at Houston, facing the Elvin Hayes and Don Chaney–led team that would end UCLA’s 61-game winning streak in the Astrodome a few weeks after playing Michigan. Later Hayes would be a teammate of Tomjanovich’s in the NBA, and it would be Chaney whom Tomjanovich would succeed as coach of the Rockets in 1992.

  But that was way down the road. Back then Hayes and Chaney were seniors on a great team, one that hammered Michigan 91–65. Red Auerbach was at the game that night, scouting Chaney, who would be his first-round draft pick that spring. But he noticed the eager, jumping-jack forward from Michigan with the sweet jump shot. He was impressed enough that he made a point of stopping Tomjanovich on his way off the court to tell him he had played well.

  As he recounted the story in his autobiography later, Tomjanovich “brushed him off…. I had no idea who the little man with the unlit cigar was,” he wrote. When he realized the next day that he had been rude to the immortal Red Auerbach, Tomjanovich was mortified. “How could I do that to Red Auerbach?” he moaned.

  According to Auerbach, who remembers seeing Tomjanovich play that night, he didn’t do anything wrong. “He was very polite,” he said. “He thanked me for the compliment and kept walking. His team had just gotten killed. I didn’t exactly expect him to throw his arms around me and say, ‘Thank you, thank you, you made my night.’”

  The difference in the way the two men remember that scene sums up Tomjanovich. Auerbach, who remembers every person who has ever slighted him in any way, saw a polite kid, disappointed by a one-sided loss. He never gave their brief exchange another thought until someone brought it up to him. Tomjanovich was convinced he had screwed up, that he had been rude, that he had somehow been wrong not to recognize Auerbach. He remembered the moment vividly enough that he wrote about it almost thirty years later. Always, if there was a way for Tomjanovich to be tough on himself, he found it.

  Michigan finished that season 11–13. Tomjanovich ended up averaging 19.5 points and 13.5 rebounds a game, impressive numbers, especially in an era with no 3-point shot and no shot clock. He was already attracting attention from pro scouts. There was no denying the progress he was making as a player. Still, unlike a lot of star athletes, Tomjanovich worked very hard at his schoolwork. He knew there was a chance (his words) that he might play pro ball after college, but he wasn’t certain, and he wanted a degree in case basketball didn’t work out for him. He worked hard at the classes that interested him and did enough to get by in everything else. He was a solid B student, which made him pretty average in the Michigan stude
nt body, well above average among Michigan athletes.

  Dave Strack left Michigan after Tomjanovich’s sophomore year to become the athletic director at Arizona, perhaps because the Wolverines had just gone through a second losing season. The coaching job went to Strack’s top assistant, Johnny Orr, one of basketball’s true characters. Orr is a legendary storyteller, one of those coaches who will stay up all night swapping tales if anyone wants to stay up with him. He was one of the few coaches ever able to compete with Bob Knight at Indiana without alienating him. Most coaches who had the nerve to beat Knight with any kind of consistency ended up on Knight’s lengthy hit list. Not Orr.

  Orr never seemed to forget a name. That was because he called almost everyone he encountered “Coach.” Most of the people he knew were coaches, and those who weren’t were flattered to be called that. Only after you were around Orr for a long time did you figure out that he called most people Coach because he had no idea what their name was.

  Orr’s philosophy of coaching when he took over at Michigan was simple: score more than the other guys. He was Loyola Marymount circa 1990 in 1968, minus the 3-point shot. A basket by the opposition was nothing more than an opportunity to get the ball back and score again.

  There’s never been a basketball player born who didn’t love playing for a coach who emphasized shooting and run-and-gun offense. Defense is the dirty work of basketball. Every great coach will tell you that you can’t win without learning defense first (a philosophy Orr came around to in the 1970s), and most practices—especially in preseason—emphasize defense. The ultimate putdown a player can suffer at the hands of Bob Knight has always been the same: “He can’t guard the floor.”