The Punch

by John Feinstein

  If you can’t guard the floor, you can’t play for Bob Knight.

  But you could play for Johnny Orr in 1969. One of Orr’s assistants then was Fred Snowden, who later became the head coach at Arizona. Tomjanovich took an activities class that year taught by Snowden and spent much of it (surprisingly he got an A) working with Snowden on a bank shot. The first time he tried the bank shot out in a game was against Indiana, and he scored 48 points, tying Cazzie Russell’s school record. From that point on, the bank shot was an important part of his repertoire.

  The late 1960s were a good time to be a talented college basketball player. The American Basketball Association had come into existence in 1967 and was trying to compete with the NBA for talent. During Tomjanovich’s senior year in high school there had been a total of nine professional basketball teams. By the time he started his junior year at Michigan, thanks to NBA expansion and the birth of the ABA there were twenty-two.

  That meant there were more jobs and, for the top players, the asking prices had gone up, since there was competition. The ABA was willing in some cases to sign a player to a contract and then let him choose his team. That wasn’t what Tomjanovich was thinking about when Johnny Orr became the Wolverines’ coach. He was still focusing on all the weaknesses he saw in his game.

  “I knew I wasn’t particularly fast and I needed to improve my defense,” he said. “We were going to score a lot of points because of Johnny’s style, but I figured the pro scouts would be on to that. They would think my numbers were deceiving.”

  Tomjanovich was right about one thing: pro scouts don’t pay a lot of attention to statistics. At most, they use them to back up whatever they have decided about a player. When pro scouts looked at Tomjanovich they saw a quick leaper, a hard worker, and a guy who was 6-8 and could roam twenty feet from the basket and consistently make shots. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he would be a pro.

  But that wasn’t the way Tomjanovich looked at it. The knot in the pit of his stomach now showed up on game nights, that feeling that he had to prove himself—again and again. The team wasn’t a lot better during his junior year: the record improved to 13–11 overall and 7–7 in the Big Ten. Tomjanovich’s numbers also improved. His scoring average soared to 25.7 points per game, and he also averaged 14 rebounds a night.

  That set up a senior year in which Tomjanovich had three goals: graduate with a solid GPA; play well enough to be a high draft pick; and convince Sophie that, wherever he was going after college, she should go with him.

  “By senior year she had me, I mean totally,” he said. “I had a car by then, and I would drive into Detroit and meet her whenever I could. Sometimes, if my classes were over early, I’d go in and meet her for lunch. She would always fix sandwiches for me to take back to school, and they were so good I’d eat them before I even got back.”

  He smiled. “Funny how you act when you’re young. I’m totally hooked, but I have to be cool. So I tell her one day that if she wants to see other guys while I’m up at school, I understand, it’s no big deal. That was absolutely the last thing in the world I wanted, but I had to act like it didn’t really matter to me. She got all upset and said, ‘Is that what you really want? You want to see other people?’ And I was like, ‘No, no way, that’s the last thing I want.’ After that, I quit trying to be cool.”

  He ended up going three-for-three in his senior goals. He graduated with a B average; he continued to improve in basketball, averaging 30.1 points per game and almost 16 rebounds; and when spring came he persuaded Sophie to marry him.

  “I didn’t know where I was going,” he said. “But I knew wherever it was going to be, I wanted her to be there.”

  The question then was, where would he be going? Tomjanovich was certain to be a high draft pick in either the NBA or the ABA. He flew to New York to meet with representatives from both leagues and came back convinced that the NBA was the place to be. The ABA had offered more money total—except that most of it was in a back-loaded annuity. Given the shaky status of a three-year-old league, signing that sort of deal wasn’t very appealing. So it would be the NBA.

  As it turned out, he was the second player chosen in the draft. After the Detroit Pistons took St. Bonaventure center Bob Lanier, the San Diego Rockets took Tomjanovich. The choice was controversial. The Rockets were a struggling, third-year franchise, and the thinking in town was that Pete Maravich, college basketball’s all-time leading scorer, who had averaged more than 44 points a game during three seasons at LSU, was a natural fit. He would score a lot, he would do it with flair, and he would sell tickets.

  “He would sell a lot of tickets on the road, we knew that for sure,” said Pete Newell, who was then the Rockets’ general manager. “But that was fool’s gold, because we wouldn’t share in road gate receipts, so it wouldn’t help us to sell out other people’s buildings. I also knew he would sell tickets at home, at least in the short term, but I was looking at it long term. When I looked at Rudy, I saw a guy who could do a lot of things: he could score, he could rebound, he could run the floor, and he could shoot the ball from deep at 6-8. I had nothing against Maravich. I just didn’t think you could build a championship team around a player who had to control the ball that much of the time. Pete had fabulous individual skills. Basketball’s a team game. I thought long term Rudy was a better pick for us.”

  Newell was castigated by the local media for the pick. “Rudy Who?” was one headline. In the meantime he had also drafted Calvin Murphy, stealing the future Hall of Famer in the second round after the entire league had passed on him in the first round because of doubts about his height. Those doubts drove the 5-foot-10-inch Murphy. “I played angry my whole career,” he said, “because I had so many people to prove wrong.”

  Tomjanovich never played angry, and he had never had any insecurities caused by his height. But by the time he arrived in San Diego, he would have as much to prove as Murphy. Just for different reasons.

  The wedding was pretty close to perfect. It was held in the church across the street from Sophie’s home, and just about all of Hamtramck was there. The local hero who had made good at Michigan and was on his way to stardom in the NBA was marrying the beautiful former cheerleader after a storybook romance. The newlyweds got in their Chevy Camaro when the party was over and began driving southwest, headed for their new life on the West Coast.

  “It was all perfect,” Sophie said. “Until we got to New Mexico.”

  That was where the bad movie started. Rudy got nailed for speeding somewhere in the middle of nowhere. “We were cruising along, listening to the radio out on the open road,” he said. “I looked up in the rearview mirror and saw this very angry policeman gesturing at me to pull over. He didn’t have a siren, and he’d been behind me for like twenty minutes. He was pissed.”

  Naturally they couldn’t just pay a fine and move on, they had to go before the local judge. Just as naturally His Honor was at lunch and the newlyweds had no choice but to wait until he came back. While they waited, Rudy stewed about all the time they were losing. He needed to get to San Diego, get settled in, and begin preparing for training camp. After all, this was a new league and a new life, and there was so much to prove. He started talking about some kind of shortcut.

  “When he pulled out the map, I knew we were in trouble,” Sophie said.

  The judge finally finished lunch and told Rudy the fine was $75, which was a fortune in those days. They got back in the Camaro, having lost several hours. About an hour later, something told Rudy they weren’t headed in the right direction. He pulled into a gas station to find out where they were and where they needed to go.

  The news wasn’t good. “We had gone about fifty miles in the wrong direction,” he remembered. “The guy told us we had two options: turn around and go back the fifty miles to get back to where we’d be pointed in the right direction on the interstate, or go through the mountains.

  “I said, ‘Okay, we’ll go through the mountains.’”


  Sophie’s response was direct: “No way. We aren’t going that way.”

  “We have to, we’ve lost a half a day.”

  “Don’t care. Not going that way.”

  “We are going that way.”

  “Rudy, just because you got a speeding ticket doesn’t mean we have to risk our lives.”

  “Well if I’d had a good map girl, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  Wrong thing to say. Sophie was out of the car, crying.

  “I’m going back to Hamtramck.”

  “Fine.”

  The proverbial first fight in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in the West.

  “I gave in finally,” he said, laughing at the memory. “I knew she wasn’t going back to Michigan, but I also knew I wasn’t going to San Diego without her, and she was very determined.”

  “I was determined,” she said, “that we get there in one piece.”

  The mountain plan was abandoned. So were the map and any shortcuts. Rudy backtracked to the interstate and drove like a demon on the main roads the rest of the way. Fortunately he didn’t get another ticket, and they arrived in San Diego without further incident.

  And thought they had died and gone to heaven.

  They were young and in love and had never seen southern California before. “Heck, we hadn’t seen much of southern Michigan,” Tomjanovich joked years later.

  They got an apartment five minutes from the beach and settled into an idyllic lifestyle, different from anything either had ever imagined. Of course it wasn’t quite the same in the NBA as it is now. Rudy had signed a contract for what felt like more money than he could possibly hope to spend in a lifetime—four years, $400,000—but the perks weren’t quite the same. Each day he would bring his practice uniform home for his wife to wash, and before he went on the road, she had to make sure his road uniform was presentable.

  Sophie was also a bit nonplussed when she was asked early in the season to speak to a group of teenagers about life as an NBA wife. “I was about two years older than most of them,” she said. “And probably a lot less worldly. I had no idea what to say.”

  Giving that speech turned out to be easier than dealing with an NBA husband. The husband was confused and frustrated by what was going on with his new team and his new career. The Rockets were coached by future Hall of Famer Alex Hannum, who had coached everywhere in the ABA and the NBA and had won three titles with three different teams: the St. Louis Hawks in 1958, the Philadelphia 76ers in 1967, and an ABA title with the Oakland Oaks in 1969.

  Hannum wasn’t happy with Newell’s decision to draft Tomjanovich with the first pick. These days it would be almost impossible for a player to be chosen in the first round without the approval of the team’s coach, who often as not has final say on personnel matters under any circumstances. Back then there was a clear separation of church and state—except in Boston, where Red Auerbach did everything until he stepped down as coach. The general manager selected the players and the coach coached them. Hannum wasn’t even present at the draft when Newell selected Tomjanovich.

  Tomjanovich was caught in the middle of a feud between Newell and Hannum. Both were strong-willed. Hannum wanted Newell to make changes, perhaps trade the first-round pick for more experienced players. As the season went on, Tomjanovich found himself playing less and less rather than more and more. Even though he suspected that his lack of playing time had little to do with anything he was doing wrong, he kept thinking that if he worked and worked he would eventually win Hannum over. What was the deficiency in his game? What could he work on to improve? Since he wasn’t even getting that much playing time in practice, he would often go to a local gym at night to shoot by himself and work on his game. Most nights he took a rebounder with him. That would be Mrs. Tomjanovich. At least, she thought, she would have some stories to tell if she was asked the next season to talk again about life as an NBA wife.

  “That was a long winter,” she remembered. “I mean, we loved San Diego, the weather, the whole thing. But Rudy was so frustrated. He hated not playing, and he kept searching for an answer when in truth there wasn’t an answer. It wasn’t anything he was doing wrong, but he couldn’t see it that way. He just kept working and working and working and getting nothing out of it.”

  Back then first-round picks weren’t superstars with agents who could go in and get a coach fired over lack of playing time. They were rookies who did what they were told and didn’t complain. It wasn’t in Tomjanovich’s nature to complain anyway, but not playing was eating him up. The last time he had felt like a failure in basketball had been after the tryouts for the freshman team in high school. In the past he had always figured he could work his way through any deficiencies in his game. Now even that wasn’t working.

  “I think I knew I was in trouble when I came into a game against Detroit, got a tip-dunk right away that ignited a run, and went on to have a real good game,” he said. “A few days later, we were looking at film of the game [in those days there was no tape, and it took several days to get film developed], and Alex looked at that play and criticized me for it. Said I was out of position. Now, this wasn’t a play you made all that often; it was really pretty good, and he’s criticizing me for it. I had a feeling at that moment that he was looking for reasons to not play me.”

  The season ended with the Rockets going 40–42, the best record in their four-year history. Tomjanovich played in 77 of the 82 games but averaged less than 14 minutes a game, often playing most of his minutes at garbage time. He averaged 5.3 points and almost 5 rebounds a game—the latter fairly remarkable given his limited minutes. Even though the team ended up missing the playoffs by just one game, attendance changed little: the team went from an average 6,123 per game to 6,774. Whether the crowds would have been larger if Rudy Who had played more is questionable. At the very least, no one in San Diego seemed eager to see him not play.

  Hannum quit at season’s end to take an ABA job, and Newell hired Tex Winter to replace him. He was convinced that his team was turning a corner. Attendance had improved at the end of the season with the Rockets in the playoff hunt, and Elvin Hayes was rapidly becoming a superstar. Newell thought that Tomjanovich and Murphy were also going to be stars. By Memorial Day, the Rockets had sold more season ticket packages than they had sold for the entire season in 1970–71. “I felt like we were about to take off in San Diego,” Newell said. “We were going to be a good team the next year, and people liked what we were doing. Then I got the phone call from Boston.”

  It was mid-June, and the owners were holding their annual meetings. The playoffs, believe it or not, had been over for six weeks (the Milwaukee Bucks had wrapped up the finals in a four-game sweep over the Baltimore Bullets on April 30—a date that now coincides with the first week of the endless NBA playoffs), and the draft had already been held. Newell’s phone call came from team owner Robert Breitbard, telling him he had just sold the team to a group in Texas that was planning to move the Rockets to Houston, Elvin Hayes’s hometown.

  “It will be tough spending a year as a lame duck,” Newell said.

  “No it won’t,” Breitbard said. “The team is moving now.”

  And so, three months before training camp was scheduled to begin, the San Diego Rockets became the Houston Rockets. Newell had a clause in his contract which stipulated that if the team left California, he did not have to go along. He agreed to remain as a consultant while the team was transitioning from San Diego to Houston.

  The players had no such clauses. Much to their chagrin, Rudy and Sophie found themselves packing the Camaro again, leaving behind the friends they had made in San Diego and heading east to Houston. This time they made the trip without any speeding tickets or fights over routing. But neither one of them knew anything about Texas summer, and when they arrived in mid-August it was a shock.

  “I think we were sick the entire first month we were there,” Tomjanovich said. “You go from a hundred degrees outside to fifty degrees with air-condition
ing blasting inside everywhere. You were bound to get sick. Between that and the fact that it rained every afternoon, we missed San Diego a lot.”

  But they adjusted. They found a house in a quiet neighborhood on a cul-de-sac that was walking distance to the supermarket and the movies and lots of places to shop. This was especially helpful when Rudy took the car to go to practice, since they still only had one car. The new neighbors were friendly and helpful, and they quickly adapted to their new lifestyle.

  It wasn’t nearly as easy for the team. The new ownership seemed to think the way to make the Rockets popular was to travel them all over Texas to play. The Rockets played every place on the state map during the 1971–72 season, playing some home games in the cavernous Astrodome, others next door in Astrohall, an auditorium attached to the Astrodome. They also played a number of games in Hofheinz Pavilion on the University of Houston campus. Worse than that, there were home games in San Antonio, a few more in Waco, and even some way out west in El Paso.

  The only thing the six different home courts had in common was that the crowds were small. Texas was, and is, a football state. In 1971 the Rockets were the first pro basketball team in the state—there are now three—and without a true home, they got off to the kind of awful start (3–17) a team simply can’t afford when it is trying to build a fan base. The new owners had figured fans would come out to see local hero Elvin Hayes, who had been a superstar at the University of Houston in the late sixties. Fans have short memories. If Hayes wasn’t starring for the Cougars, challenging Lew Alcindor and UCLA, and taking UH to the Final Four, he was just another name from the past.

  For the season, the Rockets averaged under 5,000 fans per home game in all six of their “homes.” They played better after the awful start but never could dig themselves out completely, finishing 34–48. For Tomjanovich, though, things were better than his rookie season, even with the team’s poor play and all the bouncing around. Winter made him a starter, and he responded by averaging 15 points and almost 12 rebounds a game. He was just the kind of active inside-outside player Newell had envisioned when he drafted him, and he became more and more comfortable as the season wore on.