The Punch

by John Feinstein

  The girls weren’t so much frightened by what their father looked like as baffled. Melissa just stared, almost as if she were seeing a different person. Nichole kept asking questions like, “Why did the man hurt you like that, Daddy?”

  Being home was a major step in the right direction. Toffel had already performed surgery several times. He had set the jaw, and he had performed plastic surgery on the multiple broken bones in Tomjanovich’s face. In all, he would perform surgery five times before he was finished, the last procedure—to repair the tear duct—coming several months later. For now, that could wait.

  There was still a part of Tomjanovich that thought the whole thing was a nightmare he would wake up from. But each meal taken through a straw, each time he picked up the paper in the morning and read about another Rockets loss, was a reminder that it was all very real. For the first time since he had told his uncle Joe that he wanted to quit baseball, basketball was being played without him.

  “That was a very tough thing,” he said. “Plus, I think I was still in denial a little bit. Dr. Toffel had made it clear that I wasn’t going to play again the rest of the season. At first I wondered if he was trying to ease his way into telling me I’d never play again. Gradually, though, that fear went away. Then I started thinking that maybe once the wires came out of my jaw, I might be able to play again before the season was over. As time went on, I realized that wasn’t going to happen. That was tough to take. Watching the team, especially when I started going to games again, was even tougher to take.”

  Things hadn’t gone well for the Rockets in the aftermath of December 9. After Murphy had carried them to the win that night in Los Angeles, they had dropped their next five, including a 113–91 loss to the Lakers in the Houston rematch five days after the fight. They had finally won a game, in New Jersey, before losing in San Antonio the night before Rudy and Toffel flew back to Houston. That made them 1–6 postfight and 11–19 overall.

  Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not, they won the first two games they played after Rudy’s return home. They made it three of four on the night of January 4, the first night Rudy ventured back to the Summit. He hadn’t wanted to make a big deal out of coming to watch the team play. But almost as soon as he started walking across the court to take a seat near the bench, someone spotted him. The applause grew louder and louder until all the fans in the building—including that night’s opponent, the Indiana Pacers—were on their feet clapping.

  Tomjanovich’s response to that reception was mixed. “I was grateful and touched that people cared,” he said. “I liked that, and I was emotional when they did what they did. But there was a part of my brain saying, ‘This is about pity. They’re cheering me because they pity me and they think I’m never going to play again. I’ll prove them wrong.’”

  Once again, now at the age of twenty-nine, he was back in Hamtramck proving himself. “I wasn’t going to be the guy who everyone remembered for being knocked out of basketball by a punch,” he said. “I was absolutely determined not to let that happen.”

  He was convinced, especially after that night back in the Summit, that no one would remember the four All-Star appearances or the 10,470 points he had scored in the NBA. They would remember The Punch. In many ways, he was absolutely correct.

  The nightmare, actually a sort of waking dream before he was completely asleep, started happening shortly after he came home. It didn’t happen that often at first, and he assumed it would eventually stop. Only it didn’t.

  It almost always occurred when he was really, really tired. Later, when he started coaching and would put in the brutal hours coaches put in at times, it would happen more frequently.

  Always, the sequence was the same. He would be trying to sleep. Overtired, he would toss and turn for a while and then finally he would start to drift into sleep. But just before he actually fell into a complete sleep, the fear would invade his brain. He was slipping into darkness. Every moment, things got darker and darker, and he knew what was happening: he was dying. Just as everything went completely black, at the moment when he died, he would sit up with a start, usually in a cold sweat. He would jump out of bed and run down the hall, trying to get hold of himself, terrified that he was going to die.

  Only years later was he able to understand that the dream’s starting soon after the punch was no coincidence. He had faced death in the hospital that night. A doctor had looked him in the eye and told him he might die, and he had spent that entire night terrified that if he went to sleep, he would never wake up again. He had always feared death in the abstract. Now it had become far more real to him. Even though that very real, very tangible fear of that first night had passed, the memory of it had not.

  “For a long time I told myself it would just go away sooner or later,” he said. “After a while, when it didn’t, I just thought it was something I had to live with, to deal with. The thing of it was, it was just as scary every time. It always took me a while to get hold of myself and calm down after it happened.”

  Through the years Sophie saw a pattern. Yes, it happened when he was overtired. But it almost always happened, she said, when he had been drinking.

  Tomjanovich remembers having his first drink in a bar in Hamtramck when he was fifteen. Drinking in Hamtramck when you were a teenager was a ritual, something everyone did, just as their parents before them had done. All the bars routinely served underage kids, because they all knew if they didn’t serve them, someone else would.

  Tomjanovich was aware of his father’s drinking, but in the early 1960s, almost none of the information about alcoholism that is now available existed. The term “alcoholic” wasn’t very common then. Tomjanovich heard people say that his father was a drunk, and that hurt. He vowed he would never reach that point, but his father’s problems with alcohol never stopped him from drinking. “It was just something that you did back then,” he said. “I was no better, no worse, about it than most of my friends.” He had no idea, of course, that most experts would come to consider alcoholism a hereditary disease.

  Alcohol was still the drug of choice for many when Tomjanovich was in college, especially among the jock set. He never experimented with any of the drugs that became popular in the sixties because most in the crowd he ran with never did anything at parties other than drink. More often than not it was beer, occasionally hard liquor.

  The lifestyle of a professional basketball player almost always involves late nights. No athlete can just go home and go to sleep after a game. Inevitably they are too keyed up from the adrenaline, and just as invariably they are hungry, since most don’t eat for several hours prior to a game. Going out to eat and have a few pops after a game is part of the ritual. Some eat more, some drink more, some chase women more. Some do all of the above.

  Tomjanovich liked blues bars. He would go out with a couple of teammates, get something to eat, and often stay up late listening to music and drinking. He never got passed-out drunk or blackout drunk, and it never affected his play, because like most athletes, he could sleep late most mornings. If the team had to get up early on the road to catch a flight, he wouldn’t stay out late on those nights. No one he played with considered him to be an unusually heavy drinker. Certainly there were players who drank more and others who were involved with different drugs.

  “What happened, though, was like most people who drink on a regular basis, I developed a very high tolerance for alcohol,” he said. “I could drink a lot and not realize I had been drinking a lot. It never really was a problem.”

  Or it didn’t seem to be a problem. Only later would he realize that he had gone down the same path as his father. And only then did he realize that Sophie was right: the terrifying visions of his own death almost always happened when he’d had a lot to drink. The older he got, the more frequently he had the waking dream.

  While Tomjanovich was slowly recovering from his injuries, the Rockets’ season was turning to dust. After the three-of-four mini-spurt, they began sliding again. Even p
utting aside the psychological traumas brought on by Tomjanovich’s injury, the simple fact that their best player was gone was making things difficult.

  Patterson’s plan to try to make a trade for Newlin, whether truly serious or not, had gone up in smoke on December 9. Other teams now knew that Patterson was dealing from weakness, not strength, and no one put a package on the table that made moving Newlin worthwhile. Individually the Rockets still had talent: Murphy, Lucas, Malone, Newlin, Kunnert, and the rookie Robert Reid were all good to very good NBA players. Two of them—Malone and Murphy—would end up in the Hall of Fame. But the team’s heart had been torn out when Washington had punched Tomjanovich, and everyone knew it.

  “There was a period when being a part of that team was just great fun,” Kunnert said. “We had a really good group of guys who all got along, and we were pretty good. But Rudy was the heart of it. He was the guy we all looked up to, all respected. He wasn’t the captain of the team for nothing. When he got hurt, especially the way he got hurt, I think all the fun went out of it for all of us. We missed his game, and we missed his personality.”

  Murphy, who had become the leading scorer in his friend’s absence, struggled more than anyone. Always emotional, he found himself crying at night on the road when he would return to the empty hotel room. “Rudy was gone,” he said. “And I had no idea if he was ever coming back. In fact there was a good chance that he wasn’t coming back. I tried to come to grips with that, and I just couldn’t. It was awful.”

  Many players assumed Tomjanovich wasn’t ever coming back. “It was all so mysterious,” Lucas said. “Especially those first few weeks. We were told almost nothing. Occasionally Murph would give us an update, because he would talk to Sophie. Even when he came back home and we saw him a couple times, nobody said much. We all feared the worst.”

  The organization was also coming to grips with the notion that Tomjanovich might not come back. Patterson and Nissalke were convinced they had to base their plans on his never playing again, because they believed the odds were that he wouldn’t.

  “The doctors had told us he could play again, but there certainly weren’t any guarantees,” Patterson said. “There was no way to measure his chances of coming back, because we had nothing to compare the situation to. No one had ever had an injury like this, so we were flying blind.”

  By the time the season finally came to a merciful close, the team was in complete disarray. Newlin had gone down with a knee injury after 44 games, and Malone had missed 23 games. Any thought of rallying in the second half of the season had gone out the window with Newlin’s injury. The Rockets were, plain and simple, a mess in every possible way. They finished the season 28–54, miles away from the playoffs and a lifetime away from their near miss in the conference finals a year earlier.

  “Worst season of my coaching career, because it came out of nowhere,” Nissalke said. “We went into the year with such high hopes. Once Rudy went down, everything just fell apart completely after that.”

  Still unsure about Tomjanovich’s future, Patterson began negotiating with Rick Barry, who had become a free agent at the end of the season. Barry was thirty-four, but he had still been Golden State’s leading scorer, averaging 23 points a game. What’s more, he was still one of the league’s big names, having led the Warriors to the NBA title in 1975. He had won scoring titles and he had become famous for jumping from the Warriors to the ABA and then landing back with the Warriors before leading them to the title.

  Barry fit the profile Patterson was looking for. He played Tomjanovich’s position, he was a scorer like Tomjanovich, and he would sell tickets because people knew who he was. His signing would be big news in Houston.

  “There’s no way we ever would have even talked to Rick Barry if Rudy hadn’t been hurt,” Nissalke said. “I understood what Ray was thinking when he started talking to him. What scared me was the compensation. If we had ended up having to give the Warriors a number one draft pick or a couple of our secondary players, okay, that would have been fine. But this was Rick Barry, and he was their leading scorer. I was afraid we were going to get hit hard.”

  Patterson knew that was a possibility but felt he had no choice. “We had no way of knowing if Rudy was coming back at all, or if he did come back, what kind of player he was going to be. We had a terrible season after Rudy got hurt, even before Newlin and Moses were injured. We needed to make a move.”

  And so, on June 17—eight days after Kunnert had left to sign with Boston—they made the move, signing Barry to a two-year contract. When Tomjanovich got the call from Nissalke to give him a heads-up that the signing was about to happen, Tomjanovich’s first thought was that he would be going to Golden State as compensation. Of course that wasn’t going to happen; the Warriors weren’t about to take a player whose future was a question mark as compensation for Rick Barry.

  As soon as John Lucas heard that the Rockets were negotiating with Barry, he was convinced he was going to be the one to go. “They were going to want someone young,” he said. “That meant me or Moses, and there was no way Houston was going to give up Moses. They’d have canceled the deal first. I just knew it was going to be me.”

  It wasn’t until September 5 that the league finalized compensation: the Rockets were told to send John Lucas and $100,000 to the Warriors. To Tomjanovich and others on the team, that seemed like an awfully high price to pay, giving up a twenty-three-year-old point guard who seemed to have a huge future in front of him for a thirty-four-year-old superstar who was clearly on the downside. “On the surface it looked like we were giving up a future All-Star for a past All-Star,” Tomjanovich said.

  Lucas never lived up to his full potential in the NBA because he developed a drug problem that stunted him as a player and shortened his career. “I am not going to tell you that I had never experimented with drugs before I went to Golden State,” he said early in 2002, midway through his first season as coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers. “I have to take responsibility for what happened, no one else. But San Francisco was a lot different town than Houston was. I was a long way from home, in an environment unlike anything I had ever encountered in my life. Things happened that I wish hadn’t happened.

  “Would my life have been different if Rudy hadn’t gotten hurt? Yes. How different I don’t know. But I think I can honestly say that Rudy and Kermit were not the only ones whose lives changed that night in Los Angeles. I’ll always believe that.”

  No one on the Rockets had any way of knowing at the time of the Barry signing that Lucas would find the trouble he found in San Francisco. All they knew was that their point guard was gone and that the reason he was gone could be traced directly back to December 9.

  “If Rudy never gets hurt,” Patterson said, “there is almost no chance that we ever sign Rick Barry.”

  Or lose John Lucas.

  In early May, Tomjanovich flew back to Los Angeles for one last round of surgery performed by Dr. Toffel, to repair the damaged tear duct. Once that was done, he felt he could start thinking about playing again. He felt better with each passing day and was convinced he was going to play again and play well. He was determined to prove the naysayers wrong, and for once he wasn’t imagining the questions. This time they were quite real.

  The doctors cleared him to play early in June, and Tomjanovich began playing right away. He wasn’t in any kind of basketball shape, but just being back on the court, first in informal pickup games, then as a part of the Rockets’ summer league team, felt great. He was a basketball player again. For the longest time he had wondered if he would ever be able to say that.

  Even though he didn’t want to admit it, each day was a test for Tomjanovich. He had insisted to anyone who asked that there was absolutely no reason for him to be gun-shy when he returned to the court. His feeling was that he hadn’t been injured playing basketball. He had been injured in a fluke moment in a fight. So why should he feel gun-shy (the term he kept hearing everyone apply) boxing out for a rebound or cha
sing a loose ball? Those were things he had done all his life, and he hadn’t gotten hurt doing any of those things.

  One afternoon he caught an accidental elbow in the face during a pickup game. When he bent over in obvious pain, the college kid who had nailed him went into a near panic. “Are you okay, are you okay?” he asked repeatedly. All activity stopped as everyone gathered round. Tomjanovich felt the bones in his surgically repaired face. Everything seemed to be in place. He stood up and smiled. “Thanks,” he said, trying to make light of the situation, “I needed that.”

  In truth, he had been as scared as everyone else, because he had no idea how his face was going to react to contact. Toffel had told him it should not be a problem but he couldn’t know for sure until it happened. Once it happened and he lived through it, he was relieved. But he had to admit to himself that he’d been nervous.

  Once training camp was under way, Tomjanovich began to understand the kind of scrutiny he was going to be dealing with. Every time the team scrimmaged there was analysis of how he had played, how he had looked. Had he been aggressive? Had he shied away from contact? Some days he would pick up one newspaper and read that he looked as aggressive as ever. Then he would pick up the other paper and see his favorite phrase: gun-shy.

  “It made me realize right away that it was going to be like this all season,” he said. “Wherever I went, it was going to be a story. How does Rudy look? How does Rudy feel? How is Rudy playing? I didn’t want to be the center of attention for that reason. It seemed as if everything in my life that had happened before the punch had never happened. To most people, I had become The Guy Who Got Nailed. I can’t begin to tell you how much I hated that.”

  Just as Kermit Washington now felt as if he had to deal on a daily basis with people coming up to him and saying, “Aren’t you the guy who threw the punch,” Tomjanovich also began to cringe when strangers would approach him, pointing a finger of recognition.