The Punch

by John Feinstein

  He smiled sheepishly. “There’s one other thing. I’ve always thought to myself, ‘Only you, Rudy, could figure out a way to run into a guy at the one perfect angle to almost get yourself killed. Any other angle and maybe he breaks my nose or my jaw. But I managed to find the angle to run into the punch so it could do the absolute maximum possible damage. For a long time, I had trouble getting that thought out of my head: ‘Only you, Rudy.’”

  Which is, of course, ludicrous. It was blind, dumb, horrible luck for both men that Tomjanovich’s face managed to collide with Washington’s fist in the seemingly only way that could possibly lead to such horrific injuries. In his masterful book on the NBA, The Breaks of the Game, David Halberstam describes a scene in a Celtics-Rockets game in which Dave Cowens was called for a charging foul on Mike Newlin after Newlin took what Cowens thought was a dive in the lane. On the ensuing play, Cowens raced down the court, stuck an elbow hard into Newlin’s face, turned to the official, and yelled, “Now that’s a fucking foul!”

  Halberstam tells the story to illustrate Cowens’s intensity as a player. Years later, reminded of the story, Newlin laughed and said, “Oh yeah, I remember it. That was just the way Cowens played.”

  Exactly. Cowens wasn’t a dirty player by any stretch of the imagination. He played hard and he played aggressively, which helped make him a Hall of Famer. But what if, by some fluke, that elbow had caught Newlin in the eye and shattered a bone? What if it had landed in such a way as to destroy part of his face? It didn’t, of course, and so the incident is no more than an anecdote retold years later to remind people of Cowens’s fierce competitiveness.

  Washington’s punch was not an innocent act by any means. He was in an agitated state and was already going to be ejected from the game for the punches he had thrown at Kunnert. The punch wasn’t an accident, and no one has ever claimed that Kermit Washington was a pacifist on the basketball court—including Kermit Washington. But the punch could just as easily have grazed Tomjanovich or missed or landed an inch higher and simply broken his nose. (To this day Sophie Tomjanovich can’t stand it when someone describes Rudy’s injury that night as a broken nose. “The only thing on his face that wasn’t broken,” she said, “was his nose.”)

  The punch was an act of malice, and Washington would have been punished for it by Larry O’Brien regardless of how badly Tomjanovich was or was not hurt. In fact, if he had never punched Tomjanovich, he probably would still have been fined and suspended for the punch he delivered to Kunnert. A week earlier O’Brien had fined and suspended Adrian Dantley for trying to throw a punch that never landed.

  But the damage the punch inflicted was an absolute fluke. Washington’s strength played a part, but the devastating effect arose from an awful confluence of factors that led to the punch landing exactly where it did with both puncher and punchee supplying momentum. If the punch had landed in a slightly different way, it would have been nothing more than a footnote, if that— “Just another stupid NBA fight,” as Tommy Bonk, then of the Houston Post, put it.

  But it didn’t land that way. And even though time has blurred the public’s perception of the facts, both men have lived with the consequences from that moment forward. Every person who was on the court that night remembers the moment and the scene today as if it were yesterday, not twenty-five years ago. Just talking about it is upsetting for most of them. Calvin Murphy, generally considered the toughest man in the NBA, refused to discuss that night with anyone for more than twenty years after his testimony at the trial in the summer of 1979. When he did talk about it, he cried at length as he remembered the sight of his pal on the court in a pool of blood.

  Jerry West, the coach of the Lakers at the time, put it simply: “One of the reasons I got out of coaching was that night,” he said. “I just didn’t feel as if I wanted to be part of the game on the floor anymore after that happened. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was I didn’t want to coach. These were two good men who happened into a truly horrible situation. To this day, I don’t think either one of them has found closure with it.”

  Both had hoped that meeting on the court again, regardless of the outcome, would bring closure. Put simply, it didn’t.

  Although the game against the Clippers was exceptional, it was not all that different from most nights that fall and winter for Tomjanovich. The team had changed in his absence. Most of the offense now went through Malone, who was becoming a big-time star and would end the season averaging just under 25 points and 18 rebounds a game. In the absence of a true, creative point guard, Barry was now the team’s best passer, and he and Tomjanovich learned to work very well together.

  Even though he was no longer the first option on offense, Tomjanovich was playing remarkably well. The only health scare came just after Christmas in Detroit, when he caught an accidental finger from M. L. Carr squarely in the nose. Carr was trying to throw an outlet pass, and as he released the ball his finger caught Tomjanovich, who was trying to prevent the pass, right in the nose. The momentum of the follow-through and the fact that the finger landed squarely on the bone cleanly broke the nose. Feeling the blood gushing from his nose, Tomjanovich panicked for a second, wondering if he had been seriously injured. He hadn’t been. He had finally suffered a broken nose, but nothing else. He missed six games and then came back wearing a mask to protect the nose. But his restructured face took the blow without any problem, just as Toffel had told him it would.

  “In a way it was almost a relief to get hit that hard and walk away with nothing but a broken nose,” he said. “I don’t think I ever consciously worried about something happening, and I had a lot of faith in Dr. Toffel’s work, but having it all confirmed wasn’t a bad thing.”

  Under the constant scrutiny he was receiving, Tomjanovich kept reading differing reports on his play. Some people insisted he wasn’t the same player; others said he was good as new. The numbers he was putting up seemed to indicate the latter: he was shooting better than 50 percent and averaging 19 points and 7.7 rebounds a game. When the fans’ voting for the All-Star game was announced, it was clear that they thought he had come all the way back—he had been voted onto the Eastern Conference team as a starter.

  Which did not make him happy.

  “I didn’t think I deserved it,” he said. “I thought it was another example of people feeling sorry for me, giving me a vote because they remembered what had happened to me. I didn’t want to go to the All-Star game because people were thinking, ‘Poor Rudy.’”

  He seriously considered not going at all but was talked into it by Sophie, by teammates, and by members of the media, who told him he deserved to be on the team based strictly on his play. It wasn’t as if he had never been an All-Star before the punch and all of a sudden was elevated to All-Star status.

  “A lot of guys told me that if I hadn’t been voted onto the team I would have been chosen by the league as a backup,” he said. “I still didn’t think I should start, but I knew I had been playing pretty well and I had the sense that other players really wanted me to be there. So in the end I went.”

  And was glad he did. The game was played in Detroit, which made it a homecoming. Playing in front of longtime friends and family, he ended up having his best All-Star game ever, scoring 12 points and getting 7 rebounds.

  The acquisition of Slick Watts proved to be a boon to the Rockets. Even though he wasn’t nearly the scorer Lucas had been, averaging fewer than 4 points a game, his strength and ability to get into the lane opened things up for the other four starters— Tomjanovich, Malone, Barry, and Murphy—and turned the Rockets into a dangerous team again. They were 10–11 when Watts moved into the starting lineup and finished the regular season 47–35. Unfortunately, that left them one game behind the San Antonio Spurs for the Central Division title. Instead of having a first-round bye, they had to play one of those best-of-three miniseries against the Atlanta Hawks. The Hawks came into the Summit and managed to steal game one, 109–106, then wrapped the series
up in Atlanta three days later. Just like that, what had become a very promising season was over.

  As disappointed as he was, Tomjanovich had to feel good about his comeback. He had come all the way back to being an AllStar–caliber player and had fit in with his team even though it had changed considerably during his absence. He was only thirty years old and there was every reason to believe he still had a number of productive years as a player ahead of him.

  Kermit Washington felt the same way. After the Clippers’ horrendous start and his near walkout, they too had turned their season around. As the players began to get used to one another and accustomed to Shue’s system, they played better and better, closing with a rush. After the 2–12 start, the team was 41–27 the rest of the way, finishing 43–39. Unfortunately, in the loaded Pacific Division that was only good for fifth place. Even though they won six more games than New Jersey, the last of the Eastern Conference’s six playoff qualifiers, the Clippers had no chance to qualify in the West.

  That didn’t keep Washington from feeling strongly about San Diego’s future. He had enjoyed the best season of his career. For the first time in six seasons in the league, he had played in all 82 games, becoming an everyday starter. He had averaged 11.3 points and 9.9 rebounds a night. Things had even quieted for him in most of the road venues, Houston and Detroit being the predictable exceptions.

  He and Pat had bought a home in San Diego near where Swen Nater lived and the two families had become close. Dana had started school that fall, and there was no reason as far as Washington was concerned to think about playing anyplace else. After his year as a nomad—Los Angeles to purgatory to Boston to San Diego—he felt as if he was finally home.

  And then, during the summer, he started to hear whispers again.

  Team owner Irv Levin wanted to sign Bill Walton and bring him home to San Diego. Walton had been injured—again—late in the 1977–78 season, breaking bones in his foot. The Trail Blazers had been 50–20 when Walton got hurt. They were 8–4 the rest of the regular season and then lost a six-game series in the Western Conference semifinals to the Seattle SuperSonics. Walton didn’t play a single game the following season, still injured and by now involved in a public battle with the Portland medical staff, whom he held responsible for his recurring problems.

  Walton very much wanted out of Portland, and returning to the city he had grown up in seemed like a natural fit. Levin, looking to add glitz to what was a solid but decidedly unsexy team, was willing to gamble with his team’s future in order to land Walton. The reason it was a gamble was the league rule, which put compensation into the hands of the commissioner if the two teams couldn’t reach an agreement prior to a free agent signing. Naturally, Portland would want the compensation to be based on the team’s losing a young player (age twenty-seven) who had been the league MVP just two seasons earlier and had led them to an NBA title. San Diego, for its part, would want to emphasize that it was getting a player who was a medical risk and hadn’t played a basketball game in eighteen months.

  Washington was horrified when he heard that Levin was trying to sign Walton. Initially his concern was that compensation would hurt the team, especially if Walton wasn’t healthy enough to play. Then when he thought about it further, he became more upset: What, he thought, if I’m part of the compensation?

  “Then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, they won’t do that to me for a second year in a row,’” he said. “They had sent me to San Diego when I had signed with Boston, they wouldn’t ship me to Portland as compensation a year later, would they?” Washington shook his head and laughed. “Boy, was I a fool.”

  Of course they would ship him to Portland. Among all the players mentioned to Portland coach Jack Ramsay as possible compensation, the two players he wanted most were All-Star guard Randy Smith and Washington. He knew that Washington was dependable, a hard worker, and very coachable. Since the championship, the Blazers had become a difficult team. Even with Walton gone, Maurice Lucas would continue to demand a new contract for a lot more money. Some of the players who had been important parts of the championship team—Larry Steele, Dave Twardzik, Bob Gross—were battling injuries and age. Lionel Hollins, the superb shooting guard, also wanted out of Portland. Washington would be someone he could depend on to show up and play hard every night and not cause trouble.

  Ramsay also needed a center since he was losing Walton. Tom Owens had played very well the previous season, and Mychal Thompson had been on the all-rookie team. But Thompson had broken a leg during the off-season and was going to be out for the season. Ramsay needed another big body inside. The league offered him two choices: Swen Nater or Kevin Kunnert.

  There were a couple of reasons for Ramsay to lean toward Nater. First, he was a better scorer than Kunnert, a more natural low-post player. Second, Kunnert had undergone off-season knee surgery. Ramsay liked the way Kunnert played, though; he liked the fact that he could shoot from outside. That meant he could pair him with Owens at times to spell Lucas. Also, as a coach who emphasized defense, he liked Kunnert’s toughness. Before telling the league whether he preferred Nater or Kunnert, Ramsay wanted Kunnert’s knee examined by the Portland team doctors.

  “They looked at it and told us he was fine,” Ramsay said years later. “They gave him a clean bill of health.”

  And so Ramsay told the league Portland would accept Washington, Smith, and Kunnert as compensation. Remarkably, one year after they had been sent together from Boston to San Diego, the two men, who had barely spoken to each other throughout the season in San Diego, were again packing to move to the same city. The league went along with Portland’s claim that it was losing a superstar and awarded the Blazers the three players, cash, and future draft picks as compensation for Walton.

  “Unbelievable,” Washington said. “It made me think they were conspiring to keep us together no matter what. They were worried I was going to sue him the same way Rudy had sued the Lakers. But if they kept us on the same team, I wasn’t likely to sue, was I?”

  Kunnert laughed at that notion. “The league had nothing to do with me signing in Boston. I did that all on my own because it was the best deal I could get,” he said. “The league didn’t decide which players went to San Diego, the two owners did. And if Jack Ramsay had wanted Swen Nater, he would have gotten Swen Nater. I think the guy is just a little bit paranoid.”

  While their husbands barely spoke to each other, Pat Washington and Mary Kunnert had become friends in San Diego. “We just liked each other,” Mary Kunnert said. “Pat was outgoing and very sweet. Sometimes when the team was on the road we would get together and watch the game together. When my daughter was born that year, she went with me to the hospital.”

  “It was awkward at times,” Pat Washington said. “I remember the day after the baby was born, I called Mary at the hospital to see if she needed anything. When I hung up Kermit asked me what that was about and I told him. I knew it didn’t make him happy, because he blamed Kevin for the fight. But I didn’t blame Mary for what had happened, and she didn’t blame me. I guess that was between the two of them.”

  It was largely unspoken between the two of them. One night on the road, they found themselves outside a hotel waiting for a cab in the snow to go eat. A lone cab pulled up. Washington looked at Kunnert. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll share it. We can go eat together.”

  Kunnert agreed. At dinner the subject of the fight never came up. They just talked about the team and basketball and their kids.

  Neither player was thrilled at the thought of going to Portland. For Washington it would be a fourth team in less than three seasons. He still hadn’t sold his house in Palos Verdes. Rather than buy yet another house in Oregon, he decided to rent a house and keep the one he had bought in San Diego. He was balancing a lot of real estate, hoping he would end up selling at just the right time.

  As it turned out, the Walton signing helped neither franchise. Walton managed to play a total of 14 games in San Diego during the 1979–80 season
. That was 4 fewer than Kunnert played in Portland. His knee continued to hurt him, and he would never be completely healthy again for the rest of his career.

  The one player in the group who continued to thrive was Washington. With Lucas injured a good deal of the time and eventually traded to New Jersey, Washington was not only a starter but someone the team looked to on offense. “It was the first time in my pro career that there were actually plays drawn up for me,” he said. “I enjoyed it. When Maurice came back, that stopped for the most part, but I still got the ball a good deal.”

  He had the best year of his career statistically, averaging 13.6 points and 10.5 rebounds a game. The Blazers actually started 10–0 that season, but injuries and turmoil brought them back to earth, and they finished the season 38–44, barely making the playoffs, where they lost a three-game opening-round miniseries to Seattle.

  That was the season that David Halberstam spent with the Blazers researching his book. Halberstam is as good a reporter as has ever lived, and it didn’t take him long to recognize that Kermit Washing-ton’s arrival in Portland had dumped a fascinating story in his lap. He spent a great deal of time with Washington, and when the book was published, it included a lengthy section on Washington’s life: his background, his rise at AU, and then the punch and its aftermath.

  In Kunnert’s mind, Halberstam completely bought into Washington’s version of the events of December 9, 1977. In the book, Halberstam reported that Kunnert had thrown the two elbows at Washington’s head but didn’t include Kunnert’s very different account of the encounter. Kunnert still has the autographed copy of the book Halberstam sent him and has underlined a number of passages that bother him.

  “The one that really gets me is this one,” he said, pulling the book off a shelf. He pointed to a marked passage. In between commas, talking about some of Ramsay’s frustrations with the team, Halberstam wrote: “Washington, a fast learner, and Kunnert, a slow learner.”