The Punch

by John Feinstein

  The first hint of real trouble came in early June, three weeks after the 1981 finals had concluded. The Rockets traded two future draft picks to Washington to bring an aging Elvin Hayes back to the team. Hayes was thirty-five but had still averaged almost 18 points a game for the Bullets. He played the same position as Tomjanovich played and like Tomjanovich was a deadly shooter.

  “It was pretty clear to me then that if I wanted to keep playing, I mean really playing, I was going to have to go someplace else,” Tomjanovich said. “The one thing I knew I didn’t want to do was sit on the bench and collect a paycheck.”

  His contract called for him to be paid $300,000 a year for two more years. If he wanted to be dealt, Ray Patterson would make a deal for him. And there would be teams that would be willing to take him, given that he could still score and would provide leadership and a role model for younger players on any team he played for. Tomjanovich was ready to make the move. He wanted to prove that he could still play. Calvin Murphy understood his reasoning but hated the idea of seeing his buddy leave town.

  “It would have killed me to see him in another uniform,” he said. “It would have been awful. I didn’t blame him, not one bit. In fact I probably should have gone in and told them to trade both of us someplace. I just didn’t want him leaving town.”

  It never came to that. On a hot late-summer afternoon (as if there is any other kind in Houston) Tomjanovich was relaxing in his front yard, watching his kids play with some close friends from the neighborhood. Nichole was nine, Melissa six. Both loved their school and had grown up with the same friends since birth.

  “I looked at them and thought to myself, ‘What am I doing here?’” Tomjanovich said. “I had worked hard all summer and I knew I was in good shape. I was absolutely convinced I could go to a team and help them. But how much? Would I be a sixth, seventh man? Would I play a lot or not a lot? I couldn’t be sure, even though I knew I still had some good basketball in me. There was no question in my mind about that.

  “So I finally had a talk with myself. I said, ‘Okay, Rudy, this is the deal: you’re going to uproot your family for a year, maybe two, take them to someplace brand-new, put the girls in a new school, make them start all over, and then probably move them again in a year or two, all so you can satisfy your ego and prove one more time you can still play?’

  “I realized I was being ridiculous. I didn’t need to play again. I’d had a wonderful career. My family was in good shape financially. I had proven I could come back after the punch and play well again. It hadn’t knocked me out of basketball. It was time to move on to the next thing. I didn’t want to just be one of those guys who hangs on until he gets dragged out the door kicking and screaming.”

  Tomjanovich called his lawyer and asked him to set up a meeting with the Rockets. He told them how he felt; that he didn’t want to be traded and he didn’t want to sit on the bench for two more years collecting dust and paychecks. A deal was struck: Tomjanovich would retire as a Rocket. The team would pay him his player salary for one more season rather than two. And the team would try to find a role for him in the organization.

  The question was, what would that role be? This was 1981, long before the current era, when most NBA benches have more guys sitting on them wearing suits than uniforms. In 2001 the Rockets’ media guide listed thirteen people on the basketball staff, not counting the additional four listed as basketball support staff. Not only is that not atypical, it is relatively small. The Rockets today have two video coordinators.

  But twenty-one years ago that wasn’t the case. The Rockets’ coaching staff consisted of Del Harris and assistant coach Carroll Dawson. It was Dawson who did most of the advance scouting, and he, Harris, and general manager Ray Patterson split up the bulk of the college scouting. Tomjanovich didn’t want to start his nonplaying career in some community relations job in which he spent most of his time handing out schedule cards and media guides at basketball clinics.

  Initially, Harris and Dawson set up a meeting for him at the University of Houston with coach Guy Lewis. The UH coach, a legend in Houston, was willing to bring Tomjanovich onto the staff as a volunteer assistant—which would work financially, since the Rockets were still paying him—to give him a chance to learn the nuts and bolts of coaching and scouting. That was fine with Tomjanovich.

  “I had never really given much thought to what I was going to do after playing,” he said. “And then all of a sudden it was there, right in front of me. I hadn’t thought of myself as a coach, but I had always been someone who liked coming up with plays, even when I was a kid playing in the schoolyard. So that appealed to me.

  “But then one day we got to talking, and Carroll told Del that he thought they could really use me doing some scouting—college and advance. So we decided I’d try and do that and see how it went.”

  On October 2, 1981, with training camp about to begin under the new NBA calendar, which had pushed the start of the season back to the end of October, the Rockets called a press conference. Rudy T, the most popular player in the history of the franchise, was retiring. He had played in 768 regular-season games and scored 13,383 points in eleven NBA seasons, averaging 17.4 points per game. He had 6,198 rebounds—8 per game—and 1,573 assists. He had shot better than 50 percent from the field—.501—a statistic unheard of nowadays for a perimeter player. He had played in five All-Star games. Less than four months after his retirement, he would become the first Rocket to have his number (45) retired.

  He had been a great player, a leader, a pillar of the community. And when he found himself traveling alone as a scout in the ensuing months and years and strangers would see him folding his 6-foot-8-inch frame into an airplane seat and ask him if he played basketball, he would nod and say that he had. And then, invariably, they would ask him his name. He would tell them. Their eyes would flicker with recognition and then, almost without fail, they would say, “I know you, you’re the guy who got punched.”

  While Rudy Tomjanovich was announcing his retirement, Kermit Washington was preparing to go to training camp. He was concerned about the aches and pains he was feeling in both his knee and his back. He had been forced to cut back his summer workload with Newell because of the pain, even though he and Newell now had a full battery of players participating in what had once been their one-on-one workouts.

  After missing large chunks of every one of his first five NBA seasons—the first three because he was riding the bench; the fourth because of his knee injury; the fifth because of his suspension— Washington had missed almost no time at all during the next three. He had played in all 82 games in San Diego and then had played 80 games and 73 games the next two seasons in Portland. The nine missed games in 1980–81 had been caused by his knee being too sore to play. He had hoped that going a little easier during the summer would allow him recovery time so he could start the new season fresh.

  But he knew as soon as camp started that he was in trouble. Every practice was torture. He needed long stretches in the training room, icing his knees, getting into a hot tub for his back, just to recover. About the only person on the team who was as physically miserable as Washington was Kevin Kunnert, whose surgical knee seemed to get worse with each passing day. They were both just thirty years old, but their bodies felt a lot older than that.

  “I knew we were in trouble with Kermit right from the start that season,” Jack Ramsay, the Blazers’ coach, said. “Just running up and down the court was difficult for him. You knew he wasn’t dogging it, because he would never do that, so if you saw him running slowly it was because his body wouldn’t let him go any faster. And he’d lost that great, quick leaping ability of his. You hoped it might come back, but it didn’t seem likely.”

  Kunnert began the season on the injured list. Washington was trying to play, but it was difficult. Mostly he played in short bursts off the bench, because he couldn’t run up and down the floor more than a few times without feeling pain. November became December and December became Ja
nuary. If anything, the pain he was feeling was worse than it had been in training camp. He had played in 20 games, averaging 20 minutes a game and just 5 points and 4.7 rebounds a game. None of those numbers were close to what he had produced when he was healthy.

  Washington kept hoping he would get better. He tried resting for a while. Then he tried not practicing but playing in games. It wasn’t working. “I finally woke up one morning and realized my time had come,” he said. “I didn’t want to stop playing, but my body was telling me I couldn’t play anymore.”

  He went and told Ramsay that he was going to retire. Ramsay was disappointed but not surprised. Washington asked if he could talk to his teammates before the announcement was made. Of course, Ramsay told him.

  He talked, that day, about loving basketball and how much he would miss it, but there came a time to step aside, to give younger players a chance. He said he didn’t want to hang on and collect a paycheck and take up a spot on the roster if he couldn’t play anymore.

  Kevin Kunnert sat and listened and seethed. He was convinced Washington’s speech was directed at him, an older player trying to come back from serious injury. “I was going to get paid whether I played or not, just like Kermit,” he said. “If he didn’t think he could play, that was fine, I understood. But there was no reason for him to come in there and act as if he was doing something heroic. I wanted to still try to play, thought I might be able to contribute something. That was my decision. His decision was his decision.”

  On the afternoon of January 25, 1982, Washington announced that he was retiring from basketball after eight and a half seasons in the NBA. His career statistics were not nearly as imposing as Tomjanovich’s, but given all the games missed, they were more than respectable. He had played in 501 games and averaged 9.3 points and 8.4 rebounds per game. His shooting percentage from the field, .526, wasn’t much lower than his shooting percentage from the foul line, .656, thus proving correct the referees who had told him they were doing him a favor by not sending him to the line more often.

  He had played for four NBA teams and had made one All-Star team. He had been considered a pillar of the communities he had lived in and a violent thug in many other communities. In Portland his retirement was big news. In Washington, D.C., and Houston, Texas, it was news. Everywhere else it was either a short note or a part of the agate—small type—on the sports page.

  On the morning of January 26, most newspapers across the country ran the wire service notice on Washington’s decision. “Portland Trail Blazers forward Kermit Washington announced his retirement. The Trail Blazers activated center Kevin Kunnert to take his spot on the active roster.”

  19

  Starting Over

  The transition from basketball player to non–basketball player was decidedly easier for Rudy Tomjanovich than for Kermit Washington. Not only was he getting paid for his first year out of the game at a player’s salary—$300,000—he had walked into a job that he absolutely loved right from the start.

  “As soon as I started scouting, I thought it was something I had been born to do,” he said. “I enjoyed everything about it, especially evaluating players and trying to figure out who was most likely to do well at the next level. Plus I really felt as if I was making a contribution to the team. The travel was tough, but really no tougher than when I was playing in terms of time away from home. I can honestly say that if I had kept doing that sort of work for the next twenty-five years, I think I would have been completely happy.”

  It wasn’t as simple for Washington. He wasn’t nearly as certain what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. His financial situation wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t overwhelmingly good either. He still owned his house in San Diego, in part because when he had wanted to sell, the market hadn’t been very good, but also because his brother, Chris, and his family had lived there for a while.

  Like his younger brother, Chris Washington had beaten the odds and made it from Farragut Street to the pros. He had made the St. Louis Cardinals as a defensive back in 1972 after being drafted in the tenth round out of Texas–El Paso (the school had changed its name from Texas Western while Chris was there) and had become a starter during his rookie season. “Chris was a great football player because he never had any fear,” Kermit said. “His life had been so bad when we were young that he didn’t worry about getting hurt. Nothing could happen to him that would be as bad as our life had been.”

  During his second season in St. Louis, Chris Washington tore up his knee. He underwent major surgery and was never able to regain the toughness and aggressiveness that had marked his play before the injury. The Cardinals released him at the end of the 1973 season.

  Like many athletes—but unlike his brother—Chris Washington had left college without a degree. He tried to find work in St. Louis after he stopped playing but was never able to find anything he really enjoyed or that made him the kind of money he needed to support his wife and son, who had been born in 1974. According to Kermit, the calls asking for money started not long after his brother stopped playing football.

  “I know he didn’t want to ask,” he said. “But his wife liked nice things. She was beautiful, really beautiful, and when they met, Chris was still playing football, making good money and able to take care of her the way she wanted to be taken care of. I didn’t want to say no to my brother, so when he called I sent him money. Looking back, I probably didn’t do him any favors.”

  Shortly after Kermit was traded to Portland, Chris called to say that he and Janice and their son, Eric, were thinking of moving to California. Could they stay in the San Diego house until they found their own place? This was during the off-season in 1980, Kermit said. “We were in San Diego during the summer, and I didn’t think that was going to be a good setup, but I agreed. Chris said he wanted to enroll in engineering classes at San Diego State. So I said okay.”

  The two Washington families shared the house until Kermit and Pat and Dana and Trey went back to Portland in the fall. Chris Washington did enroll at San Diego State. Kermit agreed to pay his tuition, loaning him the money until Chris had a job and could pay him back. Chris and his family stayed in the house for two years, until Chris dropped out of school again. Shortly after that, they returned to St. Louis. By then the relationship between the brothers and the two families was tense. Kermit told Chris he had to get a job or finish school but he couldn’t—and wouldn’t—lend him any more money.

  “By then our mom was really sick and I was paying for her care back in Washington,” he said. “I wasn’t playing ball anymore, so I wasn’t making the kind of money I had made. I told Chris I’d give him the shirt off my back if it would help him. I like helping people, and there was no one I wanted to help more than my brother. But there’s a line between helping and being taken advantage of.

  “I never should have let him leave California. I should have stopped him. I should have made him stay out here and finish his degree and get a good job. Then it might have been different.”

  After he retired, Kermit decided to stay in Portland. He finally sold the San Diego house. He was able to get part-time work as a strength coach with the Blazers. By the fall of 1983 he felt so good and so strong from working out in the weight room constantly that he was convinced he could make a comeback. He asked Ramsay to let him come to training camp and try to make the team.

  “Of course I said yes,” Ramsay said. “If he was healthy or even close to healthy, he could help us. The fact that I liked him was a factor, but I really looked at it as something that could potentially help the team.”

  The comeback could have been a storybook sort of thing had it worked out. Washington told team president Larry Weinberg that rather than be paid, he wanted his salary donated to a group he had started after his retirement called the Sixth Man Foundation. Washington’s goal was to raise money to help kids in need in the Portland area. When David Stern, by then the commissioner of the NBA, found out about what Washington was proposing to do, he called Don
ald Dell.

  “He can’t play without a contract,” Stern told Dell. “It is against our collective bargaining agreement for a hundred different reasons. If he wants to take the money and give it to his foundation, that’s fine, but the team has to pay him.”

  Dell, Weinberg, and Washington finally agreed to a contract for the NBA minimum. Sadly, Washington never got a chance to collect any of that money.

  “As soon as I started pounding my knees again, I could feel them going,” he said. “I told Jack that if I was on the team, I might be able to play but there was almost no way I’d be able to practice most days. I knew that wasn’t going to work for him or for me.”

  He retired again before the regular season began.

  That winter he worked for his foundation and came up with one of his many “nutty professor ideas,” as he called them. This one was for a weight vest like the one he had used in workouts since college.

  In the spring he got a phone call from Tom Davis. Since his days as an assistant at American, Davis had gone on to great success as a college coach. He had been a consistent winner at Lafayette and then had moved on to Boston College, where he had taken the team as far as the final eight. He had left BC in the spring of 1982 to move to California and become the coach at Stanford. He had been there for two years when he called Washington, having heard he was interested in getting into coaching, to see if he might want to come work for him in Palo Alto.

  “I had kept tabs on him after I left AU,” Davis said. “When the incident with Rudy happened I was stunned. If we had a complaint about Kermit as a young player, it was that he was too soft. He never wanted to mix it up inside. There was no question about his strength once he got into the weight room, but he was about the last person I ever thought would be involved in something like that.”

  To most of the world the incident was the single most important thing one needed to know about Kermit Washington. To Davis it was nothing more than a blip, an out-of-character aberration. “I knew that wasn’t who Kermit Washington was,” he said. “I didn’t hesitate to offer him a job, and no one ever said anything negative to me about it.”