The Punch

by John Feinstein

  “I liked doing it,” he said. “At first the money was ridiculous, but I wasn’t doing it for the money. As time went on, I got paid more and I felt very comfortable on the air. Talking has never been a problem for me.”

  By 1990 Portland, like most cities in the country, had an all-sports radio station. Washington was hired as a host and eventually was paired with another former Blazer, Mychal Thompson, during afternoon drive time. By then he was making decent money at the radio station while continuing to work on the Big Man’s Camp for and with Newell and Stu Lantz.

  It was during this period that Washington changed the Sixth Man Foundation into Project Contact.

  “I got very frustrated with dealing with kids in Portland,” he said. “I would make an arrangement to get Nike to contribute five hundred pairs of shoes and we’d give them out someplace and kids would come up to me and say, ‘Why can’t I get a different color?’ It just seemed to me that in our country, even the kids who don’t have much feel entitled.

  “I had done a lot of reading about Africa, about the wars over there. I remember seeing a TV special on Rwanda and thinking to myself that these were people who really needed help, that if you could help out there you would be making a contribution that went way beyond getting sneakers or basketballs for kids in Portland. I kept hearing and reading about the fact that there was no medicine and no doctors for people over there, and I thought maybe I could help with that.”

  That was how Project Contact came into being. Washington became the organizer: raising money, finding doctors and nurses willing to go overseas for up to two weeks at a time to set up free clinics that doled out medicine and helped people get treatment. He went first to Rwanda but found it so dangerous that recruiting people to go there was virtually impossible. He finally settled on Kenya, where the need was great but the dangers not quite so daunting.

  “It was still dangerous,” he said. “We learned as we went. We were, technically, carrying drugs into the country, which you aren’t supposed to do. But for a hundred dollars you paid off the customs inspectors and they didn’t look inside your bags. Then once we were there, we would find doctors and medical students who would help us out. We paid the doctors twenty-five dollars a day and the medical students fifteen dollars a day to augment the doctors and nurses who made the trip.” Several people who traveled with Washington learned the hard way that taking malaria pills prior to getting on the airplane was a necessity.

  Project Contact became Washington’s magnificent obsession. Every time he went to Africa he could see that the work he and his people were doing was important. They would usually set up headquarters inside a church and people would line up to see a doctor. Depending on how much medicine they could acquire prior to a trip, the doctors would see between 1,500 and 2,500 people on each visit.

  Washington’s goal was to make at least two trips a year. It wasn’t always easy. The logistics were difficult to begin with, but so was raising money. Sometimes Washington would track down old NBA friends for help. Shaquille O’Neal had been in Newell’s camp on several occasions, so Washington was able to get a couple of autographed jerseys from him, which he sold to raise money. Vince Carter and Latrell Sprewell helped out the same way. Jerry West got him some Lakers memorabilia to sell. Once, when fund-raising was going badly, Washington sold a car to help finance a trip.

  Clearly he put in the time and the effort because he is generous by nature, someone who has always been aware of those who are afflicted, perhaps because he grew up in difficult circumstances. But when he talks about Project Contact and the charity work he has done through the years, it becomes evident that the Tomjanovich incident is part of the story too.

  “I know what most people think of me,” he said one day. “Most people when they hear the name Kermit Washington think of what happened with Rudy and think I’m a thug. I know that. But I hope maybe when people understand the kind of work we’ve done in Africa, they’ll understand there’s more to me than just those five seconds. I would like it very much if people would think of Project Contact when they think of me rather than Rudy Tomjanovich.

  “I really believe,” he continued, “that if we could raise enough money, we could treat twenty-five thousand people a year, who knows, maybe a hundred thousand people a year. We could win the Nobel Prize if we got the proper funding.”

  One can almost hear Washington’s thoughts at that moment: Maybe then people won’t just think of me as the guy who slugged Rudy T.

  Rudy Tomjanovich may have been dragged kicking and screaming into the job as Rockets’ head coach, but once he had it he didn’t want to give it up. He had been named interim coach on February 18, 1992, and Steve Patterson and team owner Charlie Thomas had told him that no long-term decisions would be made until the end of the season.

  That was fine with Tomjanovich. Unlike most coaches stepping into a new job, the last thing he wanted the day he was hired was a long-term commitment—from him or from management.

  But once he dug in and started doing the job, a funny thing happened: he liked it. Perhaps he was influenced by the fact that the team won five of the first six games it played after he became the coach. But it was more than that. Tomjanovich enjoyed the responsibility of being in charge; he liked thinking up ways to adjust the offense and the defense to make the Rockets a better team. He enjoyed the tension of the endgame, the chess match with the other coach, the adrenaline rush that came from having to make decisions under the gun and then the pleasure of seeing them work out.

  “I was really into it right from the start,” he said. “I was surprised, because I had never thought about doing it. The outside stuff really didn’t bother me either. Most of the guys in the media are good guys, so I didn’t mind that. The only problem I think I had was time management. There were just so many different things that I had to do as part of the job that I never felt as if I had a chance to come up for air.”

  With or without air, Tomjanovich knew as the season moved to a conclusion that he wanted the “interim” removed from his title, that he wanted to be the team’s coach. Making the playoffs would go a long way toward getting that done, and with three games left it looked as if the Rockets would make postseason. But they lost all three games, the last two by 3 points each to Dallas and Phoenix (at home), and finished one game behind the Lakers for the eighth and final Western Conference slot.

  Tomjanovich thought he had blown his chance, that Charlie Thomas would surely look elsewhere for a coach, and he would either have to go back to being an assistant or look someplace else for work. Neither of those scenarios made Tomjanovich very happy, and he spent a lot of time pacing around the house, wondering if the phone was ever going to ring with an answer.

  It took a month. All sorts of rumors swirled. Steve Patterson admits now that there were people in the league who questioned whether Tomjanovich was the right choice to run the team. “I had calls from people who said to me, ‘Do you really think he’s smart enough or tough enough to be a head coach in the NBA?’” Patterson said. “I had no doubts. People get deceived by Rudy. They see him as this laid-back guy who just takes life as it comes. That’s not who he is. He’s smart, he’s driven, he’s tough. If he has a weakness it’s that he’s too tough on himself. I had no doubt he could do the job, but I knew Charlie was getting some pressure to find someone else.”

  Finally, on May 20, Thomas called Tomjanovich to his office and said simply, “Rudy, I think you’re the guy for this job.”

  Tomjanovich was as relieved as he was happy. All the decisions he thought he might face about the future didn’t have to be dealt with. He knew his family was concerned about the pressures that would come with the job—his daughters, who were now nineteen and sixteen, were especially concerned—but he was convinced he could handle it. He thought the Rockets weren’t far from being a very good team again, and he thought his relationship with the players would become closer now that it was official he was going to be the coach for the long term.
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  He was right. The Rockets responded to their new coach the following season with the best record in franchise history: 55–27. They won the Midwest Division and tied for second in the Western Conference with the Seattle SuperSonics. Unfortunately, the Sonics were awarded the second seed based on having won three of four from Houston during the regular season. When the teams met in the conference semifinals, Seattle had the home court advantage. That proved critical, since neither team won a game on the other’s court. Game seven was a gut-wrenching overtime affair, Seattle finally winning 103–100.

  It was a tough-to-swallow loss, because the Rockets believed they were good enough to beat the Phoenix Suns in the conference finals. They didn’t get the chance to find out, but Tomjanovich was convinced they were very close to being able to seriously contend for the NBA title. The Rockets had added players like Robert Horry and Otis Thorpe to go with Olajuwon in the frontcourt. Tomjanovich thought the team needed one more guard to give it some depth on the perimeter. Against the advice of a number of people, he took Sam Cassell out of Florida State late in the first round of that spring’s draft. Little did he know that he had just acquired the final piece of the puzzle.

  The Rockets were 58–24 in 1993–94 and again won the Midwest Division. That made them the second seed in the West, behind Seattle. But the SuperSonics were upset in the opening round by Denver, and that meant the Rockets would have home court advantage regardless of whom they played the rest of the way. It was the first time in the history of the team that had been the case.

  They cruised to the finals, beating Utah in five games in the conference finals. Once there, they caught another break: Michael Jordan was in the midst of Retirement I: The Baseball Years, and with Jordan in Birmingham flailing at curveballs, the New York Knicks were finally able to get past the Bulls and were the Rockets’ opponent. Not that the Knicks were a pushover by any means. They had their own great center to battle Olajuwon in Patrick Ewing. Guard John Starks was an All-Star, and Charles Oakley was the prototype power forward/enforcer. They played great defense, bruising, physical, beat-you-up defense, because their coach, Pat Riley, demanded it. They were convinced this was their year to be champions after running into the wall that was Jordan the previous three seasons.

  The series ping-ponged. The Rockets, with Cassell playing brilliantly down the stretch, won game three in New York after the teams had split in Houston, to give the Rockets a 2–1 lead. But the Knicks came back to win the next two, sending the series back to Houston with New York up 3–2. Game five was played on that eerie Friday evening when NBC switched away from the finals to join the rest of America in watching a white Bronco ride slowly down California’s I-405 with O. J. Simpson in the backseat and Al Cowlings behind the wheel, on the phone with the police.

  “We all knew what was going on, because the scorer’s table told us that TV had switched away from the game,” Tomjanovich remembered. “It was strange, but you couldn’t do anything except keep playing.”

  Game six in the finals had always been fatal to the Rockets. But this time they pulled out an 86–84 victory, as Starks’s 3-point shot at the buzzer, which would have won the title for the Knicks, fell just short. That meant the championship would come down to one game and it would be played in the Summit.

  There was nothing pretty about the game. Both teams were tight and the defenses, as had been the case throughout the series, dominated. Neither team came close to scoring 100 points in any game—the Rockets’ 93 points in game three was the high-water mark—proving that Riley-ball had taken over the NBA. The minuscule TV ratings were evidence that the absence of Jordan and the absence of scoring weren’t very healthy for the league.

  The Rockets and the city of Houston didn’t really care about any of that. All they knew was this was their chance for a championship, the city’s first in any professional sport since the Houston Oilers had won the American Football League title in 1962. Riley was kind enough to stick with Starks in the fourth quarter, even though former All-Star Rolando Blackman was on the bench, while Starks missed eleven straight second-half shots. That was just enough to allow the Rockets to escape with a 90–84 victory and the title.

  The entire city was euphoric. More than 500,000 people showed up at the victory parade. Every time Tomjanovich pulled up someplace at a red light, the person next to him started honking, then rolled down the window to yell, “Thank you, Rudy. God bless you, Rudy.” Sometimes they would get out of the car and come over for a handshake or a hug or a kiss.

  “It was great,” Tomjanovich said, “but it was embarrassing sometimes.”

  Sitting in the building on the night of game seven, Steve Patterson felt proud and vindicated. He remembered the phone calls telling him it was a mistake to think Tomjanovich was smart enough or tough enough to be a successful coach. Calvin Murphy couldn’t stop crying for joy—joy for his team, joy for his city, but most of all joy for his friend. Rudy Tomjanovich was on top of the world.

  21

  Troubles

  Looking back, Rudy Tomjanovich and Kermit Washington might very well agree that the trouble began again when the Rockets reached the 1994 finals.

  At that moment life for each of them was good. Tomjanovich had become a star in the coaching profession. Washington was doing well on radio, had started Project Contact, and had found a comfortable niche in Portland.

  But the punch still lingered.

  It was at halftime of game one or game two of the finals—she’s not sure which game—when Sophie Tomjanovich walked into a room set up in the Summit for family and friends of the Rockets’ players and coaches. All three of her children—twenty-year-old Nichole, seventeen-year-old Melissa, and eleven-year-old Rudy III, whom they called Trey—were with her. This was a proud week for the Tomjanovich family.

  In the corner of the room was a television. Naturally it was tuned to NBC. Sophie remembers glancing over to see if the network was showing first-half highlights or an interview. The answer was neither.

  “I looked up and there it was,” she said. “All over again.”

  On the television screen it was December 9, 1977. There were Kermit Washington and Kevin Kunnert squared off, with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar trying to swing Kunnert away. And from the corner of the screen, Rudy Tomjanovich was running toward the fight…

  “Let’s get out of here,” Sophie said to the children.

  None of them had noticed what was on the TV screen, but Sophie could see people crowded around watching, as if at the scene of an accident. “Come on,” she repeated. “Right now.” Surprised, Nichole, Melissa, and Trey followed her out of the room.

  “I couldn’t stay another second,” she said. “All I could think was, ‘Why? Why do they have to do this? Why do they have to keep coming back to that? Hasn’t Rudy accomplished enough that they can let him, let us, move on?’”

  The irony, of course, was that Rudy’s accomplishments were the reason the punch was back in the public eye. If he had still been the Rockets’ second assistant, or if the team hadn’t been in the finals, no one would have bothered bringing it up. But he was coaching in the finals, and the punch was part of his story.

  It was no easier for Kermit Washington or his family to see the replay popping up on TV screens again. (NBC certainly wasn’t the only media outlet to rerun the tape.) Every story chronicling Tomjanovich’s success brought up the punch, what he had gone through, and how he had come back from near death to play again.

  “None of the stories said, ‘Kermit Washington, a good guy who made a mistake,’” Washington said, laughing. “They all said things like ‘muscle-bound, hulking enforcer.’ I remember thinking, ‘My God, it’s been seventeen years and here we go again.’ ”

  Naturally Washington was often asked by callers to his radio show about the punch. It had come up early in his radio career and it continued to come up. Almost always the question was “What really happened that night?”

  Washington would then go through his version of even
ts. In that version, of course, the villain of the piece was Kevin Kunnert.

  Kunnert had retired from the Trail Blazers at the end of the 1982 season, a few months after Washington’s retirement, his knee too torn up to allow him to continue playing. Like Washington he had decided to stay in Portland. He liked the fishing and hunting in the area, it wasn’t as cold in the winters as Iowa, and his family had come to love living there. He settled in Tigard, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes away from where Washington and his family lived.

  On one occasion Kunnert happened to be listening when Washington was asked about the punch. What he heard made him so angry that he asked the station to send him a tape.

  “It all began when I got the rebound,” Washington began.

  Right there Kunnert started to get angry. “He got the rebound?” he said years later. “He didn’t get the rebound, I got the rebound. Why would he say that?”

  Washington went on from there to describe the infamous and hotly debated two elbows. He then said, “I was confused. I was no fighter. I had never been in a fight.”

  “Never been in a fight?” Kunnert said. “Ask John Shumate or C. J. Kupec if he had ever been in a fight. He was no fighter? Check the tape and tell me if he looks like someone who wasn’t a fighter.”

  Washington concluded by saying he never could figure out why the NBA took no action against Kunnert and that he was convinced the NBA kept “putting him on the same team with me so I wouldn’t sue him.”

  Kunnert shook his head in disgust at that notion. “I signed with the Celtics as a free agent,” he said. “Four of us went to San Diego in the swap. You think I was happy to be on the same team with him? Then Portland had the choice of Swen Nater or me and they took me—which was probably a mistake, given the condition of my knee, but it had nothing to do with the league.”