The Punch

by John Feinstein

  “That’s not to say I don’t get angry and I don’t get frustrated. I do. But it’s different now. I deal with it differently.”

  The difference is summed up in a rubber band he wears around his right wrist. It was suggested to him by a therapist as a reminder that when things start to go wrong, you stop yourself by “snapping back.”

  “I just snap the rubber band to remind myself, ‘Hey, it’s okay. I have a great life going here, and if something goes wrong I can handle it.’ That’s the difference now. I know I can handle things. I feel great not only about my life, but about myself.”

  The presence of the new Rudy has thrilled everyone in his family, although it isn’t always easy for Sophie to understand the importance of AA in his life. “Sometimes she will say to me, ‘Do you really need to go every day?’” he said. “And my answer is, ‘Yes, I do. I need to go every day.’ Beyond that I want to go every day. It makes me feel good.”

  In 2001–02 the Rockets suffered through an awful 29–53 season. Murphy’s Law was clearly in control even before training camp began, when the Rockets’ most important off-season free agent signee, Maurice Taylor, ruptured an Achilles tendon and was out for the season. Early on, the team suffered through a 15-game losing streak, with leading scorer Steve Francis one of several players out with injuries. Through it all, Tomjanovich never flinched.

  “It hasn’t been fun losing,” he said. “But if there’s one thing I know now, it is that good things often come from bad things. We’re going to make good things come of this. I guarantee it.”

  His tone was one of complete self-confidence. It was a long time coming.

  22

  No Peace to Be Found

  When Rudy Tomjanovich won his first NBA title as a coach, in 1994, no one was happier for him than Kermit Washington. True, all the publicity generated by the Rockets’ victory meant another round of stories about the punch, but Washington felt he could handle it. “I was,” he said, “at a very good place in my life right then. And I was happy for Rudy. I really was. I always thought he was a good guy who deserved good things.”

  By the end of 1994 Washington was a successful radio talk show host in Portland. He had Project Contact up and running. His finances were good enough that he had bought into a sports bar, LeSlam, in a Portland suburb. Dana was in college; Trey was in high school. The only real disappointment he had suffered through had been his split from Pete Newell and the Big Man’s Camp.

  That had happened the previous summer. The camp had continued to grow steadily throughout the 1980s. Washington even put together a video on the camp, in part because he knew Newell would enjoy it, in part because it was another of his “nutty professor” moneymaking schemes. “I was figuring every college or high school coach in the country would buy it,” he said. “A lot did, but not enough. I took a bath.”

  After Washington left Stanford, the camp moved back to Los Angeles. But with so many players attending, the logistics of finding court space and hotel rooms had become difficult. Newell and Washington decided they needed to move it someplace where the locals might be willing to work with them.

  Newell wondered if Las Vegas, being a town always looking for tourism, might work. Washington suggested Hawaii. He thought there would be fewer distractions for the players in August in Honolulu than in Vegas. Newell had a contact in Hawaii—Merv Lopes, the ex-Chaminade coach whom he had come to know through the years when he had gone to Hawaii on scouting trips. Through Lopes, Newell and Washington were able to make contact with someone in the governor’s office and the deal was done. The camp was moved to a 2,500-seat high school gym in Honolulu, and the government helped secure hotel rooms at a cut rate and transportation around the island for the players and counselors working at the camp.

  “It was Kermit’s idea to go there,” Newell said. “But it was Merv who really got things done once we decided to go over there. We couldn’t have made the move without Merv.”

  Washington was still very much involved in the camp at that point. He was (and is) very proud of the fact that he had gotten Shaquille O’Neal to start going there.

  “I worked the phones on that one,” he said, smiling. “I kept calling Shaq’s people, telling them that Sports Illustrated was coming over to do something on the camp and that he needed to be there. Then I called Sports Illustrated and said, ‘You need to come to the camp, even Shaq’s coming.’ In the end, they were both there.”

  But the move to Hawaii eventually led to Newell and Washington splitting. Washington believes to this day that Lopes and the other locals in Honolulu cut him out of the loop. Newell insists that isn’t the case.

  “Kermit got involved with other things,” he said. “Which is fine, I want him to have success. He wanted his daughter to take over a lot of the work he had been doing, but that really didn’t work. Dana was young and didn’t know the people in basketball the way Kermit did. I would call Kermit because something needed to be done and I couldn’t find him. By then he had the radio show and Project Contact. I told him if he couldn’t become more involved, he needed to not be involved, because the logistics were getting too big for me to handle.”

  Both men still speak warmly of each other, and no one is more vehement in his defense of Washington when the subject of the punch comes up than Newell. “The only thing I can tell you for sure,” he said, “is that it was not an act of malice. Kermit Washing-ton’s just not built that way.”

  But there is hurt in both their voices when they discuss the split over the camp. Washington thinks Newell trusted people he should not have trusted instead of trusting him. Newell thinks Washington lost interest and tried to blame Lopes and company for his leaving the camp.

  “I love Pete Newell,” Washington said. “If not for him and Red Auerbach, I never would have had any kind of career in basketball after the Rudy incident. He stood up for me when no one else would. I just wish he hadn’t listened to other people about the camp.”

  The camp had provided a nice chunk of income for Washington, especially since Newell has never taken anything more than expenses for his involvement. “He would always say to Stu [Lantz] and me at the end of camp, ‘You guys keep the money, just give me enough so I can take care of my plants back home,’” Washington said.

  But when the camp went away, Washington was on solid ground financially even without it. That was why he decided to invest in the restaurant. “I was a little bit bored,” he said. “I thought it would be fun, it would be different. I was right about one thing: it was different.”

  But not successful. Looking back, Washington can point to the purchase of the restaurant as the beginning of a slide that took his life in a bad direction after several years in which it had gone in the right direction. LeSlam was located adjacent to an upscale health and fitness club. Washington was convinced they would get a lot of business coming out of the club in addition to business from people shopping in the nearby mall. For whatever reason, it never worked out.

  “I was naive,” he said. “I thought, first of all, that people in Portland wouldn’t let me fail at something like this. I had always been popular here, and there’s so much interest in the Blazers that I thought people would come because it was my place. I was wrong about that. Also I just didn’t understand how hard the restaurant business is. You have to be very lucky and very good and get the right people working for you to be successful. Even if you do get all those things going for you, you still may fail.”

  The restaurant was bleeding money. Washington tried different menus, different chefs. He put money into marketing. Nothing seemed to help. He was working, it seemed, all day and all night, between the radio show and the restaurant. He tried saving money by cutting staff and working extra hours himself. He began opening in the mornings to save money and closing at night because he came to believe that someone on his staff was stealing from him. Pat and Trey both worked in the restaurant to try to save money. Pat could see the failure and the hours weighing on her husband.
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  “Pat begged me to sell, to get out,” he said. “Of course, she was right, I should have sold it within a year of buying it. I would have saved myself a lot of heartache and a lot of money. But I was stubborn. I wasn’t going to let the damn restaurant beat me. I was going to get it right if it killed me.”

  It didn’t kill him, but it killed his finances and probably played a role in killing his marriage. “He was never home,” Pat Washington said. “He was always tired, and the way the restaurant was going made him very uptight. Kermit always has to be busy, but this went too far. Between the radio, the restaurant, and Africa, I never saw him.”

  The words come in a torrent when Pat Carter (she now uses her maiden name) talks about her ex-husband today. “Kermit’s whole life, from the first day I met him, has been devoted to being someone. I didn’t understand that for a long time. When we were in college, I could see it, and I knew it came from all those years of feeling as if he was nobody, of being told he wasn’t any good in his own home. He felt worthless; he wanted to feel worthy. I thought if I loved him enough, after a while that hunger would go away, or at least dissipate.

  “It never did. Even after he was a star in college, even after he made it in the NBA. Maybe—maybe—if the Tomjanovich punch hadn’t happened and his career had continued to go forward, there would have come a time when he would have been satisfied. But honestly I don’t think so. He needed so much reinforcement. He needed to know he was someone, that he wasn’t the little kid who grew up homeless in his own home. Then later he needed to know that he wasn’t just the guy who threw the awful punch. He will tell you he knows he is more than that, but deep down, he doesn’t. He’s still trying to convince himself that he isn’t just that person.

  “I knew he wasn’t just that person. His children knew it. We loved him. But that wasn’t enough. It was just never enough.”

  Kermit denies none of this. He admits he was, and is, driven to show the world he isn’t just the person seen through the years on that one piece of tape. The work in Africa is to help others, but it is also to help him; not financially, but emotionally.

  “The sad part of it all is I had everything you should want,” he said. “I had a good job, I had a great family. I lived in a community that accepted me. But I couldn’t see that I had it all, and I kept pushing, whether to prove myself the way Pat says or whatever the reason. And I crashed and burned.”

  It didn’t happen all at once. The restaurant started the financial slide. Then came the marriage. He met Mimi Nguyen at a fitness club. She was young, attractive, and smart, a commercial real estate broker in Portland at the time. Washington makes no excuses for what happened. Two years later, on November 25, 1998—“Ten-thirty at night, to be precise,” Pat remembers—he told Pat the truth, that there was someone else in his life.

  “Unless you have been in love with someone, you can’t imagine the hurt I felt,” she said. “Even then I told him if he would give her up, I would try to make the marriage work, try to fix it. I told him I’d work in the restaurant day and night if that’s what we needed to do. But it was too late.”

  Washington began 1999 with his marriage blowing up and the restaurant careening toward bankruptcy.

  That summer Pat moved to Las Vegas, where she had found a teaching job in an elementary school. Kermit moved in with Mimi. Dana Washington was so hurt by the breakup of her parents’ marriage that she didn’t speak to her father for most of the next two years. Even today she finds it difficult. Trey Washington remained with his father, working in the restaurant even after Kermit finally was forced to sell.

  By then he had lost $500,000. He made no money on the sale, only able to get an agreement from the new owner to assume the considerable debt attached to the place. Meanwhile, he had also lost his radio job. New management came to the station and broke up Washington’s partnership with Mychal Thompson. Shortly after that, Thompson moved to another station. Washington didn’t like his new on-air partner, and their lack of on-air chemistry meant the station had to choose between them. Since his partner was the program director, Washington wasn’t likely to win that battle. He didn’t.

  The comfortable life he had settled into in the midnineties had crashed. His marriage was over. Instead of being comfortable financially, he was in debt for the first time in his life. Getting a job for most ex–NBA players, especially one who is articulate, college-educated, and willing to work hard, usually isn’t difficult. But if you are Kermit Washington, it will never be easy. There is no margin for error.

  He had first thought about coaching in the NBA after leaving Stanford in the late eighties. He thought his skills were more suited to the NBA. Recruiting at the college level was too much like being a door-to-door salesman. That wasn’t him. But getting out on the floor and working with big men, teaching them the things Newell had taught him, or working in the weight room, that was him. And so he began to send out letters every year to NBA teams. Most, he says, went unanswered. Others were answered with form letters. Occasionally, someone he had known would call to talk to him. Always the message was the same: “I just can’t.”

  For a long time Washington shrugged off the rejections. This, he decided, was the burden of being who he was. It hadn’t prevented him from being a success. If he couldn’t work in the NBA, that was disappointing, but it was okay.

  Now, though, he was out of work. It wasn’t so okay anymore. Coaching in the NBA was something he knew he could do. If he couldn’t get radio work in Portland, where he was well known and had been popular, then he wasn’t likely to get that sort of work anyplace else. Coaching, it seemed to him, was the logical route to follow.

  “After all,” he said, “all I needed was one guy willing to take a shot.”

  He couldn’t find that one guy. He began writing letters to anyone he had ever met in basketball who worked for an NBA team or might have a contact with an NBA team. He continued raising money for Project Contact, but without the platform of the radio show it became more difficult. His résumé traveled more than most circus performers. But it never got Washington anywhere.

  Washington is convinced that two words not mentioned in his résumé make it impossible for him to get hired in the NBA: Rudy Tomjanovich. After years of rejection, he came to believe there was a conspiracy to keep him out of the league, that he was being blackballed. “They know if I get hired, the whole thing will come up again,” he said. “All the questions, all the issues. They don’t want that. I’ve had coaches in the league whom I know tell me very honestly, ‘Kermit, I just can’t hire you.’”

  Early in the year 2000, Washington decided he needed to take aggressive steps to try once more to cleanse his reputation and to force the hiring issue with the NBA. Just sending out résumés wasn’t getting anything accomplished.

  First he took a lie detector test. He called Dr. Stanley Abrams, a clinical psychologist in Portland who has been a polygraph expert for almost forty years. Most of Abrams’s work is done with accused murderers. “Most of my referrals come from defense attorneys,” he said. “They want their client to take a polygraph test privately, so that if the results don’t come out well, they can’t be forced to turn them over to a prosecutor. If a client tests well, then the attorney will usually ask for a police polygraph for his client. About eighty-five percent of the referrals I get are people who are not found to be truthful on the test.”

  Abrams knew who Washington was when he called because the two men had sat next to each other on an airplane twenty years earlier. “He didn’t remember it, but we were on a cross-country flight together and he had told me his whole life story for hours,” he said. “I remembered thinking then that this guy had lived a very tough life. But I didn’t say anything to him about that conversation when he initially called me.”

  On April 27, 2000, Abrams tested Washington. The average lie detector test takes two to two and a half hours and usually consists of a handful of key questions asked in the midst of dozens of others. Usually the e
xaminer will start out with questions like “Is your name Kermit?” “Do you live in the state of Oregon?” In the case of a murder, he will work his way up to things such as “Did you ever wish to see anyone dead?” or “Are you afraid I’m going to ask a question you aren’t prepared for?”

  According to Abrams the crucial part of the test normally consists of nine questions, a couple of them completely irrelevant, a couple used strictly for comparison, and finally the ones that relate directly to the issue at hand. The key questions on Washington’s test were: “Were you struck by Kevin Kunnert on December 9, 1977, before you struck him?” and “After you were fighting with Kunnert, did you feel threatened by Rudy Tomjanovich?”

  According to Abrams, Washington’s responses were “almost miraculously high” in truth content.

  But like most lie detector results, Washington’s high scores are not likely to exonerate him in the court of public opinion. To begin with, there are the usual suspicions about lie detector tests. Abrams, who is considered one of the top practitioners in the field, says there are ways for people to “beat” the test, although he does not believe Washington did that. But even he concedes that lie detectors are imperfect, which is why they are not admitted as evidence in court.

  More important perhaps is that Washington’s being found to be truthful changes little about the incident: Kunnert readily admits that he swung an elbow in the direction of Washington’s shoulder after Washington grabbed his shorts. So no one, even Kunnert, disputes that he struck Washington first. Further, everyone agrees that Washington reacted instinctively to the sight of Tomjanovich coming up from behind him. The question is, did he need to react the way he did, or, as Calvin Murphy has said, should he have defended first and swung second?