The Punch

by John Feinstein

  Tomjanovich had no idea how fortunate he was that Vandervoort had figured out very quickly that he had a serious injury. As he left the court with Vandervoort, Tomjanovich was trailed by Dr. Clarence Shields, one of the Lakers’ team doctors. Washington had already left, escorted by security and by Dr. Robert Kerlan, the Lakers’ senior team doctor, who went back to the locker room with him to examine his hand.

  As he walked off, Tomjanovich could hear a man directly over the tunnel leading to the dressing rooms screaming profanities at him. “He should have killed you, Tomjanovich,” the man yelled. “Should have killed you.”

  Standing in front of the man, eyes filled with tears, was a youngster Tomjanovich recognized as someone who had come to his basketball camp years earlier. Tomjanovich wasn’t sure whether the boy was crying because of what he looked like or because of what the man was yelling. Either way, he went from wobbly to furious in an instant.

  “Let’s get this done fast, Trick,” he said. “Put some gauze in my nose or whatever and get me back out there.”

  Vandervoort said nothing. Once they were out of the arena and in the hallway under the stands, they had to walk past the Lakers’ dressing room and around a corner to where the visitors’ dressing room was located. The first person Tomjanovich saw in the hallway was Washington. By then the media was in the hallway—Bonk and George White from Houston and two of the three Lakers beat writers—Rich Levin of the Herald-Examiner and Mitch Chortkoff from the Orange County Register. Green was still on the court.

  “Kermit was still wound up,” Bonk said. “He was pacing up and down in the hallway, just all pumped up on adrenaline, when Rudy and Vandervoort got there.”

  Seeing Washington, Tomjanovich turned in his direction. “Why’d you hit me like that?” he demanded.

  “What?” Washington screamed back. “What? Hit you? Ask Kevin Kunnert. Ask him what happened.”

  “I’m asking you, you sonofabitch,” Tomjanovich yelled back, and he started toward Washington.

  He didn’t get far, though, because Vandervoort and the security people intervened. “Good thing,” Tomjanovich said later. “If I’d gotten near him, he probably would have killed me.”

  In fact he almost certainly would have killed him.

  Once it became apparent to Tomjanovich that he wasn’t going to get to Washington, he and Vandervoort proceeded to the locker room. Dr. Shields had already gone ahead and placed a call to the pager of Dr. Paul Toffel, a thirty-four-year-old who specialized in head trauma. Toffel was at a pre-Christmas fund-raiser for the University of Southern California Medical Center at a hotel not far from the arena. When he called Shields back, Shields told him there had been a fight during the game at the Forum. “I’ve got a guy here who appears to have a severely broken nose and other facial injuries,” he said. Toffel told him he would meet the player in the emergency room at Centinela Hospital as soon as he could get there.

  “Do me a favor and tell them to get started right away on X rays,” he told Shields. “That way I can see what we’re dealing with as soon as I arrive.”

  At that moment Tomjanovich was sitting on a training table, with no intention of going to a hospital. He had a game to finish. “If my nose is broken, hook me up with a mask,” he told Vandervoort. Firmly, Vandervoort told him there would be no mask and no more basketball on this night.

  “There’s an ambulance outside,” he said.

  “Ambulance?” Tomjanovich said. “What the hell is that about?”

  A few minutes later he was in the ambulance. Then he was in the hospital and they were making X rays. He wondered what he must look like, because the looks he was getting from the people in the emergency room were not that different from what he had seen on the court from Jerry West. “And these were people who were used to seeing stuff,” he said.

  Dr. Toffel arrived a few minutes later, still in his tuxedo. When he was given the X rays, his eyes went wide. “Oh my God,” Toffel said to the emergency room doctor who had given him the X rays. “This isn’t a sinus injury. The posterior portion of his face is way out of alignment.” (Translation: the top part of his skull was actually about an inch off line from the lower portion.)

  “Who is this guy?” Toffel asked.

  “Rudy Tomjanovich. Plays for the Rockets.”

  Toffel knew the name, knew Tomjanovich was a very good player.

  Tomjanovich was wondering when he was going to get to call his wife back home in Houston when Toffel, now wearing scrubs over his tuxedo, walked in carrying X rays. He introduced himself, put a glove on one hand, and told Tomjanovich that he was going to see if he could move his upper jaw.

  “It moved very easily,” Toffel said later. “Which confirmed what the X rays had shown. I knew then this was a very serious situation.”

  Tomjanovich was still trying to figure out the quickest way to get out of the hospital. He asked Toffel if whatever he was going to do was going to take long and, more important, if he couldn’t play any more basketball that night, how soon would he be back? The Rockets had a game in Phoenix the next night. Could he play there?

  Toffel looked Tomjanovich in the eye. “No, Rudy, you can’t play tomorrow,” he said. “You aren’t going to play basketball for a while. You aren’t going to play any more this season.”

  Tomjanovich, whose eyes were already swelling shut, looked at Toffel as closely as he possibly could. Even though they were slits, his eyes told him that Toffel was completely serious. Any pain he was feeling disappeared, replaced by rage. “Not play this season?” he repeated. “Okay, look Doc, I know you gotta do what you gotta do, but give me an hour. I promise I’ll come right back. I need to go back and find the guy who did this to me.”

  In Tomjanovich’s mind at that moment, he was about to walk out of the emergency room, hail a cab, and go back to the Forum. Not play for the rest of the season? Now he really wanted to get Kermit Washington, regardless of the consequences. “I can’t ever remember being angrier than I was at that moment,” he said.

  Toffel’s face didn’t change expression. His voice was very soft. “Rudy, let me ask you a question,” he said. “Do you have any kind of funny taste in your mouth?”

  Tomjanovich’s eyes opened slightly. “Yeah, I do,” he said. “It doesn’t taste like blood either. It’s very bitter. What is it?”

  “Spinal fluid,” Toffel said. “You’re leaking spinal fluid from your brain. We’re going to get you up to ICU in a few minutes and we’re going to hope your brain capsule seals very soon. Do you know what the ICU is, Rudy?”

  Tomjanovich nodded. He knew what ICU stood for: intensive care unit. The rage was gone. It had been replaced by fear.

  “You’re in trouble, Rudy,” Toffel said. “We’re going to work very hard to get you through this. But you can’t be negative right now about anything or anyone. You have to work toward getting better, a little bit at a time. We don’t need any anger or anything negative. Do you understand?”

  Tomjanovich nodded again. By now he was in shock. Less than an hour ago, he had been a basketball player, doing what he loved and being paid a lot of money to do it. Now a doctor was telling him his life was hanging in the balance. He was twenty-nine years old, with a wife and two young children. At that moment all he wanted to do was see them again. Nothing else mattered.

  While Tomjanovich was being taken to the hospital, Kermit Washington sat on a table in the empty Lakers locker room as Dr. Kerlan put stitches in his hand. A few minutes later he showered, dressed, and went home. His wife, Pat, who was almost eight months pregnant, was there with their two-year-old daughter, Dana.

  He had been in fights before. In fact the previous season in Buffalo, he had decked John Shumate during a scuffle on court and then taken on most of the Braves’ bench. He had fought with Dave Cowens, the Boston Celtics’ star center, in another incident. But something told him this was different. Dr. Kerlan had said they were taking Tomjanovich to the hospital and that he had a badly broken nose and some facial
injuries. He had seen the blood on the court, had felt the punch land. He wondered if he would be suspended by the NBA, which had passed new antifighting rules before the start of the season in response to a spate of fights in previous years.

  As he walked to his car he heard someone calling his name. It was the man who patrolled the players’ parking lot during games. He didn’t know the man’s name, but they always exchanged greetings before and after each game.

  “Kermit,” the man said as Washington opened his car. “I saw it. I saw what happened.”

  Washington nodded, not really eager to get into a conversation at that moment.

  “Kermit,” the man said, “you’re in a lot of trouble. Big trouble.”

  Washington’s stomach twisted into a knot. He wasn’t sure why, because at that moment he didn’t know how badly Tomjanovich was hurt, but something told him the man was right.

  He was in a lot of trouble.

  2

  An Overcast Friday

  As with most disasters, the day that would change the lives of Rudy Tomjanovich and Kermit Washington forever began routinely. It was an overcast Friday in Los Angeles, six weeks into the NBA season. Both the Rockets and the Lakers had gotten off to poor starts, especially given that each had arrived in training camp with high hopes.

  The Lakers had finished the 1976–77 regular season with the league’s best record, 53–29. But they hadn’t been the same team after Washington tore up his knee in the last game prior to the All-Star break, and when they faced the Portland Trail Blazers in the Western Conference finals—a team they had beaten three straight times when Washington was healthy—they were swept in four games. The Blazers, led by Bill Walton, went on to beat the Philadelphia 76ers in six games to win their only NBA championship.

  In Houston everyone connected to the Rockets firmly believed that the championship trophy sitting in Portland could easily have been in Houston instead. The Rockets had won a franchise record 49 games and had reached the conference final for the first time in team history, where they faced the 76ers. The Sixers were loaded, the overwhelming favorites to win the title. They had returning All-Stars George McGinnis and Doug Collins, the massive young center Darryl Dawkins, and had added the extraordinary Julius Erving. Erving came from the financially strapped New York Nets, who virtually gave Erving’s contract away for $3 million in order to have enough cash to buy their way into the NBA along with three other teams from the now-defunct American Basketball Association.

  Trailing three games to one, the Rockets had won game five in Philadelphia. Back in Houston, game six had gone to the wire. In the waning seconds, with Philadelphia leading by 2, John Lucas had weaved his way through traffic to the basket and made what appeared to be a game-tying layup. But there was contact between Lucas and Collins on the play and a whistle blew. If the foul was on Collins, the basket would count and Lucas could win the game with a free throw. But Jake O’Donnell, one of the NBA’s most respected officials, called the foul on Lucas, wiping out the basket, and the 76ers hung on to win and advance.

  “At worst it should have been a no-call,” Tomjanovich said years later. “Doug was right under the basket. You can’t call a charge when the defender is under the basket like that.”

  “Jake made the call,” Lucas said years later. “But he could have gotten help from his partner on it.” O’Donnell’s partner that night was Joe Gushue. “Philly guy,” Lucas said. “He was from Philly.” He smiled. “Which means nothing, of course.”

  To a man, the Rockets were convinced that if they had forced a game seven, even playing in Philadelphia, the pressure on the 76ers would have been overwhelming. If they had won that game, they would then have faced Portland, a team they had handled throughout the regular season, winning three of four games. “It was definitely right there,” Tomjanovich said. “That call was one of those you think about for a long time.” He smiled. “I still think about it.”

  The reason for the Lakers’ early-season struggle in 1977–78 was easy to pinpoint: no Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In his ninth season in the league, Abdul-Jabbar was the most dominating offensive presence in the game. At a listed 7-foot-1 (most players insisted he was at least 7-3), he was unstoppable when he set up in the low post and unleashed his skyhook, a shot that was actually released above the rim. It couldn’t be blocked, and Abdul-Jabbar had made it into an art form. But his temper tantrum in the opening game put him on the sidelines for 20 games, and without him the Lakers were a shadow of themselves.

  The Rockets had had no major injuries. They just weren’t playing very well. Teams had adapted to playing against their big lineup—Kunnert at 7 feet, Moses Malone at 6-10, and Tomjanovich at 6-8—and were taking advantage of their lack of quickness on defense. Coach Tom Nissalke had taken to tinkering with the lineup to try to create more favorable matchups. After a 6–12 start, Nissalke went to a starting lineup that included Malone, Tomjanovich, and rookie Robert Reid up front and Lucas and Calvin Murphy in the backcourt.

  One person the tinkering did not sit well with was guard Mike Newlin. He had been a starter for most of his seven-year NBA career. He was 6-foot-5, 220 pounds, and a good enough shooter to score from outside, strong enough to get to the basket if a defender came up to deny him his jump shot. But with Nissalke going with the smaller lineup, Newlin had seen his minutes dwindle. He had spent his entire pro career in Houston. In fact he had been the first player the team had signed to a contract in 1971 after the franchise relocated from San Diego. He liked to call himself “the original Houston Rocket.”

  The original Rocket was not pleased with his loss of playing time. A year before, he had heard rumors throughout the season that the Rockets were trying to trade him. But he had a clause in his contract that allowed him to be traded only to certain teams, and he had made it clear to the Rockets that he didn’t want to be moved. Now he had decided enough was enough. He and Nissalke clashed often.

  “As much as I loved Houston and loved the guys I was playing with, I wanted out,” he said. “Especially if I could be traded to a good team.” After Nissalke changed the lineup Newlin asked team president and general manager Ray Patterson to see if he could make a deal for him. It was unusual for NBA general managers to go on the road with their teams, but Patterson, who had come to Houston from the Milwaukee Bucks five years earlier, was on the trip to Los Angeles because his daughter lived there.

  Shortly after the team returned from its game-day shootaround at the Forum, Newlin got a call from Patterson to come up to his room. “When I got up there, Ray told me they were about to make a deal,” Newlin said. “He asked me if I had a choice, would I prefer the Celtics or Lakers. I told him to let me think about it and tell him after the game. I went back to my room thinking I was probably about to play my last game as a Rocket that night.”

  Patterson has no recollection of that meeting, but Newlin’s memory is very specific. He made no bones then—and makes no bones now—about Nissalke. Even though he had spent his entire career—six-plus years—with the Rockets, the notion of going to the Celtics or the Lakers excited him. He said nothing to his teammates, knowing that nothing was final and the deal could still fall through.

  Newlin went back to his room to ponder his future. By then Tomjanovich was relaxing in his room and Washington was sitting down at his home in Palos Verdes with his wife and daughter to eat his pregame meal, which was almost always a plate of pasta.

  The referees assigned to the game had arrived in Los Angeles that morning and had checked into the Hacienda Hotel, a few miles from LAX. The Hacienda always gave NBA refs favorable rates, and often, if officials were assigned more than one West Coast game on a trip, they would leave their things at the Hacienda for several days. “In those days the [San Francisco] Warriors played in the Cow Palace, which was right near SFO,” Bob Rakel said. “You could work a game up there and catch a late flight back to L.A. and not have to worry about checking out and checking into hotels. It made life simpler.”

 
Rakel was forty-four and had been officiating in the NBA since 1968. He had grown up in Cincinnati with a refereeing pedigree— his father had been a referee, and his brother Ron was also a referee and had worked in the ABA for several years. Rakel had been a salesman for a garage door company when he got a last-minute call in the fall of 1967 to work an NBA exhibition game. The following summer he was invited to work at Kutcher’s Resort outside New York City in a series of exhibition games. That fall, Dolph Schayes, the league’s supervisor of officials, offered him a job.

  His partner that night was Ed Middleton, who had returned to the NBA the previous season after nine years in the ABA. Middleton was ten years younger than Rakel, one of a host of NBA officials who—like Joe Gushue—had come out of the Philadelphia area.

  The way officials worked in those days was entirely different from the way they work now. Today there are three officials assigned to every game, and they will usually have some kind of pregame meeting, if not in the hotel, then at the arena, to go over all the possible scenarios they may face in a given game. Then there were only two officials working; there was a lot less videotape available and a lot less communication from the league office.

  “We would always read the paper going into a given city to see if there had been anything brewing between the two teams,” Rakel said. “If one of us had worked a game between the teams and something had happened, we would discuss it, or if there had been a specific problem, the league might make us aware of it. But it wasn’t as extensive as it is now.”

  The NBA in 1977 was very different from what it is today. This was two years prior to the arrival of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and seven years before Michael Jordan joined the two of them to form the triumvirate that turned the league around. These were what Commissioner David Stern, then the league’s outside counsel, called “the dark days.”