But the general manager in San Diego liked Tomjanovich’s ability to shoot from long range, his willingness to mix it up inside, his attitude, and his quickness to the boards. The general manager was Pete Newell. Two years after drafting Tomjanovich, Newell left the Rockets and joined the Lakers. A year after that, his first pick in the draft on behalf of the Lakers was Kermit Washington.
The Rockets had come into existence in 1967, part of the NBA’s second expansion. In 1966 the league had made the Chicago Bulls its tenth franchise. One year later San Diego and Seattle were granted teams. Those twelve were joined the next year by Phoenix and Milwaukee. Two years later Buffalo, Portland, and Cleveland were added. That meant the league had nearly doubled in size in a five-year period.
Tomjanovich was the classic wide-eyed rookie in San Diego. Neither he nor his new wife, Sophie, had ever spent any time outside the Midwest. They drove cross-country from Michigan to San Diego after their wedding and found themselves in paradise. They lived less than a mile from the beach and waited for a winter that never came.
As much as the Tomjanoviches loved San Diego, Rudy’s rookie season wasn’t an easy one. For reasons he never understood completely, his playing time was sporadic. Some nights he would play for extended periods; others he played hardly at all. He learned later that Alex Hannum, the coach, was in the midst of an ongoing battle with Newell and that he had not been Hannum’s choice as the team’s top pick. Once the team drafted Tomjanovich, Hannum wanted to use him in a trade. Newell was firm: the kid was staying. That might have explained why Hannum, without any real explanation, kept finding ways—at least in Tomjanovich’s mind—to keep him on the bench. He played less than 15 minutes a game that first season and averaged a dismal 5.3 points per game.
Tomjanovich was so disturbed by what was going on that he would often go to a local gym at night to shoot, taking Sophie with him as a rebounder. “Very romantic stuff,” she said years later.
At season’s end everything changed. The Rockets were sold to a group in Houston. Hannum was gone as coach, replaced by Tex Winter. Sophie and Rudy set off on another cross-country trek, this one landing them in Texas in the middle of August. They were from Michigan by way of San Diego. Houston in August was a complete shock.
“We were sick for weeks,” Tomjanovich said. “You go outside, it’s a hundred and five; inside it’s fifty. Hearing about weather like that is one thing, living with it is another.”
They adjusted gradually. One thing that helped was that Winter immediately installed Rudy as a starter. The team was worse than it had been the year before—dropping from 40 wins to 34—but Tomjanovich was playing. The Rockets were a strange franchise. To try to drum up support, they played “home” games all over Texas, including several in El Paso, which was almost as close to San Diego as it was to Houston. They played a number of games in the Astrodome, often with nearly 50,000 empty seats as witnesses.
Slowly the team and the franchise got better. Calvin Murphy had arrived the same year as Tomjanovich as the team’s second-round draft choice. He and Tomjanovich were friends right from the start; as different in temperament as two people could be, but bonded by their love for the game and, it seemed, by the fact that each man felt he had a lot to prove as a basketball player. Murphy had always been overlooked because of his height—he had finished second to Maravich in national scoring each of his three seasons in college, yet wasn’t selected in the first round—and he played every game with a huge chip on his shoulder. Tomjanovich always felt people didn’t really believe in him. He remembered the newspaper headlines in San Diego after he had been drafted: “Rudy Who?” He was fully aware of the people in San Diego who preferred Maravich and was convinced that his coach didn’t respect him and that most people looked at him as an overrated white stiff who couldn’t possibly be athletic enough to adjust to the NBA.
By the end of their rookie season, Tomjanovich and Murphy were road roommates, such close friends that when the players were given the right to single rooms on the road a few years later, they continued to share a room. Their wives also became close friends.
The team made the playoffs in 1975 and won a first-round series from the aging New York Knicks. A year later Ray Patterson, who had arrived from Milwaukee in 1972 as team president and general manager, made two moves that made the Rockets into a legitimate NBA contender. First he made what looked like a solid deal, sending Joe Meriweather and Gus Bailey to the Atlanta Hawks for Dwight Jones just prior to the 1976 draft. He also persuaded the Hawks to swap first-round picks, since they were getting two players to the Rockets’ one. This ended up giving them the number one pick in the draft, and the player the Rockets chose was John Lucas, a lightning-fast point guard from the University of Maryland.
A few months later, Patterson made another deal, this one a gamble: he gave up his 1977 and 1978 number one picks to Buffalo in exchange for 6-foot-10-inch wunderkind Moses Malone. In 1974 Malone had become the first high school player to skip college to turn pro when he signed with the ABA’s Utah Stars. He had landed in Buffalo two years later and hadn’t yet hit his stride as a pro. But he was still only twenty-one.
Patterson and the Rockets saw Malone as a work in progress. When he was added to Lucas, Tomjanovich, Murphy, and Mike Newlin, who had been the team’s number two pick out of the University of Utah (behind the immortal Cliff Meely) in 1971, it was clear that this was a team on the come. The 49–33 record in 1976–77 and the near miss in the conference final against the 76ers had convinced everyone in Houston that big things were ahead. After their nomadic first seasons and the acres of empty seats in the Astrodome, the team was now in the brand-new Summit with a young team worthy of the building. Even the poor start in the fall of 1977 was looked at as a temporary setback, nothing more. They were just beginning to find themselves, having won three games in a row when they flew to San Francisco to start a four-game West Coast swing that would conclude with three straight games on the weekend, the first in Los Angeles on Friday night.
3
That Was Then…
The NBA in 1977 was an entirely different entity from the NBA in 2002. Not only was the salary structure light years away from where it is now, the lifestyle was completely different. There was no such thing in the league as a charter airplane. Teams traveled commercially, in coach, the players squeezing uncomfortably into their seats, usually on the first flight available the morning after the game. Anyone who traveled in those days often saw groups of very tall, very bleary-eyed men moving through airports in the predawn hours.
Coaches were genuine authority figures. Free agency existed, but only in a limited sense, because teams had to be compensated for the loss of a player. That meant if a general manager signed a free agent, he risked having his team damaged or even gutted, because it was the league that decided on the compensation to be given the player’s former team. As a result, if you as a player didn’t get along with your coach, chances were pretty good you were going to be stuck on the bench for a while. And if you were on the bench, you couldn’t prove to another team it was worth taking a chance on signing you.
Players and coaches were far more accessible to the media. To begin with, there were far fewer media outlets. ESPN was still two years from its launch, and USA Today was six years away from publishing for the first time. None of the twenty-four-hour news services that now glut the airwaves existed. Writers often traveled on the same flights as the players. Their lifestyles weren’t all that different. The difference in salary between most players and most writers wasn’t that great. Often they ate and drank together.
The writers and coaches on teams even played basketball together at times. Rich Levin, the Lakers beat writer for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, had been a backup forward on UCLA’s national championship teams in 1964 and 1965. Ted Green, the L.A. Times beat writer, was also a very good player. Occasionally he, Levin, and whoever else was around would engage Lakers coach Jerry West and his assistant coaches in pickup games. L
egend has it that one morning Green got hot and began burying shots from all over the court. Each time he would score, West, one of the greatest guards in the history of the game, would respond by hitting a shot over Levin. Finally, exasperated by yet another West basket, Green screamed at Levin, “Geez, Rich, do I have to do everything? Can’t you stop him once?”
To which Levin responded, “Ted, in case you haven’t noticed, this is Jerry fucking West I’m trying to guard!”
“You had a job to do, they had a job to do, everyone understood that,” Green said. “But it was almost collegial at times. I liked almost all the players. I genuinely liked Kermit Washington and enjoyed his company on the road.”
A number of players chose to hang with the writers on the road. Mike Newlin, who, like Washington, had been an academic All-American in college, enjoyed the writers because their interests tended to be broader than those of most of his teammates. “I loved to read, anything I could get my hands on,” he said. “There weren’t a lot of guys in the locker room who had much interest in most of the books I was reading. The writers did.”
Television played a minor role in the life of the league. Cable TV was just starting to emerge as a factor, mostly in major markets like New York and Los Angeles. Game times were rarely changed because of television, and there probably weren’t more than a half-dozen players in the league who would be recognized by most people walking down the street in their hometown.
“In a lot of ways it was less stressful then than it is for the players now,” Kermit Washington said. “Sure, they’re making a lot more money now—a lot more—but their lives aren’t their own. The lives most of us led in the league in those days were fairly close to normal.” He smiled. “The worst part was trying to fit into those coach seats on six A.M. flights.”
To Washington, and to most NBA players, that was a small price to pay given that they were doing what they loved and being well paid to do it. “I think most athletes will tell you they’d play for nothing,” Washington said. “It’s not quite that simple, since we all need to make a living once we become adults. But what you are doing as a professional athlete is playing the game you did play for nothing as a kid because you loved it, and now you’re being paid a lot of money to keep on playing. I think more of us understood how lucky we were back then, more than the athletes do today. Nowadays a lot of them feel they’re owed the living they make and the lifestyle they lead.”
The crowd in the Forum on the night of December 9 was a reflection of what the NBA was in those days. The attendance was 10,645, meaning the building was a little more than half-full. If the Lakers had been off to a better start, there might have been another two or three thousand in attendance, but the game certainly wouldn’t have been a sellout.
Ted Green’s brief advance on the game didn’t even make the front page of the L.A. Times sports section that morning. The lead story in sports was the California Angels’ trade of second baseman Jerry Remy to the Boston Red Sox for pitcher Don Aase. Jim Murray’s column was about a middleweight boxer. On the front page of the newspaper, Anwar Sadat was calling his opponents in the Arab world “moronic dwarfs,” and AFL-CIO president George Meany was calling for the creation of 4 million new jobs at the organization’s convention, which was being held in downtown Los Angeles.
That both teams were having difficult seasons was reflected not only in their mediocre records but in the atmosphere in their locker rooms. Jerry West, in his second season as the Lakers’ coach, was already beginning to have doubts about the job. Like many great players, he found it difficult to be patient with players who didn’t approach the game with the intensity or the intelligence he had brought to the court—which was most players. He liked his rookie point guard, Norm Nixon, but wasn’t crazy about his other guards, notably Ernie DiGregorio, a one-time rookie of the year who was struggling to find minutes with the Lakers.
The one player West had who could look him in the eye in a playing sense was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But coaching Abdul-Jabbar was no picnic. He was moody, often angry. There were times when Abdul-Jabbar would just leave practice if something happened that didn’t make him happy. As was true in games, he didn’t like any sort of physical play, and one player who always played physically was Washington. One day in practice when Washington was shoving Abdul-Jabbar around on the inside, Kareem simply picked up his things, bounded up the steps of the Forum to the level where the players parked their cars, and left.
“Never said a word to anybody,” said Ted Green, who witnessed the incident. “He went from jostling with Kermit to out of the building in about forty-five seconds.”
“I would always try to tell Kermit that the purpose of practice wasn’t to get somebody hurt,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “His answer was that if he didn’t practice the way he was going to have to play, he wouldn’t be ready to play. I understood that, but there were times when he crossed the line.”
Washington had been a pleasant surprise to West right from the beginning of his coaching tenure. When he had taken the job he was convinced that one thing he and Bill Sharman, who had replaced Pete Newell as general manager, had to do was find a way to move Washington. But the Washington who showed up for training camp in the fall of 1976 after his summer-in-hell with Newell was a completely different player from the Washington West had wanted to trade. By the end of training camp he was either starting or coming off the bench very early in games and had become an important part of the team.
“He brought things to the table that we needed,” West said. “He was especially important to Kareem because of the things he was willing to do.”
Specifically, he did the things Abdul-Jabbar didn’t like to do: mix it up inside; guard the other team’s most physical inside player; rebound in traffic. At 7-1, Abdul-Jabbar was a very good rebounder—he averaged 11.2 rebounds per game for his career—but most of his rebounds came as a result of his size or his positioning on defense. Washington would go after the tough offensive rebound Abdul-Jabbar often had little interest in. And when scuffles broke out, as they often did, the person who was expected to step in to keep Abdul-Jabbar from getting into trouble was Washington.
“In those days every team in the NBA had an enforcer, a policeman,” said Jack Ramsay, who coached the Portland Trail Blazers to the championship in 1977 with Maurice Lucas acting as the enforcer for Bill Walton. “There was so much physical play and there were so many fights, you had to have one guy the other team didn’t want to mess with under any circumstances.”
The role of the enforcer had become so important that Sports Illustrated had done a cover story on the subject early in the 1977–78 season. Most of the players selected were power forwards like Washington and Lucas. The exception was the Rockets’ Calvin Murphy, all 5-10, 165 pounds of him.
“Calvin was one of the few players in the league who truly knew how to fight,” Mike Newlin said. “He actually had a fighting style. Size didn’t matter to him. In fact he preferred fighting big people. They were terrified of him. He just beat the crap out of people.”
Everyone in the league had a story about a Calvin Murphy fight. The one in which he had destroyed 6-foot-8 inch Celtics forward Sidney Wicks was the most legendary. “I think he got in nine punches by my count,” said Tom Nissalke, the Rockets’ coach at the time. “Wicks never got off a punch.” The replay of that fight was popular in a lot of NBA arenas, especially at the Summit in Houston, where it was often shown on the replay screen on the scoreboard prior to games.
One night when the Celtics were in town, the replay appeared once more on the big screen during warm-ups. As it did, Nissalke saw Celtics coach Tom Heinsohn walking toward him. Heinsohn was 6-foot-8 and had played at about 240 during his Hall of Fame career with the Celtics. His face was red by the time he got to Nissalke.
“That replay shows up one more time,” he said, pointing a finger at Nissalke, “and the next fight they’re gonna replay will be between you and me.”
“Tom,” Nissalke said, �
�I’ll take care of it right away.”
The replay wasn’t used again—when the Celtics were in town.
Washington had balked when asked to pose for SI’s enforcer pictures. He understood his role and knew why the magazine wanted him to take part. But even though fighting was sometimes part of what he did on the court, he didn’t think of himself as fierce or mean, certainly not cut from the same angry cloth as Murphy or Lucas. He agreed to pose for the photos but refused to produce the angry look the photographer was after.
“Just one, Kermit,” the photographer said, exasperated. “Just look a little bit tough.”
Washington complied. “And that was the one picture they used,” he said.
A lot of stories written about Washington, especially those written during his college days at American University, included the phrase “gentle giant.” Off the court he was soft-spoken and polite. The writers liked him not only because he was cooperative and friendly but because he could talk about subjects that had nothing to do with basketball.
“Kermit was a go-to guy in the locker room,” Rich Levin said. “He was always good with a quote, and he was usually the guy you stood around and killed time with while you were waiting for Kareem to show up.”
But he was a fierce player, strong and aggressive, and more than willing to mix it up when necessary. He never looked for a fight, but he never backed away from one either. And he understood that if Abdul-Jabbar got into a skirmish—which he often did—it was his job to intervene.
The Punch Page 5