The Punch

by John Feinstein

  He’d been thwarted in that regard on opening night, when Abdul-Jabbar came up behind Kent Benson, slugged him, and broke his hand. Washington was having the best season of his career through the Lakers’ first twenty-three games, averaging almost 12 points and more than 11 rebounds a game. There had never been a better time for him to play well. His contract was up at the end of the season, and it was becoming apparent that he would be negotiating from strength based on the way he was playing.

  Kevin Kunnert was also in his contract walk year. He had come into the league the same year as Washington—1973—chosen in the first round of the draft by the Chicago Bulls but traded to the Buffalo Braves without ever playing a game, because the Bulls didn’t want to pay a number one pick more money than their veteran stars Jerry Sloan and Norm Van Lier were making. He had grown up in Dubuque, Iowa, and had played at the University of Iowa, becoming the school’s all-time leading rebounder in his senior year. Because he was from a small town, a lot of NBA people thought of him as a cornpone. The phrase “big ole farm boy” was used to describe him almost as often as “gentle giant” was used on Washington. Kunnert was certainly big, 7 feet tall and 230 pounds, but he was a surprisingly effective player away from the basket. He had a funky-looking shot that made him appear to be falling backward when he released the ball, but he had a soft touch.

  Midway through his rookie season he was part of a four-player trade that landed him in Houston, where he became a solid, consistent player, starting frequently while playing about 30 minutes most nights. He consistently averaged about 11 points and 9 rebounds a game. He wasn’t quick, but he was strong enough to push people out of the low post and he played without fear and with an understanding of the game and his role.

  He was popular with his teammates because he had a dry sense of humor and was willing to do whatever he was asked to do to win. “He was never a ‘me’ guy,” Tomjanovich said. “If you needed him to rebound, he’d rebound; guard, he’d guard; shoot, he’d shoot. You liked having him on your side.”

  “There’s only one basketball,” Kunnert said, remembering his days with the Rockets. “We had Rudy, Calvin, Moses, Luke—all guys who liked to shoot the ball. I was happy to rebound, play defense, and win games. Which we did.”

  Kunnert and Washington had met two years earlier when they played on an NBA team that had gone to Mexico during the summer. The team had been put together by ProServ—formerly Dell, Fentress, and Craighill—which represented both of them. They had spent some time with each other, occasionally having breakfast together. They hadn’t become close friends by any means, but there was mutual respect. Each played a similar role for his team— one at center, the other at forward—asked to do the dirty work inside to protect the stars from foul trouble, from injury, and, if need be, from fights.

  “In those days you didn’t get friendly with too many guys on other teams,” Kunnert said. “You had a job to do, and that sometimes meant getting physical. But Kermit was someone I would say hi to when we played, because we’d spent some time together and he seemed like a perfectly nice guy.”

  Like Washington, Kunnert was easygoing and easy to like off the court. But he wasn’t gentle on the court. “He was the nicest guy you’ll ever meet,” Newlin said. “But on the court, he didn’t take any crap. He had a temper, and if you pushed too hard he’d push back.”

  “He had an edge,” said Jack Ramsay, who coached him later in his career. “You wouldn’t guess it talking to him, but he didn’t take any crap once the game started.”

  Kunnert was coming off the bench for the Rockets when they came to Los Angeles, backing up Moses Malone at center but also spending some time at power forward when Nissalke wanted to rest Tomjanovich or Robert Reid. Malone, Tomjanovich, and Reid started that night along with Lucas and Murphy. Up front for the Lakers it was Abdul-Jabbar, Washington, and Tom Abernethy, a second-year player from Indiana whom West liked because of his ability to guard small forwards. He was in the lineup because of an injury to Jamaal Wilkes, and it was his first NBA start. The rookie Norm Nixon and veteran Earl Tatum started at the guard spots.

  It was a normal NBA night throughout the first half. West put Washington on Malone to keep Abdul-Jabbar out of foul trouble. At the other end, Abdul-Jabbar was making Malone look like the twenty-two-year-old kid he still was, scoring over him with his skyhook and getting him into foul trouble. Midway through the second quarter, Malone had four fouls and had to come out for Kunnert. The game stayed close for one reason: the Lakers couldn’t guard Tomjanovich. No matter who West put on him, Tomjanovich scored. Abernethy knew how to play defense because he had played under Bob Knight at Indiana. But he wasn’t about to stop Tomjanovich on a night when Rudy T’s shot was finding the net as if the ball were equipped with radar. By halftime he had hit 9 of 14 shots and had 19 points. If the 3-point line had existed in those days he probably would have had 4 or 5 more points, since at least half his shots came from way outside.

  At the break the score was tied, 55–55. Over the course of an eighty-two-game NBA season, coaches rarely rolled out fireand-brimstone speeches at halftime. Players usually didn’t want to hear them, and every coach knew he could only go to the well so many times with emotional talks. Most saved them for the playoffs, crucial games at the end of the season, or, occasionally, for nights when the team was being completely outplayed. Even on some of those nights, the coach might not bother, knowing his team was tired from a long road trip or playing back-to-back or just the grind of the long season.

  Neither West nor Nissalke had much to say during the break. West decided Abernethy was still his best bet defensively on Tomjanovich because, at the very least, he would be willing to chase the constantly moving Tomjanovich around the court. Nissalke, not wanting Malone to pick up his fifth foul quickly in the third quarter, decided to start Kunnert at center.

  The second half began routinely. Murphy hit a shot to give the Rockets a 57–55 lead. Nixon missed a shot for the Lakers. Underneath, Abdul-Jabbar and Kunnert went after the long rebound and got tangled. Kunnert came down with the ball and managed to quickly outlet it to Lucas. While most of the players sprinted the other way, Abdul-Jabbar and Kunnert pushed and shoved at each other.

  There was history between the two men. Like most centers, Kunnert found Abdul-Jabbar almost impossible to guard. His best chance was to be physical with him, push him out of the low post if he could, frustrate him if possible, and hope to get him out of his rhythm. Abdul-Jabbar knew what Kunnert was trying to do. Intellectually he understood it. Emotionally it annoyed him.

  “He wasn’t a skilled player,” he said of Kunnert. “So he would push and shove, throw elbows, sometimes try talking to me. He had a mouth on him. We’d had our share of verbal exchanges in the past, and I knew he wanted me to throw an elbow back or square off. I dealt with that from people my whole career.”

  “Of course I pushed and shoved, that’s what you did with Jabbar,” Kunnert said. “The coaches would always tell me, ‘Don’t let him set up in the post.’ So I would try to beat him to the spot and keep him from getting position.”

  Abdul-Jabbar had nailed Kunnert with an elbow the previous year, on the opening possession of a game, catching him right above the eye and sending him flying. Kunnert landed on his tailbone and ended up in the locker room getting stitches.

  “When I came back out, Kareem apologized,” Kunnert said. “He said he didn’t know I was there. I didn’t really believe him, but I figured, okay, fine, that’ll be the end of it.”

  Now the two centers were pushing and shoving again. Bob Rakel, the trail referee, watched closely, debating whether he needed to whistle a double foul but not wanting to stop play unless he absolutely had to. “Houston had a break, so I didn’t want to stop the flow of play,” he said. “And I was hoping the two of them would just get clear of each other and keep playing.”

  Up in the press box, Ted Green noticed the Abdul-Jabbar– Kunnert skirmish and rolled his eyes. “Kareem was always
getting into these little flare-ups with players he considered to be beneath him,” he said. “The notion of a Kevin Kunnert pushing him was personally insulting. Almost always, when these things happened, it was with a white guy. I don’t think I ever saw Kareem fight with a black player. Kunnert was just the kind of player he didn’t respect. He wasn’t graceful, he wasn’t an All-Star, he was just sort of a solid plodder, but someone who was competitive enough to get into Kareem’s face. Kareem didn’t like that.”

  Seeing the contact between Abdul-Jabbar and Kunnert, Washington lingered in the backcourt, knowing if it escalated it was his job to step in and finish whatever Abdul-Jabbar or Kunnert might have started. Before things got that serious, though, Kunnert got away from Abdul-Jabbar and started up the court. The Rockets already had a numbers advantage with Lucas, Murphy, Reid, and Tomjanovich filling the lanes. Only Abernethy, Nixon, and Tatum were in position to get back. Tomjanovich ran toward the right corner, looking for a shot.

  “I was doing the thing I loved to do most,” he said with a smile. “Running the break, getting open, and waiting for Luke to get me the ball. My shot felt so good that night. I didn’t think I was ever going to miss.”

  Lucas with the ball on the break was as good as it got for the Rockets. He had such a great feel for the game that the other players were always convinced he would deliver the ball to the right spot. “I always felt like I could hear the other guys when we were going down the court,” Lucas said. “Rudy had those big old clunky feet. So if I heard ‘clomp, clomp, clomp,’ I knew it was him. Moses would come running down mumbling something like, ‘Middle, I’m middle.’ You heard the words, didn’t understand them, so you knew it was Moses. Murph was always screaming in that high-pitched voice of his, ‘Luke, me, me, me!’ So when I heard soprano, it was Murph. And if I heard someone yelling words I couldn’t understand because I needed to look them up in the dictionary, I knew that was Newlin.”

  The four Rockets were in full flight when Kunnert got free of Abdul-Jabbar. As he tried to burst upcourt to trail the break, Washington tried to hold him up. “Routine move,” he said. “A guy has a step on you, especially if his team has a break, you grab his shorts, hold him up, and push past him. It’s a foul, but you rarely got caught, because the trail referee had to be focused by then on catching up to the play because the ball was already moving down the court.”

  Trailing the play by a couple steps, Abdul-Jabbar saw Washington grab Kunnert’s shorts and thought little of it. “That was a routine move in those days,” he said. “At that point my focus was to try and catch up with the play,” he said.

  Until the moment when Washington grabbed Kunnert’s shorts, there is no dispute about what took place. The next few seconds are in dispute. According to Washington, Kunnert responded to his grabbing his shorts by turning around and elbowing him in the head.

  “I was going by him and he elbowed me in the head,” he said. “My first reaction was, ‘It’s an accident, forget it.’ I knew Kevin Kunnert from the summer trip. I also knew I’d fouled him, so if he did take a shot, okay, we’re even, let’s get on with it. Then he did it a second time, right above the eye. That’s when I stopped and turned on him.”

  Kunnert says the elbow he threw was aimed at Washington’s arm and was designed to do nothing more than get himself free from Washington’s grip. “When he grabbed my shorts, I reacted the way any player would react,” he said. “I reached down with my right arm, pushed his hand off of me, and said, ‘Get the fuck off of me,’” he said. “My momentum kind of spun me backwards, so I ended up facing him. I wasn’t looking for a fight, but I was ready for one. Before I could even think to get my hands up to protect myself, he threw a quick right that missed. When that happened, I thought, ‘Okay, we’re going to fight.’ I started to bring my hands up to cover for the next punch, when Kareem came up from behind and pinned my arms.”

  Abdul-Jabbar agrees that Kunnert’s elbow hit Washington below the shoulder. “But then, as he spun to face Kermit, he threw a punch at him. That’s when Kermit threw his first punch, and I jumped in to grab Kevin and try to get him out of there. I didn’t want a fight, and I didn’t want Kermit getting ejected for getting in a fight. Unfortunately, when I grabbed Kevin, I pinned his arms. That wasn’t my intent, but when I did he couldn’t protect himself from the next punch Kermit threw.”

  Kunnert denies throwing the punch Abdul-Jabbar says he saw. But he doesn’t blame him for grabbing him from behind. “He was doing the right thing,” he said. “In an NBA fight, if you’re a bystander, the best thing you can do is try and get the guys apart. I know that’s what Kareem was trying to do. When it was all over he said he was sorry he had pinned my arms, and I told him I knew that wasn’t his intent. I know what he was trying to do; he was trying to grab me and get me out of there to break the thing up. But what he ended up doing was pinning my arms so I was defenseless when Kermit threw the next punch. He nailed me pretty good with it right above my eye. I remember being stunned and starting to drop to one knee as Kareem was swinging me out of the way. I was woozy for a few seconds, down on a knee. I started to get up and I was thinking to myself, ‘Where’s Tricky?’ Usually in a situation like that he’d be on the court in seconds. The whistle had already blown to stop the play, so there was no reason for him not to come out. Then I stood up and saw him on his knees with a towel on Rudy’s face. I had no idea what had happened. Then I saw the blood.”

  The combination of Washington’s strength and Tomjanovich’s momentum produced an awful result. Washington knew how to throw a punch. Unlike Murphy, he had never formally trained to box, but he loved the sport and had studied great fighters. He had even told his close friend Josh Rosenfeld, who had been a manager at American University during Washington’s career there, that he fantasized about someday fighting Muhammad Ali. When he worked out, his favorite song was the theme from Rocky. Often he would shadowbox in the locker room before games to let off steam. When he saw the blur of red coming from behind, he turned and threw a right hand that started from behind his ear and landed just under Tomjanovich’s nose with extraordinary force.

  Only at the last second did Tomjanovich see the punch coming. That was when he threw up his hands—too late, never getting them above his shoulders. To this day he has no memory of seeing Washington turn toward him or of the punch itself. He remembers thinking that Kunnert was in trouble and running back downcourt to help break up the fight. And then he remembers lying in a pool of blood asking Vandervoort about the scoreboard.

  In the press box Chick Hearn, who has done play-by-play for the Lakers on radio since 1961, said on the air what everyone in the building was thinking: “Oh my God!”

  Hearn, who is still the voice of the Lakers at the age of eighty-five, remembers finding it difficult to believe that Washington would be the person delivering such a punch. “Kermit played an aggressive game and at times he had to be our enforcer,” Hearn said. “But I always saw him as a gentle soul. There were plenty of players in the league who I could see throwing a punch like that one. Kermit Washington wasn’t one of them.”

  The force from Washington’s right hand catapulted Tomjanovich backward. He landed squarely on his back, his head bouncing off the floor of the Forum, and then as he lost consciousness rolled over into a fetal position. Instantaneously, what had been just another skirmish on another NBA night had become, to use Washington’s oft-used phrase, a living nightmare.

  The building went quiet. “It was,” said Mike Newlin, “the loudest silence you have ever heard.”

  The first person to react to what had happened was Vandervoort, the Rockets’ trainer. He reached Tomjanovich in a matter of seconds, while other players were milling around in shock. He gently rolled him onto his back so he could get a towel on his face and try to stanch the blood gushing from Tomjanovich’s nose and mouth. The sound had terrified everyone; the sight of the blood spewing from Tomjanovich’s nose like a geyser made it worse. Years later, Ed Middleton, the refe
ree, would remember that he called for more towels to mop up the blood. What he didn’t remember, according to Ted Green, was that he was screaming for the towels.

  “I had this awful sense of dread in my stomach,” Middleton said. “The sound of it, then the sight of it, actually made me feel physically ill.”

  Rakel, who had seen Washington throw the punch from behind, stepped in front of him to tell him he was ejected from the game and pointed him in the direction of the locker rooms. Washington didn’t argue or debate with Rakel. He was also in shock at that moment. Today he can’t remember anything anyone said to him on the court after the punch landed. He doesn’t even remember Rakel telling him he was ejected.

  Jerry West didn’t say anything to Washington. He stood rooted to the spot, staring at Tomjanovich. As Vandervoort got Tomjanovich into a sitting position, a towel covering his face, Tomjanovich found himself looking right at West. It was at that moment that it first occurred to Tomjanovich that something awful had happened.

  “Funny thing is, I got that look a lot in the next few days,” Tomjanovich said. “It was as if he’d seen a ghost or something. I remember wondering, ‘Why is Jerry looking at me like that?’”

  4

  Did You Hear About Rudy and Kermit?

  They all remember the towel.

  As Vandervoort got Tomjanovich slowly to his feet, he had pressed a towel against his nose to try to stanch the bleeding.

  “By the time Rudy stood up, the towel was completely red,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said. “It was as if someone had pressed a button and changed the color.”

  As frightening as the scene was, no one on court could possibly know how seriously Tomjanovich was hurt. Tomjanovich had no idea what was going on. “All I knew was I was shooting the hell out of the ball that night and we had a chance to win in that place for the first time in years,” he said. “I was still dazed when Tricky got me up, trying to figure out what had happened still. It wasn’t the scoreboard, he said, it was Kermit. But why? Why would Kermit hit me? Why did Jerry West have that strange look on his face? And most important, how quickly could Tricky get some gauze in my nose or whatever so I could get back out and finish the game?”