“No,” Tomjanovich said firmly. “Murph, you got to make me a promise that you won’t start anything tomorrow or the next night or with any of the Lakers next week.”
“But Rudy, look at what he did…”
“I know, but getting you suspended for fighting isn’t going to make me better. I got enough on my mind right now without having to worry about you getting in a fight over this. You have to promise me you won’t fight.”
“But Rudy…”
“Promise, Murph, promise.”
Years later, as he retold the story of that night, tears rolled down Murphy’s cheeks. “Think about it,” he said. “The man is in the hospital, he’s in terrible shape, he has no idea what’s going to happen to him, and he’s worried about me. Everyplace we went the next few weeks, I couldn’t get that out of my mind. And then I would think, ‘I may never play with him again, he may never come back.’ And I’d break down and cry every time.”
No one on either team had any clue about how badly Tomjanovich had been hurt. Even so, the rest of the game was played in a fog— by everyone except Murphy. Fueled by anger and fear, he scored 20 points in the second half and 28 for the game. Led by Murphy’s performance, the Rockets won the game, 116–105, their first victory in the Forum in four years.
“I have almost no memory of the second half of that game,” Mike Newlin said. “I remember Calvin, because he took over the game. But I think we were all just wondering what was up with Rudy. We knew he had gone to the hospital, but that was it.”
Abdul-Jabbar remembers even less. “Who won the game?” he asked. “After what happened, it didn’t seem to matter. I can remember a few days later, sitting in a hotel room reading the New York Times, and I realized that I had been sitting there for forty-five minutes without reading a word. Now, there aren’t many things in the world I enjoyed more than sitting by myself in the morning and reading the entire Times. But I can remember that day I couldn’t focus on the paper at all because I kept hearing that punch and seeing Rudy on the floor and all the blood around his head. Even now, talking about it, it all comes back again.”
The Lakers were stunned; the Rockets stunned and angry. When the media came into the locker room after the game, Mike Newlin minced no words. “If I had a gun,” he said, “I would gladly shoot the guy.”
Newlin’s comment earned him a letter of reprimand from the NBA.
Driving home from the arena, Kermit Washington had a sinking feeling that his life had changed every bit as much as Tomjanovich’s. It wasn’t just what the parking lot attendant had said or even the sight of Tomjanovich on the floor. He had been in fights before, but nothing like this. When he walked in the door, Pat Washington knew right away that something had gone terribly wrong. Almost eight months pregnant, with a two-year-old to take care of, she hadn’t been listening to the game. Shortly after she had put Dana to bed, her phone had rung. It had been Jessica Smith, the wife of Elmore Smith, one of the four players traded to Milwaukee two years earlier in the Abdul-Jabbar trade. The two women had been close friends when Smith played in Los Angeles, and Jessica Smith was calling to see how Pat was feeling, remembering that Dana had arrived early and her due date was now six weeks away. They were in midconversation when the operator broke in to say she had an emergency phone call.
The call was from Jackie Chaney, whose husband, Don, was on the Lakers’ injured list but had been at the game anyway. Sitting in the stands, Don Chaney was as frightened as everyone else when he saw the punch. “Seeing what I saw and knowing how strong Kermit was, I knew it was very, very serious,” he said. “I told Jackie she better call Pat and warn her. When the game ended, I drove to the hospital to see what I could find out. They just told me Rudy was in intensive care. The whole thing was impossible to believe.”
Jackie Chaney got to a phone, called the Washington house, and got a busy signal. That was when she asked the operator to break in. “Kermit is okay,” she said immediately, knowing that the emergency call would make Pat wonder if something had happened to her husband. “But be prepared. He was in a fight and he hurt someone badly. He’s probably going to be scared when he gets home.”
Jackie Chaney’s prediction was accurate. As soon as Kermit walked in the door, Pat knew her friend hadn’t been exaggerating. “He was scared and upset,” she said. “He was worried about Rudy. He said he had tried to call the hospital but they wouldn’t tell him anything. He was crying when he talked to me about it. He kept saying, ‘I never meant to hurt him that way. I saw him coming from behind and I thought he was going to jump on me like in Buffalo.’
“I felt awful for him, because I knew he would never hurt anyone on purpose that way. I didn’t know what to say. There was nothing I could say to comfort him. I couldn’t tell him, ‘Rudy will be fine,’ because I didn’t know that. I couldn’t say, ‘I’m sure the league won’t be too tough on you,’ because I certainly didn’t know that. So I just listened. It was a long night.”
Kermit and Pat had talked in the past about Kermit’s penchant for fighting. Pat worried not so much about punishment as she did about his getting hurt. The previous year’s fight in Buffalo had frightened her. “It seemed as if he was taking on the whole team,” she said.
That fight had started with some pushing and shoving under the basket between Washington and John Shumate, another hard-nosed 6-8 power forward. When Shumate had challenged him, Washington decked him with one punch. At that point Fred Foster, another of the Braves, had run at him from behind and jumped on his back. Washington had shed him with what Abdul-Jabbar described as “a shrug that sent him flying.”
“The whole thing happened right in front of their bench,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “It started with Shumate, then came Foster. By the time he sent Foster flying, you could see the circle around him growing. No one wanted to go near him. They were afraid.”
There were other fights and near fights in Washington’s career. There had been a fight with Dave Cowens in Boston that had led to a bench-clearing brawl between the two teams, and there had been other skirmishes that had involved pushing and shoving and glaring but no one landing any punches.
“Nowadays I probably would have been ejected a lot, because it doesn’t take much to get ejected,” Washington said. “Back then, though, you really had to do something to get ejected. I had only been ejected twice [Shumate and Cowens] before the Rudy fight. My job was to protect Kareem and step in when necessary. I was supposed to be an intimidator.”
All well and good to be intimidating, but Pat Washington lectured her husband about knowing when to stop, where to draw the line. Later in the 1976–77 season, he was thrown out of practice one day for slugging backup center C. J. Kupec. Josh Rosenfeld, who had known both Kermit and Pat since their college days, was living in Los Angeles at the time and was a regular dinner visitor. While Pat was fixing dinner, Josh and Kermit sat in the living room.
“I asked him how practice had gone that day,” Rosenfeld said. “He looked around the room and then said very softly, ‘Not well. I got into a fight. I got thrown out.’ I don’t know how Pat heard him, but she came flying out of the kitchen, screaming, ‘Did you get into a fight again? When are you going to learn?’”
Pat Washington wasn’t screaming now. There was no point. She could see the hurt in her husband’s eyes and hear the pain in his voice. This was no time for a lecture. “Maybe it will turn out Rudy isn’t hurt so badly,” she said, searching for a positive spin. “Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think.”
Kermit said nothing in response. He got into bed and tried to sleep. It was no use.
Rudy Tomjanovich wasn’t sleeping either. His eyes had swollen shut, which might have been a blessing, because it kept him from even thinking about trying to look in a mirror. Lying in his bed, all he could think about was his family. He had decided that if he could never leave his house again because he looked like the Elephant Man, he would be okay with that as long as he could be with Sophie and the girls.
&nbs
p; The hospital chaplain had come into the room to ask if he wanted to pray. No, Tomjanovich said, thanking him. He told him he felt he had a relationship with God that would allow him to feel close to him throughout the night. In his autobiography, Tomjanovich would write that during those first couple of nights he was talking often to God and he felt his presence through the entire ordeal. “It was all quite real,” he wrote.
Only it wasn’t.
Tomjanovich remembered going to church with his parents twice when he was a child—on the same day. “I never understood it,” he said. “We’d never gone, then one morning we went, and later that day we went back. I never quite figured out what it was about.”
He had never been a churchgoer and hadn’t given much thought until that point in his life to spirituality. He had turned down the chaplain’s offer not because he didn’t need him but because he didn’t believe he was worthy. “My thinking was, I had never prayed before, I had never gone to church, so here I was in this crisis and now I was going to pray? It didn’t seem right. My thinking was, if I was God and all of a sudden here I was praying, my attitude would be, ‘Oh sure, now you want to talk.’ I just couldn’t bring myself to pray for myself. It felt wrong.”
Lying in bed, Tomjanovich could hear sounds coming from the other side of the curtain in the ICU. He could hear someone talking very softly, saying, “Come on, sweetheart, wake up, you have to wake up. I know you can wake up. Please wake up.”
He asked a nurse who was in the next bed. He was told it was a little girl who had been in an automobile accident. She was in a coma, fighting for her life. After the nurse left, Tomjanovich finally prayed—for the little girl. “She was worthy,” he said. “I asked God to let her live, to let her wake up.”
Several days later Tomjanovich learned the little girl had died. He was devastated. God hadn’t even listened to his prayer for someone else. It reconfirmed his notion about being unworthy.
He dozed very briefly in fits and starts throughout that first night, unable to see a clock, unable to see much of anything. It felt as if a week had passed when the sun began to come up. Toffel was in to see him shortly after he woke up. The leakage from the brain capsule appeared to have stopped. He wasn’t out of the woods yet, but it was a major step in the right direction.
For the first time since he had turned and seen Kevin Kunnert engaged with Washington and Abdul-Jabbar, a moment that now seemed to be a lifetime ago, Rudy Tomjanovich smiled. At least he thought he smiled. Given the condition of his face, he couldn’t be certain.
“This is a victory, Rudy,” Toffel said.
Tomjanovich tried to smile again. “So Doc,” he said, “how do we celebrate?”
“You just did,” Toffel told him.
5
Who Hit Whom?
During Kermit Washington’s last three years in college, one of his closest friends had been Josh Rosenfeld, one of the basketball team’s managers. Rosenfeld had worked briefly in Philadelphia after graduating and then moved to California in 1976. He had rented an apartment near the Washingtons’ home in Palos Verdes and at Washington’s urging began working out with him in the weight room to build up his 5-foot-8-inch, 130-pound body.
Prior to the start of the 1977–78 season, Rosenfeld had moved back east, taking a job with the Dorf Features Service, an outfit that supplied high school sports coverage to several newspapers, most notably the Newark Star-Ledger. Each night during the NBA season, the sports staff at the Ledger ran an NBA pool. The staffers took turns running the pool throughout the season. Whenever Rosenfeld’s turn to run the pool came up, everyone knew that the tiebreaker for that night would have something to do with Kermit Washington.
On December 9, Rosenfeld ran the pool. His tiebreaker was, “How many rebounds will Kermit Washington get tonight against Houston?”
The next day when Rosenfeld arrived for work, he found that there had been a tie in the pool. In those days, the wire services rarely moved a full box score—minutes, field goals made/missed, free throws made/missed, rebounds, assists, steals, fouls committed—on regular-season NBA games across the wire. Instead they moved what was called a short box, which consisted only of field goals made/missed, free throws made/missed, and total points. That morning’s Star-Ledger didn’t have a story on the game since it had ended well after midnight East Coast time, missing the paper’s late deadlines.
“Hey, Rosenfeld, we need to find out how many rebounds your buddy Kermit got,” someone shouted at Rosenfeld when he got to his desk.
Rosenfeld puffed his chest out a little bit. “No problem,” he said. “I’ll just call and ask him.”
Knowing it would be midmorning in Los Angeles, he picked up the phone and dialed his friend’s number. Pat answered the phone.
“I could tell by her ‘hello’ that something was wrong,” Rosenfeld said. “I said, ‘Pat, is everything okay?’ She just said, ‘I’ll let Kermit tell you.’”
When he heard his friend’s voice on the phone, a jolt of horror ran through Rosenfeld. Either something had happened to two-year-old Dana or something had gone wrong with Pat’s pregnancy. It had to be one of those two things.
“His voice was a monotone, like he was in some kind of shock,” Rosenfeld said. “I remember it like it was yesterday. I said, ‘I know something’s wrong, do you want to talk about it?’”
“Not really,” Washington answered.
“Is Dana okay?”
“She’s fine.”
“Pat?”
“Fine.”
“The baby?”
“Fine.”
“Kermit, how’d the game go last night?”
There was a long pause, then Washington said, “I got thrown out.”
Rosenfeld immediately guessed—at least in part—what had happened.
“A fight?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“No.”
Rosenfeld didn’t push it. He had never heard Washington like this, so he knew it hadn’t been just an ordinary NBA fight. He hung up and went and found the late wire story on the game. It described the fight and said Washington had been ejected after breaking Rudy Tomjanovich’s nose. That didn’t seem so bad. The next morning a friend of his living in L.A., another AU grad, called him.
“Did you hear about Kermit?” he said. “He almost killed Rudy T.”
Then he read him the story in that morning’s Los Angeles Times, which said that Tomjanovich was in the intensive care unit in guarded condition.
“Oh my God,” Rosenfeld said, stunned. Now he understood Washington’s tone. It hadn’t been just another NBA fight. He knew, just as the man in the parking lot had known, that Washington was in serious trouble.
Whenever there was a fight or an ejection in the NBA, it was standard procedure for the lead official to write a report on the incident and send it by telegram to NBA officiating supervisor Norm Drucker. Both officials, Bob Rakel and Ed Middleton, understood that this was not an ordinary fight or an ordinary ejection. In fact Rakel took the unusual step of allowing the media into the officials’ locker room after the game, even though he limited his comments to explaining what the rules were that caused Washington to be ejected.
Rakel and Middleton agreed that the proper thing for them to do, given what they had seen, was to each write a report for Drucker. Each had seen the punch from a different vantage point and had a different view of how the fight had unfolded, since they were at opposite ends of the court. They knew that Washington would undoubtedly face both a fine and a suspension, so getting as much detail as they could into the hands of the league as soon as possible was important.
They decided to write their reports that night, before going to bed, so that it would be fresh in their minds. “Ordinarily you might do a report like that the next morning on the plane going to the next city,” Rakel said. “But you knew when people saw this there was going to be tremendous reaction. We wanted to make sure we got the league the info
rmation fast and that we got it right.”
Both men were torn by the events of the evening. Each liked and respected Washington and Tomjanovich. “Kermit is a good guy,” Middleton said. “He was the kind of player you respected as a referee because he worked hard, he never gave you a hard time about a call, and everything he did was out front. There was nothing sneaky about him. What happened that night was as much bad luck as anything else. He had no idea he could hurt Rudy that badly, and there isn’t any doubt in my mind that he had no intent to hurt him that badly.
“But he did.”
Rakel felt the same way. He liked Washington, respected his game, and felt awful that what had started out as a skirmish between Kunnert and Abdul-Jabbar had somehow escalated in a matter of seconds into a bloodbath. “There were times when I would think back on that game and wonder if there was anything I could have done differently,” he said. “Should I have jumped in on Jabbar and Kunnert? Could I have gotten to Kunnert or Kermit before the punches began? In the end, the answer was no. Jabbar and Kunnert got untangled, there was no reason to stop the game. Kunnert and Washington started so quickly there was no time to do anything except maybe step in between and get knocked flat myself. But I wondered about it more than once.”
If anyone was to be second-guessed after the incident, it was the team owners, who had voted against adding a third official for that season. If there had been a third official, Washington might not have grabbed Kunnert’s shorts. A year later, in large part because of the Washington-Tomjanovich fight, the NBA added a third official. Soon after, that move all but disappeared from the game because the trail official was in position to see it happen. With two officials, the trail had to get upcourt much quicker and didn’t have the time or the positioning to focus on that move.
That night, though, it was just Rakel and Middleton, and their job once the game ended was to tell the league what had happened. They had to put aside any feelings they had for Washington and put in writing what they had witnessed. Rakel’s report would be more significant, in part because he was the lead official, but more important because he saw the entire thing unfold. Middleton had been running downcourt with his back turned when Abdul-Jabbar and Kunnert had started flailing at each other. Both men had a clear view of Washington’s haymaker punch. Like everyone else, they were stunned by what they saw and by the result.
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