In Los Angeles the Lakers felt as if they had a terrible public relations problem on their hands. Clearly Washington was going to be a pariah around the league for a good long while. The tape had now been seen everywhere. The Saturday Night Live incident had ensured that non–basketball fans would be as aware of what had happened as basketball fans. (Remember, this was late 1977, when SNL was still a national phenomenon, with John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, and Morris heading up the cast.)
The question Lakers management was dealing with was simple: should they bring Washington back when his suspension was over? West wanted him back. He felt time would heal the wounds brought on by the punch and that the team needed Washington in the lineup. It certainly wasn’t playing very well without him.
“Beyond that, I thought we owed it to Kermit to stand by him,” West said. “What happened was horrible. There was no excuse for it. But that moment wasn’t who Kermit Washington was. He made a terrible mistake and paid a price for it. But I didn’t think we needed to desert him because of it.”
Bill Sharman, now the general manager, was on the fence. He had been talking to teams about trading Washington before the punch took place. The Lakers were guard-starved, and if the right deal could bring a quality guard to the team, Washington was one chip that might be dealt. He was a solid player with a definite role on the team, but rebounders are more easily replaced most of the time than scorers. When the punch occurred, there were questions about whether trading Washington was still viable, but Sharman was still looking to move him if he could find the right fit.
Exactly where Jack Kent Cooke stood on the issue wasn’t clear to anyone at first. But one thing is clear: if Cooke had wanted Washington to stay in Los Angeles he would have stayed. Washington had been one of Cooke’s favorite players. He liked his aggressiveness. The phone call he received from Cooke right after the fight comforted Washington. But then nothing.
“The month of December,” he said, “was one of deafening silence in my life.”
It would get louder soon enough.
7
Red to the Rescue
Like everyone else in the league, Red Auerbach was horrified when he heard—and saw—what had happened in Los Angeles. Auerbach was the most famous coach in the history of the NBA, having coached the Boston Celtics to nine championships. In his heyday, Auerbach would announce that a game was won by lighting a cigar on the bench—thus the term victory cigar—an act that would get a coach thrown out of the building these days.
“I’d’a had to go outside to light up nowadays,” said Auerbach, who, at eighty-five, still keeps a cigar lit throughout most of the day.
In 1966, after winning his ninth title, Auerbach retired from coaching, turning the team over to his best player, Bill Russell, elevating him to player-coach while he, Auerbach, remained with the team as general manager. By promoting Russell, Auerbach was making a statement: Russell was the first African American hired as a coach or a general manager in one of the four major team sports. Auerbach, who is Jewish, had been born in Brooklyn in 1917 and knew a little bit about prejudice and bigotry. He was the first coach in the NBA to start five blacks and had a reputation among black players for being completely color-blind.
“Red treated everyone the same,” said Sam Jones, another of Auerbach’s Hall of Fame players. “Awful.”
Which is why the players loved him. Only one color mattered to Auerbach: green, as in Celtics green. If you could make his team better, you could be from Mars and he would find a uniform for you. When he decided to stop coaching, Auerbach wanted Russell to be the coach because he thought Russell was best qualified for the job. “When I announced that I was going to step down at the end of that season, Russell came to see me,” he said. “He had tried to talk me out of [retiring], even called my wife to try and get her to talk me out of it. But that wasn’t going to happen. I needed to quit. I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping, I was a mess. I looked at a picture of myself that year and I looked like death warmed over. If I hadn’t stopped coaching, it would have killed me.
“I explained this to Russell. He says to me, ‘Okay, if you really won’t coach, let me coach. Because I don’t want to play for anyone else.’ I thought about it and then told him okay—as long as he kept it a secret until I was ready to make the announcement. He agreed. At the time, it hadn’t even occurred to me that he would be the first black coach. Which was probably good. Because if I had announced that I was giving Russell the job and he would be the first black coach, he probably wouldn’t have taken it. That’s the way he was.”
Auerbach intended to wait until the end of the season to announce Russell as the coach. But in the NBA finals that year, the Los Angeles Lakers, coached by one of Auerbach’s more heated rivals, Fred Schaus, came into Boston Garden and won the first game in overtime. There were no interview rooms in 1966. The press would crowd into one corner of the locker room to talk to the coaches. Auerbach was peppered with questions about what had gone wrong, what special strategy had Schaus unveiled to steal game one on the famed parquet of Boston Garden?
“Nothing went wrong,” Auerbach said. “They just kicked our butt. Oh, by the way, we’re having a press conference tomorrow morning to introduce our new coach. You see that guy over there?” He pointed at Russell a few feet away. “He’s going to be coach of the Celtics next year. Any more questions?”
Thirty-five years later, Auerbach still smiles retelling the story. “The next day in the papers it was almost as if the game didn’t happen,” he said. “Poor Fred. His big moment and no one wrote a word about it. We went out and won game two easily after that.”
The margin was 20, and when the game was over, Schaus was still complaining about Auerbach stealing the Lakers’ thunder after game one. The Celtics went on to win the series in seven games—the third time in five years they had beaten the Lakers in a seven-game final series.
The new team of Auerbach and Russell proved successful. It certainly didn’t hurt coach Russell to have player Russell in uniform. The team did not win the championship in 1967, losing in the division finals to the record-breaking Philadelphia 76ers team led by Wilt Chamberlain, but came back to win the title again in 1968 and 1969, beating the Lakers—now led by Chamberlain—in game seven for the title in 1969. Russell retired from both coaching and playing after that championship, his eleventh as a player. Auerbach was left to rebuild. His first big step in that direction came in 1970 when he drafted Dave Cowens out of Florida State. At 6-foot-9, Cowens was too small to play center in the NBA. Only he was so tough and so competitive that he turned the Celtics around, leading them to championships in 1974 and 1976.
Throughout his career with the Celtics, Auerbach’s family had lived in Washington, D.C. Auerbach had gone to college there at George Washington University. His first professional coaching job had been with the old Washington Capitols. He had gone from there to Duke University, staying only half a year before being hired late in 1949 to coach Ben Kerner’s Tri-Cities team. By the end of that season, he and Kerner were at odds over who would make personnel decisions. When Walter Brown, the owner of the fledgling Boston team, approached Auerbach about coaching the Celtics, Kerner willingly let him out of the final year of his contract. Auerbach took over the Celtics that summer. He has held a title in the Celtics organization—coach, general manager, president, general chairman—ever since.
His oldest daughter, Nancy, had a serious asthma problem. Living in Durham, near all the tobacco factories and in a house with a yard outside, had made the condition worse. When Auerbach accepted the job in Boston, he and Nancy’s doctor both thought it would be best for the family to stay in Washington, where the weather was warmer, where they could live in the city, and where Auerbach’s father-in-law, a pediatrician, would be nearby at all times.
“Probably the best decision I ever made,” he said. “Living with a coach in-season is hard, especially me, because I took everything so seri
ously. I got home when I could, and they were glad to see me when I came home. If they’d been living with me, they all would have hated me.”
Auerbach was intense. One night, after a Celtics victory over the Cincinnati Royals in the old Cincinnati Gardens, an outraged fan began screaming profanities in Auerbach’s face as he left the court. “In those days there was no security around you going on and off the court,” Auerbach said. “This guy is screaming at me, so I turned around and just popped him in the nose. He went down like he’d been shot.”
The man got up soon enough and filed a lawsuit against Auerbach. When Auerbach heard he was being sued, he turned to John Havlicek and said, “Hey, John, you remember how that guy kicked me before I hit him?”
“Well, Coach, no, I don’t remember that,” Havlicek answered.
“Let me rephrase the question, John,” Auerbach said. “Do you remember how that guy kicked me, the guy who signs your paycheck, before I hit him?”
“Oh, yeah, now I remember,” Havlicek said.
In the end, Havlicek’s testimony wasn’t needed. There were so many witnesses around who thought Auerbach was entitled to slug the fan that the suit was dropped.
Auerbach continued his commute between Washington and Boston after he stopped coaching. Nancy enrolled at the University of Rhode Island, but her asthma again caused her serious problems. She came home and enrolled at American University, which was only a few blocks away from the apartment where her parents lived on Massachusetts Avenue. One of her best friends was Marty Levy, the daughter of one of Auerbach’s close friends.
Shortly after Nancy Auerbach arrived at AU, Marty Levy introduced her to a friend from her dorm: Pat Carter. Pat’s boyfriend was Kermit Washington. One night, after a party on campus, Kermit and Pat gave Nancy a ride home. Kermit walked into the living room, looked at the pictures and plaques, and went slack-jawed.
“Are you related to Red Auerbach?” he asked.
“Pat had no idea who the man was,” Kermit said, laughing, years later. “Then a few minutes later, he came downstairs. Nancy introduced us, and he sat down and started telling stories. I was completely awed.”
Auerbach wasn’t awed, but he was impressed. “He was the kind of kid you liked right away,” he said. “Polite, friendly, and very serious. You could tell he was going to do well in life, whatever he ended up doing.”
Pat and Kermit remained friendly with Nancy Auerbach, and Kermit worked at Red Auerbach’s camp for two summers. Naturally, when Kermit made it to the NBA, Auerbach kept tabs on him. “He really struggled those first couple of years,” Auerbach said. “But then [the fourth year] he really improved. He had become a good NBA player, the kind of guy you really wanted on your team. If you had a guy like Jabbar, you wanted someone like Kermit there to do the dirty work. And Kermit was willing to do the dirty work.”
When Auerbach heard about the incident in Los Angeles, he made a point of watching the tape. “What happened to Rudy was obviously bad, very bad,” he said. “But I knew then and I know now, that wasn’t Kermit’s intent. For one thing, I’m convinced the kid didn’t know how strong he was. But the other thing is, he didn’t sneak up on him. Rudy was running right at him. I know he was going in as a peacemaker, but Kermit didn’t know that. I’ve seen [former Pistons center Bill] Laimbeer do things that were worse dozens of times. Other guys too. It wasn’t a sucker punch. It was just a horribly damaging punch.”
Shortly after the incident Auerbach began hearing on the NBA grapevine that Jack Kent Cooke wanted to trade Washington, that he felt the public relations fallout from the incident was so bad that he couldn’t bring Washington back in a Lakers uniform. Like the Lakers, the Celtics were struggling. They were overloaded at the guard spot, and coach Tom Heinsohn desperately wanted to get power forward Sidney Wicks out of town.
Auerbach sensed an opportunity to make a move that would help his team, even if Washington was going to be suspended for two months. “I was thinking long term,” he said. “Kermit was just a kid, twenty-six, twenty-seven [actually twenty-six] years old.” Auerbach had already made a call to Larry O’Brien on Washington’s behalf, even before he heard he might be available. “Larry was a Boston guy, so I knew him pretty well,” Auerbach said. “I just called him up and said, ‘I know the incident was awful, but this isn’t a bad kid. Keep that in mind.’”
Now, hearing that Cooke was looking to move Washington, Auerbach wanted to make a deal. He didn’t want Cooke’s basketball people, Bill Sharman or Jerry West, to get involved, because he was certain they would try to talk Cooke out of the trade. But he also knew he couldn’t call Cooke directly, because Cooke wouldn’t take his call.
“I’d tried to deal with him in the past,” he said. “He said to me, ‘My dear Red, I won’t make any deals with you ever, because you know much more about basketball than I do and I’ll get the short end.’ I thought maybe he was kidding until I saw him quoted as saying it in the newspaper. So I knew he was serious.”
Auerbach came up with an idea. He called Celtics owner Irv Levin and told him he wanted to get Kermit Washington. Cooke was living in Las Vegas at the time, staying out of California because he was in the middle of an ugly divorce. Auerbach convinced Levin to fly to Vegas and call Cooke, saying he was on vacation, and suggest dinner.
“I told him once they’d had a couple of pops to tell Cooke that he was sick and tired of Auerbach making all the trades and taking all the credit for everything the Celtics did. Then I said he should tell him, ‘Jack, I want to make a deal, just you and me. None of these general managers or coaches. I know you need to get rid of Kermit Washington, and we can’t get Jo Jo White and Charlie Scott to play together. You give me Washington, I’ll give you Scott. You get rid of your headache, I get rid of mine. Then I can go back and tell Red, “I made a deal without consulting with you and the hell with you.”’”
Whether Levin delivered his speech in those words—both Cooke and Levin are now dead—is impossible to know. But Cooke apparently agreed to the deal, because on December 27 Washington was traded to Boston (along with Don Chaney, a player Auerbach had lost in free agency but wanted back) for Charlie Scott, who had been an All-Star and a key member of the Celtics’ 1976 championship team. The notion that Cooke made the deal unilaterally fits with the fact that both Sharman and West say they had no idea the trade was coming.
“I didn’t even know about it until I got a call saying it was done,” West said. “I was very upset. In part I was upset because we needed Kermit. He was important to the way we were trying to play. Kareem, in particular, needed him on the court. But beyond that, I felt as if we needed to be more supportive of Kermit than we were. We left him hanging out to dry after the incident. He deserved better than he got from us.”
Sharman was also surprised. “I think Mr. Cooke felt we needed to make changes,” he said diplomatically.
On the day the trade was made, Washington was at home, still in purgatory, counting the days until his suspension could be lifted. The phone rang and Washington answered—by then he had gotten a new phone number, so the threatening calls and the crank calls had, for the most part, stopped. It was Chick Hearn, the Lakers’ play-by-play man, who by then carried an assistant general manager title with the team.
“Kermit, I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed working with you,” Hearn began. “I’m truly sorry for what happened, and I know you are too. I really believe this is the best thing for you, though, I really do.”
“What’s the best thing for me?” Washington asked.
“Why, the trade,” Hearn answered.
“The trade?”
It was at that moment that Hearn realized no one in the Lakers’ brain trust—Cooke, Sharman, or West—had called Washington to tell him he was traded. “I was horrified,” Hearn later said. “It certainly wasn’t my place to deliver news like that to a player, especially under those circumstances. I was just calling to wish him luck, because I genuinely liked him. When I realized what wa
s going on, I think I just said something like, ‘Kermit, you need to call the front office.’”
Washington was too upset to call the front office. Instead he called Dell and asked him to do it. Dell called him back and told him he had been traded to the Celtics.
“Part of me was furious,” Washington said. “I mean, how could someone not call me to tell me? Nothing against Chick Hearn, but he was not the person I should have heard that news from. I know his intentions were good, but it was wrong. But then when I thought about the trade, it didn’t seem so bad. I mean, it was the Celtics. And it was Mr. Auerbach, who I liked so much. I realized it took a lot of courage for him to make that trade at that time, when people were trying to cast me as the devil. I’ll always be grateful to him for doing what he did.”
Auerbach wasn’t looking for any bouquets, he was looking for a rebounder. Two important factors allowed him to make the trade: First, he was Red Auerbach. Another NBA general manager might not have been secure enough to trade for Washington while he was still under league suspension and with no guarantee that it would be lifted after two months. Second, he knew Washington and believed the incident did not represent who he was as a person.
“I had a lot of faith in the kid,” Auerbach said. “I wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t convinced he could help us. But I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog. At that point in time, no one was a bigger underdog than Kermit Washington.”
Rudy Tomjanovich was back in Houston on the day Kermit Washington became a Celtic. He had asked Dr. Toffel to do everything he could to get him home in time for Christmas, and Toffel had come through. The two of them had flown from Los Angeles to Houston on Christmas Eve on an almost empty plane. Toffel accompanied his patient because he had wired his jaw shut after setting it, and if anything happened on the flight, Toffel needed to be there to cut the wires so Tomjanovich would be able to breathe.
The Punch Page 11