The Punch

by John Feinstein

  “I got my confidence back that season,” he remembered. “I felt comfortable playing for Tex, and even though we weren’t as good as we should have been, I felt as if I belonged in the league, that I could play. The year before, I hadn’t felt that way.”

  The one saving grace about all the traveling was that he and Calvin Murphy had become completely comfortable as roommates. During their rookie season, each had been assigned to a veteran: Tomjanovich was with John Q. Trapp, who had grown up in Highland Falls, which bordered on Hamtramck. “My home boy,” he said. Murphy was with Larry Siegfried, an eight-year NBA veteran who had played on championship teams in Boston earlier in his career.

  Tomjanovich got along fine with Trapp. Murphy was miserable with Siegfried. “Larry kept trying to train him,” Tomjanovich said, laughing. “He wanted him to take naps in the afternoon, get to bed right after games. Calvin was miserable. One afternoon John and I were going out to a movie when Calvin jumped out the door of his room in his underwear. He grabbed me and said, ‘Where you going, where you going?’ I said we were going to the movies, and he said, ‘Take me with you, please take me with you. That man in there is driving me crazy.’”

  They took Murphy to the movies. Shortly after that Murphy suggested to Tomjanovich that they room together. That was fine with him as long as it was fine with Hannum. Murphy went and asked Hannum, who said it was okay. “Murph was all excited about it,” Tomjanovich said. “Then Siegfried comes over and says, ‘Can you believe Alex broke us up like that? I was just starting to get you trained.’ And Murph says, ‘Yeah, Larry, I just can’t believe it.’”

  The new roomies took a while to settle in together. The first night, after they had eaten and watched some TV, Murphy asked Tomjanovich if he had trouble sleeping after games. “Always,” Tomjanovich answered.

  “How about some music?” Murphy asked.

  “Great idea,” Tomjanovich said, thinking some quiet, soothing music would help him sleep. “I thought he’d put on the Dells or the Stylistics or something like that. Next thing I know James Brown is blasting all over the room.”

  By the time they reached Houston, Tomjanovich and Murphy had become inseparable on the road. Exactly why the two of them hit it off the way they did is a mystery unless you believe in the theory of opposites attracting. At least outwardly. Murphy was, by his own description, the league’s angry man. Every night was a crusade to prove how good he was. In college, at Niagara, he had averaged a spectacular 33.1 points per game over three years—the fourth highest scoring average in history. But he never led the nation in scoring because he was in college the same three years as Pete Maravich, whose 44.2 points per game is still the highest per game average by a landslide.

  Then, in spite of his gaudy numbers, he wasn’t drafted until the second round. That was because the NBA always discriminates against those who are under 6 feet tall. Like Tomjanovich, he didn’t start as a rookie, but he received considerably more playing time off the bench and averaged 15 points per game. Still, he was always proving himself as a player and as a tough guy. No one in the NBA was more willing or able to fight than Murphy. Players of all sizes soon learned not to mess with little Calvin—or call him little, for that matter.

  Tomjanovich was the complete opposite. He was tall, dark, and handsome and was as quiet and laid-back as Murphy was intense and feisty. Murphy never stopped talking; Rudy never seemed to really start. Except that Tomjanovich was just as focused on proving himself as Murphy. He was still the kid from Hamtramck whose dad drank too much, who remembered the looks in the streets as he and his father wheeled the welfare meals home, the kid white folks looked down on because his best friends were black.

  Once again his best friend was black. And once again he was proving himself. Their wives became close friends, so unlike a lot of roommates who are always together on the road but never at home, they were together at home all the time too.

  “I never had a brother,” Murphy said. “Until Rudy.”

  And so, like a pair cut straight from a buddy movie, they went everywhere together, home and away. Some nights after games they would go back to the room and Calvin would rant about playing time or the officiating or an opponent. Rudy would listen and then tell him what he thought, whether Calvin wanted to hear it or not.

  “He was about the only guy who could say to me, ‘Calvin, you’re wrong,’ and I would listen,” Murphy said. “He was never someone who just let me talk and accepted what I said because it was easier that way. He thought I was screwing up, he told me.”

  He also knew how to give Calvin a hard time. Once when the team was on a flight from Atlanta to Houston, the pilot flew right through a thunderstorm. Tomjanovich was not a nervous flyer. Murphy was. Naturally they were sitting next to each other. “It was a real bad one,” Tomjanovich said. “It was so bad that a bunch of the guys started singing songs just to take everyone’s mind off all the bouncing around.”

  Murphy wasn’t singing. Finally he turned to Tomjanovich and said, “Just do me one favor, Rudy. Turn around and see what Jimmy Walker is doing.”

  Walker, who had been a superstar at Providence College in the sixties, was considered the most unflappable player on the team— on the court or in a thunderstorm. “Nothing scares him,” Murphy went on. “Tell me what he’s doing.”

  Tomjanovich turned around and looked back at Walker. “Well,” Murphy asked, “is he okay?”

  “Calvin,” Tomjanovich said, “he’s praying.”

  “Oh God,” Murphy shrieked. “We’re going down!”

  The team was still changing. Ray Patterson, who had run the Milwaukee Bucks, was named the team’s president and general manager at the end of the 1971–72 season. One of his first acts was to trade Hayes, a shocking move since Hayes was still a young player and a hero in Houston. Hayes went to the Baltimore Bullets in exchange for Jack Marin, a solid swingman but hardly a player with Hayes’s star power. The deal seemed to have little effect on the team for two years: the Rockets, having won 34 games in their first season in Houston with Hayes, won 33 and 32 the next two without him.

  The team’s leading scorers in 1974 were Rudy Tomjanovich and Calvin Murphy, averaging 24 points and 20 points per game respectively. They had proven they belonged in the NBA. Tomjanovich made his first All-Star team that season. Clearly now he had proven himself at every level.

  “But we still hadn’t won,” he said. “We still hadn’t even made it to the playoffs.” In other words, there was still more to prove. Much more.

  Rudy at the University of Michigan, proving himself at the big-time college level. (Photo courtesy of the University of Michigan)

  Kermit at American University: “The happiest days of my life.” (Photo courtesy of American University)

  When it was good: Kermit with a rare open shot. (John Zimmerman/ Sports Illustrated)

  Homecoming: Rudy (his jaw wired shut), Sophie, and their daughter Nichole, together again in Houston a few weeks after the punch. (Bob Straus/Sports Illustrated)

  Kermit and Pat in happier days. (Photo courtesy of Pat Carter)

  The comeback that wasn’t: Kermit during his brief stint with the Golden State Warriors. (Peter Read Miller/Sports Illustrated)

  On the way to a championship: Rudy leading the Rockets to their first NBA title, in 1994. (John McDonough/ Sports Illustrated)

  Victory: Rudy and the Rockets celebrate with NBC’s Bob Costas. (John McDonough/Sports Illustrated)

  Red Auerbach, the man who saved Kermit’s career. (Dick Raphael/ Sports Illustrated)

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the best player in the game. He tried too late to stop the fight. (John Zimmerman/Sports Illustrated)

  Calvin Murphy, the last man anyone in the NBA wanted to tangle with. (John Iacono/Sports Illustrated)

  Jerry West as Lakers coach. Twenty-five years later he is still horrified by what he saw. (John Zimmerman/Sports Illustrated)

  12

  The Bright Lights of L.A.

  Donald Dell w
as relatively new to the business of agenting in 1973. He had been a star tennis player in college and had gone on to get his law degree at the University of Virginia. In the late 1960s he had been captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team and had become close friends with Arthur Ashe. When tennis became an open sport in 1968, allowing pros to play in the Grand Slam events, Dell began representing players he knew as their lawyer, Ashe among them.

  To this day, after thirty-five years as an agent, Dell still winces when he is referred to as an agent. “Lawyer, representative, either one is fine,” he said. “Agent implies something that I’m not.”

  While others might disagree with that self-assessment, Dell was still learning his way around the “sports representation” world when he signed Kermit Washington as a client in the spring of 1973. He only had a handful of basketball clients at the time, and landing someone who according to all reports would be one of the first ten players chosen in the NBA draft was a major coup for him.

  “I remember when I told him I had chosen him,” Washington said. “He was really excited. In fact I think that’s one of the reasons I chose him. He gave me the impression that it was important to him to represent me. The other guys I met with acted as if they were doing me a favor.”

  Shortly after the NBA draft, Dell and his newly minted client flew to Los Angeles for preliminary meetings with the Lakers. On the plane, Dell and Washington talked contract. Washington wanted to know what kind of deal Dell was planning to ask for.

  “Given your position in the draft, I would think we can get at least four years guaranteed at somewhere around four hundred thousand dollars,” Dell answered. “There might be a fifth year, but we should get at least four.”

  Washington nodded. “What does guaranteed mean?” he asked.

  Dell explained it meant that the team had to pay him for whatever period the contract was guaranteed for, regardless of whether he was still on the team. “That’s why it’s guaranteed,” Dell explained. “They are guaranteeing they’ll pay you no matter what.”

  Washington’s eyes went wide. “They have to pay me even if they cut me, even if I’m not good enough to play for them?”

  Dell nodded.

  Washington shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be paid for not working. If I’m not good enough, they shouldn’t have to pay me.”

  Dell was stunned. “I had never had an athlete say that to me before that day, and I have never since had an athlete say that to me,” he said. “Kermit just believed you should only be paid for working. He felt as if that was stealing.”

  Kermit Washington certainly isn’t the only person ever to put forth the notion that athletes shouldn’t be paid if they don’t perform, but he may well be the only athlete ever to put forth that notion.

  “It just didn’t seem right,” he said. “The way I was raised, you only got paid for work done. What Donald was talking about just didn’t sound right to me.”

  Dell explained to Washington that the guarantee was protection: from injury, from a coach who might not like a player, from being rushed to perform at a level a young player might not be able to attain early in his career. It was standard, something the general manager—in this case Pete Newell—would accept as a matter of course. This sort of thing, Dell explained, is the reason you hire an agent.

  Washington agreed… grudgingly. Even later in his career, when he had come to understand that in the NBA you fought for every penny, he was never completely comfortable with the notion of being paid for not playing. By then, though, he understood that the owner—whoever it was—wasn’t paying him as an act of charity. He would learn about that the hard way.

  It was late in the summer when Dell and Newell finalized Washington’s contract. It was pretty close to what Dell had told him it would be. The first four years were guaranteed, and there was a club option for a fifth year. His salary would go up each year, beginning at $80,000 the first year and climbing in $10,000 increments for four years.

  To Washington, an annual salary of $80,000 was as good as $8 million. He was thrilled. For the first time in his life, he actually had money to spend. He flew to Los Angeles, signed his contract, found a condo near the L.A. Forum and the Lakers’ training camp at Loyola Marymount, and asked Pat to come to Los Angeles once he had moved into his condo.

  The plan was to get married. They had talked about doing it on the East Coast before making the move, but had agreed it would be a lot simpler to just go to a justice of the peace in Los Angeles and do it that way. Although his success in college had brought a certain degree of peace to his relationship with his father and stepmother, Washington still felt awkward and uncomfortable with them. The memory of Barbara asking him for his house key when he left to enroll at American was hard to shake. Pat was closer to her family, but not so close that getting married across the country from them bothered her. So just before training camp started, they were married in Los Angeles City Hall.

  The wedding was another surprise to Dell; not the notion of Kermit’s marrying Pat, but the way it happened. “I was out there for a couple of things and I stopped by to see Kermit one morning,” he said. “We were sitting there talking when all of a sudden Pat started screaming from upstairs, ‘Kermit, get up here and get dressed or we’ll be late!’ I asked Kermit what was up and he said, ‘Oh, no big deal, we’re just getting married in an hour.’”

  There was no honeymoon, unless you count the notion of a couple of East Coast kids settling into a new home in L.A. as a honeymoon. In those days the NBA season started the second week in October and training camp started the last week in September. Kermit and Pat were married September 23. Two days later, Kermit reported to camp to begin his NBA career.

  Even though he was the Lakers’ top draft pick, someone the team had spent a good deal of money to sign, he felt overwhelmed at the start. The Lakers were a team in transition, but they were still the Lakers. They had reached the NBA finals in four of the previous five seasons, winning the title in 1972, and had lost seven-game series in the finals to the Celtics in 1969 and the Knicks in 1970. The previous spring, they had lost the finals in five games to the Knicks. Shortly after that series, Wilt Chamberlain surprised most people in basketball by retiring.

  The Lakers’ center was now Elmore Smith. The core of the team was the backcourt: All-Star Gail Goodrich and Hall of Famer Jerry West. Washington was intimidated by West; terrified, in fact.

  “I had never played with a competitor like Jerry West,” he said. “Anytime I made a mistake in practice, it felt to me as if he was staring holes in me. I could almost hear him thinking, ‘What in the world were we thinking drafting this guy?’ I was a lot more scared of him than I was of Coach [Bill] Sharman. I mean a lot more scared.”

  It was not an easy team for a rookie to fit in with. Most of the players were longtime NBA veterans who were well into their thirties. Bill Bridges, who was one of the toughest, strongest players in the league, blooded Washington early in camp, literally and figuratively, pushing him around, daring him to retaliate. Early in the season, the team traded for a fading Connie Hawkins to strengthen the power forward spot, meaning that Washington’s playing time dwindled from not much to very little.

  The worst part was feeling as if he wasn’t good enough to play at the NBA level. Washington had never become a polished player in college; he hadn’t needed to. Against most teams that American played, he could camp out in the low post, catch the ball there, and power his way to the basket. If he missed, he chased the rebound and scored that way. Often his best offensive move was to throw the ball off the backboard, rebound it, and score.

  That wasn’t going to work in the NBA, especially at 6-8. He would have to learn to play power forward, which was a position completely different from college center. To begin with, it meant playing facing the basket and away from the basket. A jump shot was a prerequisite, and Washington’s knowledge of the jump shot didn’t extend much beyond his ability to spell the wo
rds.

  So there he was on a veteran team, trying to learn a new position and feeling as if he was going nowhere fast. He hurt himself during an exhibition game, falling awkwardly on his rear end while grabbing a rebound. Afraid he would be labeled soft if he complained about the injury, he didn’t tell anyone how much it hurt and ended up doing damage to his back that would stay with him throughout his career.

  The Lakers had won 60 games in 1973 with Chamberlain. Without him, with Smith at center and Washington playing a very minor role, they won 47 in 1974 and were beaten in five games in the opening round of the playoffs by the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar–led Milwaukee Bucks. West decided that, at thirty-five, he had seen enough. The team had gotten old in a hurry, and even though West still averaged more than 20 points a game that season, he decided to retire. In two seasons, the Lakers had lost two Hall of Fame players, arguably two of the best ten players in the league’s history.

  Not surprisingly the Lakers plummeted in 1975, dropping to 30–52, the worst record for the franchise since the move from Minneapolis in 1960. Washington’s second season wasn’t any better than the first. Instead of being a benchwarmer on a good team, he was a benchwarmer on a bad one. He didn’t feel any more comfortable in games. He was still an offensive liability. He was an aggressive rebounder, able to use his quickness and leaping ability to get to the ball, but very unsure of himself on offense. If he was more than five feet from the basket, defenders dropped off him, daring him to shoot.