The Punch

by John Feinstein

  Washington didn’t want to go to the doctors and have it checked, because he was concerned they would find something and insist on surgery that would end his season. No way would he chance that. His plan was to play through the pain until the end of the season and then find out what—if anything—could be done.

  The Lakers’ last game before the All-Star break was at home against the Denver Nuggets. Driving to the Forum that night with Pat, Washington knew the knee was worse than it had ever been but was hoping the four-day All-Star break would give him the rest he needed. “I thought if I could stay off it for those four days, I’d be okay,” he remembered. “That had worked in the past. I knew the pain would come back once we started playing again, but I was thinking it would come back in stages the way it always did and if I made it to the playoffs, where you have more nights off than during the regular season, I’d be okay. The season was already two-thirds over. I was convinced I could do it. Pat thought I was crazy, that I needed to see the doctor.”

  He ended up seeing a doctor—that night, because he didn’t make it through the game. Late in the second quarter, running the lane on a fast break, he caught a pass, went up for a layup, came down, and heard his knee shatter. “That’s what I remember most, the sound of it,” he said. “When I went down, the pain told me I was in trouble, but more than that the sound left no doubt that I had done something really, really bad.”

  The fragile knee had simply collapsed from the wear and tear of playing when there was already damage done. Lying on the floor of the Forum, Washington looked down and saw his kneecap pushed over to the side of his leg. “I knew right then,” he said, “that at the very least my season was over.”

  At the very least was right. He had torn a tendon and done damage to both his cartilage and his ligament. Even today, with all the advances made in orthopedics, that would mean major surgery. In 1977 it meant surgery that had to be considered career-threatening.

  They operated the next morning. The next few days are hazy in Washington’s memory except for the pain. It was bad enough that when Pat came to the hospital with Dana, who was a little more than a year old, he couldn’t bear to have his daughter sit on the bed with him. “Every time she moved or bounced or did anything, pain shot through my entire body,” he said. “It killed me to do it, but I finally had to ask Pat to take her home. I was in agony.”

  Things weren’t very good for the Lakers either. They were a different team without Washington, not as strong on defense or on the boards. They did manage to hang on to finish the season with the league’s best record, 53–29, but Portland was closing fast at the finish. Without Washington to deal with Lucas, the Blazers beat the Lakers in their last meeting of the regular season and then swept them in the Western Conference finals.

  It is unlikely that the Lakers would have beaten the Blazers at that stage of the season even with a healthy Washington. Portland had matured into a superb team that would go on to upset the supposedly unbeatable Philadelphia 76ers in the finals. But it is just as unlikely that the Lakers would have been swept if Washington had played. “They had real trouble with us when Kermit was healthy that year,” Abdul-Jabbar remembered. “Would we have won? I’m not sure. But four straight? No way.”

  Jack Ramsay, who coached that Portland team, doesn’t argue with Abdul-Jabbar’s assessment. “We were on a roll by then,” he said. “But if we had played the Lakers with Kermit, they would have been far more dangerous than they were without him. They simply didn’t have anyone on that team other than Kermit who could handle Maurice.”

  The finals that year were still a prime-time event. This was just prior to the start of the so-called dark period, when the NBA’s ratings had slipped so badly that CBS began televising the finals on tape delay at 11:30 P.M. In 1977 the 76ers were a true glamour team, led by the spectacular Julius Erving, who had joined the team after the merger with the ABA the previous fall. George McGinnis was a superstar, Doug Collins was a perennial All-Star, and Darryl Dawkins, the 7-foot-1-inch center who had never gone to college, was thought to be one of the next great players. The opponent was the upstart Blazers, a team from the NBA’s smallest market, an expansion team just seven years earlier. Now they had Walton and Lucas and a group of hard-nosed role players who weren’t intimidated by the 76ers.

  The first two games were in Philadelphia, and the Sixers, after winning a close game one, routed the Blazers 107–89 in game two. Near the end of that game, Dawkins and Lucas got into a fight. It wasn’t one of those throw a few punches and dance around NBA fights, it was a serious brawl, with players jumping in to try to pull the two immensely strong men apart.

  Brent Musburger, doing play-by-play for CBS, remembers being frightened that a full-scale riot was going to break out. Dawkins and Lucas were both so strong and riled up that it took a bevy of players and security people to finally get them off each other. While the fight was going on, many in the crowd began pushing toward the court, including friends and family of Dawkins.

  “It was a frightening moment,” Musburger remembered. “And the timing of it was important. This wasn’t just another fight in another NBA game. This was two big, strong men who were really angry taking swings at one another, and no one could stop them. Plus, it was the finals, it was prime-time national TV. It could not have made Larry O’Brien happy to see this happening in the middle of his showcase. It left you with a very bad taste in your mouth.”

  Musburger was right about O’Brien’s reaction. The commissioner had been concerned all season with the escalating number of fights in the league. He felt powerless to stop the fighting, since the most he could fine a player for getting into a fight was $500 and the longest suspension he could mete out was five games. The Dawkins-Lucas fight was scary. O’Brien and everyone in the league knew it could have been much worse.

  Perhaps energized by the fight, the Blazers turned the series completely around, taking the next four games to win the title four games to two. They clinched the championship on a Sunday afternoon in Portland, setting off a wild postgame celebration. In a decision long remembered by both the NBA and CBS, the network honchos chose not to stay in Portland for the postgame celebration or even for the trophy presentation—which was taped to be shown later—because they wanted to switch immediately to the final round of the Kemper Open golf tournament.

  By the time Musburger got out of the locker room after the trophy presentation, fans in the arena had figured out that CBS had cut away as soon as the game was over. “They were furious,” Musburger said. “I was the symbol of CBS to them. I was wearing the blazer, I was the voice they heard, the face they saw. They probably thought I had something to do with the decision, which of course I didn’t. It got ugly. I needed a security escort to get out of the building and a police escort to get out of the parking lot to the airport. They hid me out in the airport until my flight took off. It was a scary scene.”

  O’Brien was convinced his league had become too violent in every way. Most of the owners agreed with him. That summer, at the league meetings, responding to the forty-one fights during the regular season that had each led to at least one ejection—usually more—and to the specter of the Dawkins-Lucas fight, the owners voted to give O’Brien much broader powers to penalize players who fought during a game. The maximum fine for fighting was increased to $10,000—roughly equivalent, given the difference in salary levels, to a $100,000 fine today—and, more important, the commissioner now had the right to suspend players indefinitely without pay. That was a long way from $500 and five games.

  “It was an important thing to do,” David Stern, then the league’s outside counsel, said. “The message had to be sent to the players that what had gone on before was no longer tolerable. We needed to stop it before it got worse. That was our goal.”

  Kermit Washington paid little attention when the new penalties for fighting were announced. He was deep into the process of rehabbing his knee and preparing for another summer of torture with Pete Newell. His o
nly concern was getting back to where he had been as a player before his knee had collapsed on him on that February night in the Forum.

  The last thing on his mind was being suspended for fighting during a game. All he was thinking about was getting himself back into games.

  13

  Turnaround

  While the Lakers were hitting bottom during the 1974–75 season, an old team that needed to make major changes to contend again, the Houston Rockets were a team finally headed in the right direction.

  The team had spent its first three years in Houston running in place. Consistently lousy was the best way to describe the Rockets. They had won 34, 33, and 32 games, and their attendance, a paltry 4,966 the first season, when they played in half the cities in Texas, had actually dropped to 3,855 by the third season. The team had already been sold once since the move to Texas and was about to be sold a second time. Tex Winter had coached for a season and a half and then been replaced by Johnny Egan. Ray Patterson had come in as president and general manager and promptly traded Elvin Hayes, the team’s most popular player.

  But by the end of the 1973–74 season, there were some signs of life. The heart and soul of the team was now made up of three young players: Rudy Tomjanovich, Calvin Murphy, and Mike Newlin, who had come to the Rockets one year after Tomjanovich and Murphy. Two-thirds of the way through that season, Patterson had made what appeared to be a minor deal, sending Matt Guokas and Jack Marin to Buffalo and getting Dave Wohl, a guard, and Kevin Kunnert, a 7-foot center out of the University of Iowa, in return. At the time, the trade appeared to be nothing more than Patterson conceding that trading Hayes to Baltimore to get Marin had been a mistake.

  But Kunnert proved to be more than just a throw-in to a deal that would be little noted nor long remembered. The Rockets were in desperate need of help inside. They were a team that did not play good defense in the post and a team that was consistently outre-bounded. Kunnert had a major impact in both areas. He wasn’t the quickest or prettiest player in the world to watch, but he wasn’t the least bit afraid to mix it up inside and was willing to use his size to push opposing centers out of the low post. He was also a very capable rebounder, leading the team during his first full season with an average of 8.4 a game. Coincidence or not, the Rockets went from minus 130 rebounds versus the opposition for the season to plus 256.

  “Off the floor, you never met a nicer guy than Kevin,” Tomjanovich said. “He was quiet but very funny and enjoyable to be around. But on the floor, he wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone. He was a physical player but not a dirty one. On the other hand, if someone messed with him, he responded.”

  The Rockets were a young and improving team that season. The core of the team—Tomjanovich, Murphy, Newlin, Kunnert, and Ed Ratleff—were all in their midtwenties. Needing to finish the regular season strong after a four-game losing streak had put them in jeopardy, they won three straight to reach the playoffs for the second time in team history (they had made it in 1969, with a 37–45 record, when eight of fourteen teams qualified) and went into postseason with a record of 41–41, the first time in the team’s eight years that it had finished at .500.

  The first-round playoff opponent was the New York Knicks. The Knicks were at the end of a glorious run during which they had won two NBA titles (1970 and 1973) and had been a league force every year, reaching at least the conference finals for six straight seasons. But Willis Reed, their center and captain, and Dave DeBusschere, their heart and soul, had retired. Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe were still a potent backcourt and Bill Bradley was still the starting small forward, but the centers, John Gianelli and Hawthorne Wingo, weren’t exactly Reed’s caliber.

  Generating interest in the team for the first time ever in Houston, the Rockets won the three-game miniseries 2–1. They won the deciding game in a blowout, 118–86, with Tomjanovich leading the way with 25 points. That put the Rockets into a conference semifinal series against the defending champion Boston Celtics. Tomjanovich and Murphy were both superb, each averaging more than 25 points per game, but the Celtics, with Dave Cowens and John Havlicek and Jo Jo White, had too much experience and fire-power. They won the series four games to one.

  Still, it appeared that a corner had been turned. Tomjanovich and Murphy were now established stars in the league firmament. The team was about to move into a new building in the fall of 1975, the Summit. After four years of feeling as if they were on the road regardless of where they played, they would have a true home in an NBA-quality building. The days of treks to El Paso and nights playing in front of thousands and thousands of empty seats in the Astrodome were behind them.

  The new building and the playoff run did boost attendance. The average went from just over 4,000 per game in 1975 to just under 7,000 in 1976. That was better, but it still meant the team was being outdrawn on most nights by a lot of the state’s high school football teams.

  “We were making progress, but it was slow progress,” said Ray Patterson, then the team president. “It was exactly the same as with the team on the court. People got excited in the playoffs in ’75, but until we showed that we were more than a .500 team, we weren’t going to get people running to the box office. Rudy and Calvin were exciting players, but we needed to be more than what we were if we were going to truly turn the city on.”

  The 1975–76 season was almost identical to 1974–75, the team hovering at .500 and trying to find a way to sneak back into the playoffs. The problem was that Houston played in the Eastern Conference, which had most of the power in the league that year. In the Western Conference, the Milwaukee Bucks and Detroit Pistons made the playoffs with records of 38–44 and 36–46. The Rockets finished at 40–42 but were six games behind the last playoff qualifier in the East.

  The core of the team had put up numbers almost identical to those they had posted in 1975. In fact Kunnert had improved his numbers, averaging better than 12 points and just under 10 rebounds a game. Talented forward John Johnson had been added through an early-season trade, but still the Rockets were a .500 team. Changing coaches—Tom Nissalke replaced Egan at season’s end—probably wasn’t going to change the team’s performance that drastically.

  “It wasn’t as if they had a bunch of guys who didn’t play hard,” Nissalke said years later. “Coaching wasn’t their problem. No one played harder than Rudy and Calvin, Newlin or Kunnert. Those guys were all competitors. The team needed another star if it was going to make the jump to the next level.”

  Patterson knew this. Just prior to draft day he made a trade with Atlanta that gave the Rockets the number one pick in the draft. He then used that pick to take John Lucas, a talented point guard who had been a four-year starter at the University of Maryland. Lucas was the kind of pure point guard that the Rockets lacked. Murphy was more a shooter than a passer. Lucas was an explosive player, a versatile athlete who had performed the unique double of being a collegiate All-American in both basketball and tennis.

  “He was perfect for us,” Tomjanovich said. “We had players who loved to run the fast break, and Luke was the guy who would find you on the break. If you were a shooter, you had to love playing with him.”

  Patterson wasn’t finished dealing. Two games into the new season, with his team having started 2–0, he made what appeared to be an audacious deal with the Buffalo Braves. He traded his team’s next two first-round draft picks and sent a large chunk of cash to Buffalo in return for twenty-one-year-old Moses Malone.

  Two years earlier, Malone had made headlines when he decided not to become a teammate of Lucas’s at Maryland. Instead, having committed to coach Lefty Driesell, having already arrived on campus to enroll for classes, he decided at the last possible moment to forgo college completely and sign with the Utah Stars of the ABA. Malone was a 6-foot-10-inch basketball prodigy who would have been a dominant college player. Nowadays players skipping college to turn pro is routine, something that happens in several cases every single year. In 1974 it was a brand-new phenomenon. It had only
been one year since Spencer Haywood had gone to court to force the NBA to allow him to play before his college class graduated. Now a new step had been taken: a player bypassing college altogether.

  His decision not to suit up at Maryland stunned Driesell. Without Malone, the Terrapins reached the NCAA tournament’s round of eight in 1975, leaving Driesell to wonder forever what his team might have done with Malone. A case can be made that Driesell never completely got over Malone’s defection. He never forgave Donald Dell, who became Malone’s agent and negotiated the ABA deal for him. Years later, whenever Dell’s name came up in conversation, Driesell would shake his head and start talking about “the man who took Moses away from me.”

  In fact for many years Driesell included Malone in his media guide on a page titled “Lefty’s Players in the Pros.” There, along with players like Lucas and Tom McMillen and Len Elmore, was Malone, who never once wore a Maryland uniform. Only after being chided for years about the picture of Malone did Driesell finally remove it.

  As talented as he was, Malone found the transition to life in the pros difficult. He was a boy living among men. And although he was big and strong, he didn’t really know how to play the game, certainly not at the pro level. He struggled in Utah and continued to have difficulties after signing with the Buffalo Braves in the NBA after two seasons in the ABA. At times his potential was apparent. At other times, he appeared to be years away from being a competent player.

  There was also a perception that Malone wasn’t very smart. That may have come in part from his decision to skip college, but it had more to do with the fact that he was so shy that when he spoke he almost never raised his voice much above a whisper. When he did speak, he spoke rapid-fire, as if trying to get the ordeal over with. His nickname around the league for many years was Mumbles Malone.

  Malone wasn’t stupid by any stretch, and as the years went by and he grew more confident, that became apparent to those who played with him. But he was always difficult to understand because he spoke so quickly. Even when he got over his shyness, he was a nightmare in a crowded locker room for reporters, because if you weren’t standing right next to him, you couldn’t hear a word he was saying.